This week I am publishing a recent interview with Microsoft’s Angus Norton. We start by exploring the recent Silk Road initiative announced by Microsoft at Pubcon 2008.
After that, we spend some time speaking about Microsoft’s initiatives in search moving forward, and their plans to improve their market share in the future. Check it out!
One of the things that is critical in doing link building work is developing tricks for finding the right contact info. Here is the scenario:
Of course, it is only a small percentage of the time that such pages identify the person you need to contact. You often need to fish around a bit to find the right contact. You may need to look at a “contact us” page, or some other such page that contains more general information.
Regardless of all this, one scenario that happens a lot is that you learn who authored or updated the page last, yet no contact information is provided. You begin to fish around the site, trying to find that contact info, but can’t … sound familar?
Here is a simple tip. Let’s assume the person is named John Smith, and the site they work for is “theirdomain.com”. As soon as you decide that John Smith is the right contact, stop all your searching by hand, and go to your favorite search engine and type in “john smith” site:theirdomain.com.
If the email address is published on the site you will have that answer in less than 1 second. Chances are pretty good that it will be sitting there on the search results page and you won’t even need to click through to the site to find it.
Got a tip of your own? Let me know and we will publish it.
I recently did an interview with Alex Chudnovsky of Majestic SEO. After my recent interview with Rand Fishkin about Linkscape Alex contacted me to discuss his backlinking tool. Majestic SEO offers a competing tool to Linkscape, and therefore it made for an interesting discussion. It looks like this market is heating up!
This week’s interview is with Eric Ward, aka Link Moses, the person with arguably the longest running history of link building of anyone in the business. Eric and I focused the conversation on the process of reaching major influencers. If you are shooting for the big time with your web site, then reaching the major influencers is a must. Check out the interview to see Eric’s ideas on how to do that.
This week’s interview is with Dr. Larry Cornett, the VP of the Yahoo Search consumer products division. Our discussion focused on SearchMonkey, Yahoo’s new effort to remap the user experience in search.
We talked in particular about Yahoo’s recent announcement that certain SearchMonkey applications have been defaulted to on for all search users. Personally, I think that this is big news, as it is a bold step in the direction of giving individual publishers a great deal of control over their listings in the search results.
Check the interview out, and then come back here to talk about it.
Talk about bad metrics, cost per link is one of the worst. Let’s talk about why, but first, I am going to outline how it comes up.
Typically what happens is that an SEO is performing work on behalf of a client, or the company they work for. They are diligently adding the links. Then the person managinf the SEO does a calculation, looking at the money spent on the SEO, and the number of links acquired.
For example, if you have an in house SEO getting paid $8000 per month, and they obtained 40 links for you last month, your cost per link is $200. So why not try to drive this cost per link metric down?
The reason is that it will drive you to acquire crappier and crappier links. If you tell the SEO to get you links at a cost per link of $100, they are going to start looking for easier and easier ways to do it.
What the metric ignores is that all links are not created equal. In fact, a high quality link can easily be 10,000, or even 100,000, times more valuable to your web site then one of those crappy links. Looking at cost per link as a metric then could lead you to focus on getting 1,000 crappy links, instead of one really good one, which is a big mistake (we advocate mix of quantity and quality by the way).
Let’s look at the major factors influencing a link’s value to your web site:
One idea would be to try and create a more precise calculation of the link’s value. Since PageRank is a logarithmic scale, you can do the following math: Link Value = (10 ** PageRank) / Number of links on the page. Just to illustrate, if you have a page with PageRank 6, that has 123 outbound links, you get a score of 8130.081 for your link value.
This is a crude measurement, but it is certainly better than cost per link. However, this metric ignores other important factors such as the trust level of the linking domain, the relevance related factors, and the anchor text, and these are very, very important factors.
So if you are looking to measure the results of your link building campaign, stay away from cost per link. You can try the refined version that calculates link value as a metric, and that has some merit to it, but you still need to consider the other factors, based on a manual review of the links.
The Google Analytics team recently announced a whole series of updates that focused on new enterprise class features. This included some great stuff, such as segmentation, custom reporting, integrated AdSense reporting, motion charts, and a new API that provides access to almost anything inside GA.
I decided to dig a little deeper, and interview Brett Crosby to learn more about it. Check it out and add your comments to the discussion below.
This week I am releasing the my recent interview with Rand Fishkin. In this interview we discuss Linkscape, the new link building intelligence tool from SEOmoz. The discussion includes a detailed look at how it was put together, SEOmoz’s policies rgarding the tool, and how SEOs should use it.
Once you have read the interview, come back here and comment if you want to discuss it.
If you have an interest in researching spam by other sites, and quantifying it, there are a few things you can do. One of these is to dump out a spreadsheet of all a site’s backlinks using a tool like Linkscape or Link Diagnosis. Then you can analyze the links. This can be a painful process, but here are a couple of tips on how to speed the process up significantly.
1. Sort by anchor text: This is easy to do, and if the site you are buying is purchasing links, you will surely see an un-natural distribution - Gee how did they get 70% of their links to be their target keywords? Most likely, by purchasing links, wordpress templates (or equivalent), or a widget such as a hit counter with embedded links (or equivalent). Anything more than 5%-10% of the links containing the same anchor text is a flag in my opinion.
Note that you should still doublecheck a sampling of the links, because there are other ways that this can happen, such as a legitimate widget with a link back to a page that is the source of the data in the widget.
2. See who is buying links in the same place.: If you manually research a few pages that have paid links on them, you may see that some sites tend to be buying links on the same site. I did this recently for a wedding site called vponsale.com, after I noticed that they had a lot of links in common with rpgshow.com. I then typed this search into Yahoo:
linkdomain:vponsale.com linkdomain:rpgshow.com returns 17,500 results
and, here are the results:
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That’s a heck of a lot of links in common for two sites with nothing in common This happens one of two ways - they have bought links from an ad network, or they own both web properties and got lazy in implementing their spamming.
The above example illustrates why spamming is an increasingly difficult game. It is not really hard to spot these patterns. If I can do it this easily imagine how easy it is with the search engines when they have all the data sitting in hand.
Want an inside look at how a competitive intelligence tool can help you improve your search and web site performance? This is exactly what we cover in my interview with Bill Tancer. We cover this and more in our discussion of his hit book Click. Check it out (the interview and the book).
I also have two recent podcasts I have done. One of these is a great discussion on with Debra Mastaler on link building for e-commerce sites, a difficult task if there ever was one.
The other was with David Szetela on Advanced PPC tips. This one provides some great ideas on how to boost your PPC results.
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