08.24.07

The Art of Buying Links Under the Radar

Posted in Uncategorized at 11:22 am by laser

I’ve been a fan of David Wallace for a while, but his rant on things that bug him about link sellers was one of my favorites. It also made me realize that I needed to write a solid post about link purchasing directly from websites under the radar of the engines. To some, this type of advice would put me squarely in the black hat camp, but I think that buying relevant advertisements from good quality sites who are certainly going to take into account who they’re linking to is a legitimate way of marketing your site and if you can add to the ROI of the ad by not adding a "nofollow" it seems hard to justify adding that condition to the sale.

I’m also of the opinion that, when done right, these one-to-one link purchases are nearly impossible to detect, as compared to large link purchases through brokers or networks, which can be compromised by smart engineers. After all, f you worked at the engines, wouldn’t you type in text link ads, create a fake identity and try to get a look at all of the link sellers’ networks?

Here’s the general process I like to follow, using the specific example of Eden Valley Orchards (who I don’t think has any SEO efforts, but I loved their grounds and am considering it as a wedding location, so it’s fresh on my mind).

STEP 1: Keyword Discovery
Eden Valley needs to figure out which keywords are going to send them the most qualified, valuable web traffic. In reality, they should probably buy some ads on Google AdWords, Yahoo! & Live, and test the conversion rate (through their contact page or a visit us link or their email newsletter, along with their wine club membership). However, I don’t have access to that data, so let’s just assume that the term "ashland winery" is particularly valuable. They’d probably want to find a good 2-3 dozen terms and phrases, but for brevity’s sake, we’ll just look at this one.

STEP 2: Finding Relevant Sites
As I’ve noted in the past, it’s my belief that some of the most valuable links, from both a traffic and relevancy standpoint, come from the pages that rank highest for the target term. Thus, acquiring links from the pages here, here, here and here are probably very good bets. I also like using the Juicy Link Finder tool, which is perfect for this kind of task. There’s a ton of different ways to find good sites to provide value, but for now we’ll move on - maybe a more detailed post on link opportunity discovery will be valuable in the near future.

STEP 3: Sending Initial Advertising Requests
The first request typically will be sent either over email, or through a contact form. The phrasing and style of what you send is extremely important and will determine how likely you are to get a response and the receptiveness of the person to the email. Many times, you’ll find a page on sponsorship/advertising/etc like this one. In these cases, it’s easy to get started and the site is clearly receptive to a paid link advertisement. At other times, though, it’s a bit more difficult. For example, this page - winenet.com - ranks very well at most of the engines and would be a great spot to get traffic and link value. Technically, though, they’re a competitor, so buying an ad might be very tough. Here’s what I might write:

Greetings from your friends 15 minutes up the road in Medford (over at the Eden Valley Winery),

My name is Rand Fishkin and I actually work in the web marketing department over at Eden Valley (OK, so technically I’m also the web designer and the guy who has to clean the glasses after tastings, but that’s beside the point). I wanted to get in touch to see if we could possibly do some cross-promotion over the web. I’m hoping that you’ve got some time to schedule to chat on the phone this week about your website and possibly getting an advertising link of some kind.

Let me know if this is something that can work for you - we’d love to reciprocate by sending some of our site visitors your way as well. You can reach me anytime over email or at 215-649-XXXX.

Best,
Rand

That’s certainly not guaranteed to work, but it establishes a relationship and it’s straightforward. My guess is that since they’re a direct competitor, I’ve got only a 1/4 chance of getting that phone call, but if I pursue this strategy with enough sites, I’m sure to get some places to sell me that ad link.

STEP 4: Follow Ups
As important as the first contact is following up. I recommend being as prompt as possible - you want to make them see that they are incredibly important to you. Treat your contacts with respect, and you’re more likely to earn respect yourself. In the follow up, you’ll need to establish details, including what page you’d like the link on, what format you want them to use (I particularly like to have a small image with a logo or picture and a short anchor text block beneath it) and request that they send over pricing.

STEP 5: Pricing Considerations
Pricing is a big deal - you’ll only have a certain budget and you can’t afford to spend $5,000 for every link that comes along. For link valuation, I’d suggest checking out my post - How do you measure a link. From there, you’ll need to determine a starting point and a maximum - you don’t want to go into the negotiations without these prepared. I like to first ask the party selling the link to give you a price they find acceptable - I find that 75% of the time or more, they come back with a price far lower than you were expecting (simply because folks don’t realize how valuable links are). Here’s how I figure it - if you can break even based on the traffic the link will send, you should absolutely buy it. If you’re not quite there, but you’re at least getting 2/3-3/4 of the link price from the traffic, I usually opt to go for it as well (as the link value for the search engines will end up sending enough other traffic).

On trick here - always offer to pay a discounted rate for a 1 or 2 year stint if you can afford it. Many times, site owners would come back to me and say "I’ll give it to you for $100/month" and if I offered $500 for one year, they’d often accept (or at least come back with $7-800 for the yearly price). The psychology is easy to understand - the link costs them nothing, so the thought of getting $500 straightaway is very enticing.

STEP 6: Checking Value
Figuring out whether you’ve gotten a good deal is tough, but the best metrics to use are traffic referrals and rankings. Check your backlinks at Yahoo! - more recent and more important sources tend to appear higher (though even those in the 2-300 range for highly linked-to sites are often very valuable). Also, run searches containing the anchor text and excluding your site - if the page you bought a link from is highly ranked, chances are it’s sending you some pretty good quality link love. Obviously, during a campaign of link acquisition, you’ll want most of all to see your rankings rise. If they don’t you might be doing something wrong (or Google’s got a dampening penalty on you).

STEP 7: Evaluate & Repeat
It takes at least a few dozen link purchases like this before you can see serious progress. In the manual link building campaigns that I ran, I noticed that the delay in the links "earning" full value could be up to 3 months. It was also critical to add many numbers of links before you’d see progress, and then it would often come all at once (moving up 5 or 10 positions). Be prepared for uneven movement - some links are more and less valuable than you think, so it’s just a matter of hitting that sweet spot. In my experience, you’ll need a combination of trusted links, links with proper anchor text and links with high PageRank/Juice (not neccessarily according to the toolbar, though it can be one indicator).

I can’t say for certain, but its my strong feeling that link acquisition in this manner, even if many of them do involve money changing hands, is nearly impossible for Google and other engines to detect. I also believe that there’s no real reason they wouldn’t want to count these links. The sites you’re buying from are trusted sources and they’re not going to link out to junk. In my view, it’s very much like buying a link from the Yahoo! directory - you’re paying, they’re reviewing critically and listing you only if they like you and want to send their visitors to you.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you make effective use of direct advertising link purchases.

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Social Media Manipulation Runs Rampant

Posted in Uncategorized at 11:22 am by laser

Posted by randfish

I’m barely qualified to bring up this subject, as SEOmoz has certainly had our fair share of asking a friend to submit something to Digg, give us a boost on Reddit or add a tag at Del.icio.us, but I was pretty surprised to see the level to which social media manipulation has been taken:

Go visit the freebies section at Digitalpoint, and you’ll see one of the most active sources of social media manipulation publicly available. The crowds are Digging, Redditing, Del.icio.using and Stumbling every few minutes. The timestamps on the 30 entries I viewed on the front page was less than 30 minutes - more than one post per minute on the topic of trading votes at the social sites (and this is late at night, PST).

Obviously, manipulating social media content, particularly the front page of Digg/Reddit has significant benefits, but to have a popular forum with people abusing the system out in the open like this seems almost bizarre. The sites and people who attempt to game the systems are putting themselves out there where anyone can find them. I wouldn’t be surprised to find quality control teams from these sites monitoring those threads to help identifying and defeat spam.

What do you think? Is it OK to trade favors at social media sites? Is it wise to do it in a public forum? Is this a center for abuse, or simply the tip of the iceberg? And, maybe most importantly, how much of the content that gets voted up, thumbs up’d and tagged is organic?

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Where to Park Your Bumbershoot In Seattle in October SEO - Training Seminar Travel Info

Posted in Uncategorized at 11:22 am by laser

Posted by gillian

If you’re coming to spend the day with Rand and party the night away with the Mozzers on October 1 (for the SEOmoz Seminar), here’s info about where to stay:

WATERTOWN HOTEL

4242 Roosevelt Way NE
Seattle, WA 98105
(206) 826-4242

Rate: $149/night
Includes: Room, parking, breakfast, high speed internet access, use of the hotel’s bicycles and helmets, and complimentary shuttle service (7AM – 7:30PM).

We’ve held a limited number of rooms at this rate. To get the discounted rate, tell reservations that you are attending the SEOmoz Training Seminar. If you want to come to Seattle for the weekend before the seminar, call early, as the rooms will go quickly.

The Watertown offers a cooked hot breakfast each morning and has a fine wine bar open from 5-9 nightly. Although it’s just a short walk to Kane Hall at the University of Washington (UW), where the seminar will be held, a free shuttle with service to the UW, downtown Seattle and other locations runs every hour. Reserve a space the night before.

You’ll be in the University District. There are ample restaurants, coffee shops, bookstores, bars, and pubs in the neighborhood.

Getting to the Hotel
Cabs are available at the airport. Cab fare is a flat rate of $35 to the University District plus tip. Cabs may charge extra for additional passengers sharing a cab.

We recommend Seattle S&A Town Car service: 206.459.7903. One-way service to or from SeaTac airport is $40 [$35.00 + $5] tip for one-to four passengers. S&A also offers a Lincoln Navigator for up to 7 passengers for $70 for larger groups. Call S&A at least 24 hours in advance to arrange for a pick up at the airport.

Shuttle Express offers scheduled shuttle service with a round trip cost of $40 for most rides. Very late arrivals or very early departures may incur an additional charge. Call (800) 487-7433 or make reservations online at least 24 hours in advance.

PS. A bumbershoot is an umbrella.

Technorati Tags

seo training, seo

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Contribute Feedback for the MSN/Live Search Team (And Be Heard)

Posted in Uncategorized at 11:22 am by laser

Posted by randfish

This coming Thursday, I’ve been invited to present to the Live Search team over in Redmond. We’ll be discussing all sorts of issues, including spam on Live, increasing retention rates for searchers and growing relationships between Live and webmasters. However, I can’t represent the entire search community on my own, so I’m hoping to solicit your input. What would you like to see Live do to make it easier to interface with their search engine from a webmaster perspective, and as a user?

Some of the things I’m intending to discuss include:

Tools & information that Live could provide to webmasters & SEOs
Some specific examples of where Live seems to be struggling against manipulative link building techniques
Signals that might help to establish trust between sites and Live
Opportunities for establishing and benefiting from greater community involvement in the SEO/M world
Advantages & disadvantages of including vertical & specialized results
The visual interface of Live’s result pages
The Live vs. MSN branding decision

As I look at Live’s results, I see a lot of opportunity for improvement. It’s my sincere belief that interfacing actively with people inside the search community will help to get the Live engineers exposure to a great number of issues at the engine. Just running through a few searches, I found some material that might be of interest to their search quality team:

Weddings near Ashland, OR - it appears that Live isn’t recognizing the "OR" as referring to Oregon, as most of the results center around Ashland, Wisconsin
Popurls - oddly, the PopURLs website doesn’t appear on the first page for its own name
Yahoo Answers - a strange broken out result is #2, and a similar pattern also exists for searches like New York Times (note the strangely high placement of the Migrant Camp Laborers article).
WSJ - the page is right, but the title and description are bizarre - "interstitial page?"
House Values - It looks like Live doesn’t interpret "house" and "home" as meaning the same thing. This means that Zillow doesn’t have their usual rule of the SERPs - they’re not even in the top 100.
John McCain - The first two pages are the same result

Obviously, I’m going out of my way to point out foibles, and among the few dozen searches I ran tonight, there were plenty where Live did a fine job. However, I don’t think they’d get much value out of me patting them on the back, so we’ll focus on those issues where they’re struggling. However, if you do have a positive comment or something they’re doing that you like, I’ll bet they’d love to hear it.

Thanks so much for your help. Please constribute by posting your thoughts, concerns & issues below. I can promise that they’ll get in front of the people behind Live.com - a very rare opportunity.

BTW - As I mentioned to Nathan (a senior PM at Live) on the phone today; I must say that it’s fun working with Microsoft on a project where they’re the underdog - there’s a great depth of resources to pull from and an incredibly tough challenge ahead. And, for those who are concerned, this is a pro bono gig, like the presentation I gave to Google, so there should be no conflict of interest - we’re all trying to make search a better place to be for SEOs, businesses, search engines and users.

I’m also embedding a Sphinn link (which I need to start doing more often, I think):

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How to Take Advantage of the Coming Web 2.0 Crash

Posted in Uncategorized at 11:22 am by laser

Posted by randfish

A favorite quote from last week:

Every single person working in the media today who experienced the dot-com bubble in 1999 to 2000 believes that we are going through the exact same process and can expect the exact same results—a bust. It’s déjà vu all over again…. I can assure you that after this next collapse, nobody will think of the dot-com bubble as anything other than a prelude.

I’m actually in a camp that disagrees with most of what Mr. Dvorak has to say (like Marshall), but I’ll play along. Let’s say the bubble is only a year or two away from bursting and imagine how that hypothetical world would function.

STEP 1: Investors Flee from Public Internet Stocks
This is typically the first step - some bad news comes out of Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, IAC & Amazon all in the same few week span and stock market traders start selling shares at losses like it’s going out of style. Remember how the stock market works, though - no one’s bidding on what they think the value of a stock is, nor are they bidding on what they think others think it’s worth. The stock market prices shares based on what other investors think other investors think (yes, you read that right). It’s all about the opinions of the opinions of others - hence the Random Walk theory.

STEP 2: Private Investors & Venture Capital Gets Squeemish
With the possibility for massive valuations from a public offering diminished, private money retreats into hiding. This, combined with the Wall St. losses create -

STEP 3: Investment, Marketing, R&D and Overall Growth Screech to a Halt
When money starts drying up externally, companies of all kinds freeze spending, start layoffs and kill development projects. In the last dot-com crash, we saw plenty of irrational spending freezes - freezes even on those spends that had a positive ROI - simply because management didn’t want the association with the doomed "Internet sector."

STEP 4: Eveyone Goes Out of Business
This is the part I hate. Companies large and small declare huge losses and, often, Chapter 11. Why? Because all of that development they’ve done and all of those products and service they provide suddenly aren’t doing much of anything because none of the other companies are buying. The irony is - the stock market and the private investors will hold up the companies’ failures and closures as evidence for why their withdrawal of money (up in Step 1 & 2) were wise moves, when, in fact, they were the catalysts for the events, not the fortune tellers they’ll claim to be.

STEP 5: Enterpreneurs Start from Scratch
All those scrappy, smart, out-of-work programmers and biz-dev leaders will pout for a few months, then eventually find a job, oftentimes in startup environments with little to no capital. Over time they’ll produce the next Google/YouTube/Facebook, investors will come flocking back and the cycle of boom will begin anew.

Here’s what doesn’t happen during the above process:

Users don’t stop searching the web for products, services & information
Said users don’t stop clicking search ads
They don’t stop being influenced by online branding
They don’t stop buying (unless the macro-economy has gone to hell at the same time, but even then, many of them will still be buying)

Remember when Frankie told us that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself?" Truer words were never spoken - and they’re just as relevant to the dot-com collapse as they were to the stock market crash. But, if there’s nothing we can do to stop investor pessimism, at least we can profit from it.

So, now that we know what’s coming, how do we take advantage of it?

Build a Rainy Day Investment Fund - you’ll need to have some cash to keep going through potentially tough times, but if you can spend while others have to save, you’ll be in beautiful shape.
Operate Properties in Multiple Spheres - consulting is a great gig while times are good, but a downturn can mean a lot of irrational halting of expenditures, so make sure you’ve got some pre-determined business ideas into which you can invest yourself.
Select Sectors with Immunity - In the offline economy, alcohol and funeral homes are good examples of businesses with cyclical immunity. The online world has plenty, too - ecommerce (remember that no one stops buying online just because investors think Internet stocks are a poor choice), adult content, news, luxury goods - these are all consumed with little regard to the economic perception of the web.
Spend When Others Slack - If the ad market on the web suddenly dries up (as it did last crash), you can sweep in and grab a lot of very juicy ads at far below market value, and get a massive ROI on them.
Release Positive News - The media will want to harp on the downturn for a while, but they’ll also be looking to temper that with good news, so if you can make your business stand out during a slow period, you’ve got a great chance to be in the press.
Gobble Up Competitors - If memory serves, acquiring Internet properties in 2002 was like taking candy from a baby. Get ready for that market again by keeping your eye on companies and sites with real value who might have overextended themselves but have great potential to rise again.

I’m sure you’ve got more tips for how to prosper in a downturned market - please do share. If Dvorak’s right, at least we’ll know what to do when the Silicon Valley party goes to bed.

p.s. Back from vacation and gearing up for San Jose SES next week. So much email to slog through…. ugh. And thanks to Brian for the great link round-up.

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