Link Diversity Defined and Explained with Video (LinkMoses Resurrected 10)

Ahhh, Link Diversity...

Linkmoses loves it when a seemingly technical and complex concept can be broken down and simplified, and Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz is one of the best at doing this. Give him a whiteboard and I do believe he could solve global warming. I've embedded a video of his that beautifully explains link diversity below.

Link Diversity means different things to different people. Some folks think link diversity is the number of links you give to other sites from your site. Links out, not in. There's also the school of thought that link diversity is the total number of pages from your site that are linked to by other sites. Meaning if your site has 173 pages, and you have links from other sites linking to 28 of your 173 pages, that's link diversity. That's getting closer, but not exactly.

Here's the most basic definition of Link diversity. Link diversity is the number of different sites linking to your site. To confuse it a bit, link diversity is also when another site links to more than just one page of your site.

We can take this many steps further, and invoke the old quality of diversity mantra. Having links from 652 different domains is useless if all 652 domains come from a link farm to begin with.

Linkmoses takeaway?

Lower diversity numbers from highest quality sites trump higher diversity numbers from low merit sites.

A site with 10 inbound links, where those ten inbounds are comprised of three libraries, two universities, and five non profits, will have a much more appealing and diverse link profile than a site with 100 links from 100 different make money fast domains.

Achieving link diversity is another matter completely

The approach needed to improve link diversity will depend on your site. Sorry, no magic bullets here. The link diversity potential for a site that sells tennis gear versus a site that helps handicapped people find companion animals will be quite different. In that sense, for link diversity to have any lasting impact on traffic or rank it must be dependent upon the subject relevance of that diversity.

Below is Rand's video. It's just a few minutes of your time, and well worth it. If it wont load, you can find it at

http://vimeo.com/7973233

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Link Diversity from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

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the "comments" link below, or the
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Link Building for Personalized Search (LinkMoses Resurrected 9)

In the wake of the recent news Danny Sullivan covered excellently at SearchEngineLand in Google Now Personalizes Everyone's Search Results, some of you may be having a link building PANIC ATTACK.

Don't.

For the most part, high merit content owners should have no fear, because personalized search doesn't somehow turn your high-merit content into no-merit content.

I feel a small sense of vindication. It seems like forever since I wrote Google Personalized Search, Google Bookmarks & Link Building. You might want to re-read it. It was a couple years ago.

I'm finally working on that Personalized Link Building Strategies Special Report I mentioned two years ago. The report will not include tricks for fooling algorithms. It will include practical, ethical, and responsible link building advice specific to personalized search results, My goal is to explain what you can and can't influence, as well as how and when you should.

If I decide to sell this report, it will be at a fraction of the $299 16 page "chart driven unactionable crap the big city consultants put out. I'm a real practioner. I do this stuff, I'm on the keyboard, not the golf course. Even if all I wrote was a full page of tips and advice for every year I've been doing this, that's 16 pages from an expert willing to back it up. That's worth a few bucks, isn't it? Email me at PLBreport@ericward.com if you'd like to know when the report is ready.

The key takeaways from all this...

On the web, where engines index URLs by the billions, (the good, the bad and the ugly), signals of trust, merit, and intent of source will be crucial to any search result, including a personalized search result.

Signals of trust, merit, and intent of source can be determined in a couple ways...with an algorithm that looks at on-site or off-site signals, or without an algorithm at all, using offline factors (rarely discussed, BTW).

So links, citations, inclusions and connections, along with confidence, intent, credibility and veracity, aren't going anywhere, because what other signals are there?

Seriously, if you had a billion dollars and wanted to start a search engine, what's your big fancy algorithm going to study in order to produce useful results?

What's likely true is the sources of all signals are getting more and more algorithmic scrutiny, and end users play a larger role in this process in many ways. The links you depend on for both traffic and rank better be bullet-proof and not a house of cards waiting to crumble. If your link building tactics and targets have not been wisely chosen, the day is coming (or already has) when you will not be happy.

The value of certain types of links cannot be underestimated...

Why? Because they are so hard to get, and are based on a decision made by a person (as in, um, personalized) who is a passionate subject expert. They don't have to be a Ph.D or a librarian or a famous blogger. They just have to be able to provide algorithmic confidence signals. And you need to know what those signals are. I know what many of them are, only because I've sat in front of a PC screen for way too many years studying this, working at it, over and over and over. If I'm an expert at all I'm an accidental expert.

And as you know, I'm happy to teach what I know to you.

The ability to identify who and what a true influencer is and why is crucial, for both broad and narrow topics. For any topic. Just as important is knowing how to interact with each one of them in the right way, in order to get what it is you seek. This is where I've screamed at the conferences for years that link building and public relations at the highest levels must be thought of both in tandem and as one.

Things are getting interesting, and frankly, I like where I'm positioned, pun intended. There's a reason my site (and more importantly, my clients) rank well. A merit based, vertically driven, and etiologic link building methodology doesn't seem so crazy, silly or old school now, does it?

BuzzStream Continues Improvements for Link Management

Many of you have already heard about BuzzStream, a wickedly cool tool for managing the processes of link building and buzz monitoring. I'm one of their advisers and have been thrilled with how they continue to improve it.

To that end, this week BuzzStream announced a series of improvements and features that I wanted to share with you. I don't use my blog to tout services, so this is rare for me, but it's well worth your time to give BuzzStream a try.

Here's a post from them explaining the new features, and here's a quick overview on the link building process management tool.

Try it. You'll like it.

The Curly Theory of Link Building (Link Moses Resurrected 8)

I read today about how all three major search engines have removed the Geocities.com domain from their search indices. A site:geocities.com search on Google, Yahoo, or Bing shows that, as Matt McGhee illustrates here, geocities.com is "dead and buried".

*Sigh*

Once upon a time, in 2001, back in the day, I spent hours and hours seeking links from geocities sites on behalf of clients. It wasn't for rank, since rank wasn't link dependent yet, it was for subject affinity. I remember doing a project for AMCTV.com, the cable network who also had a great web site. They had launched a new section on their site devoted to the Three Stooges, as the online companion to the TV broadcasts of the Three Stooges they were showing every day.

They also had a contest to win a year supply of pies. There's still evidence of my work, preserved like fossils of link building past. Here's one. And another.

There were so many Geocities sites devoted to the Three Stooges I was busy for days. I was amazed and remember laughing out loud at the hilarity of those Geocities sites devoted to all things Stooge, and while Geocities is gone those same folks likely live on somewhere else.

This period of time was also when I first started thinking about the true verticality of the web. The "Curly Theory" of link building was one of the theories that emerged. I've joked about it and never actually discussed it in writing, but the news of Geocities' passing made me misty, so indulge me.

The "Curly Theory" of link building is based on my discovery that even something as seemingly vertical as The Three Stooges was not vertical enough. You had to go even deeper. More vertical. Three Stooges fan pages of course, but there were sites devoted just to specific Stooges, like Curly, Moe, Larry, or even Shemp. Yep, Shemp.

But even that discovery was not vertical enough. It seems that within the realm of Three Stooges fans, you even had sites devoted to the different Curly's that appeared.

Discussions of Curly could incite a "flame war", depending on where your Curly loyalties lay. If you liked Curly over Curly-Joe, and were going to say so, you'd better be able to explain why.

While all these sites were great link targets and many would end up giving me and AMCTV.com a link, I was struck by the desire people had to be heard. Geocities gave them a platform, even if it was to put forth 33 reasons why Curly Joe would never be as good as Curly.

Hence the "Curly Theory" of link building: No matter how narrow the vertical, somebody somewhere cares about it, writes about it, links to it, and you'd darn sure better recognize and respect those editorial passions before you go asking for a link to something that may look like a match, but isn't.


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NOTE: To ask a link building related question, click the "comments" link below, or the "Post a Comment" link at the bottom of any individual post. You can also email your question to eric [at] ericward [dot] [com]

A Peek At Google's Future (Link Moses Resurrected 7)

Below are several interviews conducted this week by Businessweek's Rob Hof with key execs and engineers from Google. Rob spoke with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Udi Manber, Google's vice president of engineering in charge of search, Amit Singhal of the core ranking team, Scott Huffman who runs the change impact evaluation team, and Matt Cutts, head of Google's Webspam team.

Most SEO's would miss these interviews because they're in a mainstream pub, and who has time for rags like Businessweek when we have all those SEO blogs to read that are never wrong, right?

You can click their names above to go to the interviews, or any of the links below.

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/oct2009/tc2009102_694444.htm

http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2009/10/googles_udi_man.html

http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2009/10/google_search_g.html

http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2009/10/googles_scott_h.html

http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2009/10/matt_cutts_goog.html

I've read them all, and as much as I'd like to think I've learned in 14 years of link building and linking strategy related work, it's never enough. So go forth, and read. Then read again. Why take the time to read them? Because collectively, if you read the text and between the lines, you will better understand just how amazing Google is at what it does, as well as what you can expect in the future, and for you link builders, you'll glean several insights that you may want to incorporate into your strategies. And I pity any site whose rankings are based on trickery.

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NOTE: To ask a link building related question, click the "comments" link below, or the "Post a Comment" link at the bottom of any individual post. You can also email your question to eric [at] ericward [dot] [com]

Who Controls Link Building Success (LinkMoses Resurrected 6)

If you are seeker of link building services, and are evaluating companies or persons to help with your linking strategies or link building, it's logical and reasonable to have some questions you want answers for.

One of the most telling questions of all is this one:

"How many links can you get for us and how much will it cost?"

If you asked me this question, the best answer is the most honest answer, and here it is.

For highest quality content seeking links, once you have identified the highest caliber and most credible targets, it is never me, the link builder who gets you the link, and it is never me, the link builder who controls anchor text or any other HTML based editorial choices. It is your content that dictates the ultimate result, not me or any other merit-based link builder.

Put another way, the higher the quality of the target site, the more likely it is the editor/owner is a "curator" of links, passionately picky about what does and does not get on their pages, links, text, anchors, and otherwise. Thus it is not the link builder who controls the success or failure of that process. Even fantastic content doesn't assure links will be granted, or granted in the manner you, as the link builder, wish they were. To try and hold a link builder accountable for editorial decisions made on high merit sites they do not control is, frankly, silly.

Example? Sure.

Let's say I want on this page. For this client. Pagerank 8 blah, blah, blah. It wasn't me that got this link. It was the quality of the kbb.com site I was seeking a link for. All I did was match content of merit with link curator of merit.

Yes, I agree it's easy to do this when the content is that strong. But again, this is the exact point of merit-based linking. And it's why the engines give them such weight. And once again, notice, no anchor text. It isn't needed, isn't used, and to ask for it from this particular target site is like asking the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld for an extra roll with your Crab Bisque.

Just shut up and be happy a link is there at all.

At best, the link builders role with merit or citation based link building is to have the skills to identify the right targets and editorial contacts at those targets, make a brief and polite content introduction, and then leave.


NOTE: To ask a question, click the "comments" link below, or email your question to eric at eric ward dot com

Why Reciprocal Links Will Always Be Viable (LinkMoses Resurrected 5)

Hard to believe it has been over two years since I wrote Link Building's Cult Of Reciprocity over at SearchEngineLand. Reciprocal links remain a polarizing topic.

Most SEM's who were anti-recip remain so, at least based on what I read on the blogs and columns. Among those who were for recips, I've read more than a couple change their position and state they are no longer of any value. Some continue to propose a "magic trigger" percentage exists that somehow turn your reciprocal links from good to bad in the eyes of the search engines.

Here's an update to the original, with my current thoughts on reciprocal links in red.

There cannot be an absolute and the rules of reciprocity cannot be perfectly defined (in other words, if you tell me that if I go over 33% reciprocity with my inbound link profile, I will tell you that's insane, besides being incorrect). Having a high reciprocity percentage is thought to be a red flag that the engines can use to devalue your links. The math is simple. If 100% of any site's inbound links are reciprocal, then those links can't really be trusted as an indicator of quality, because it could simply be a case of "you link to me and I'll link to you" (this can and does happen, but it isn't a quality specific occurrence. Great sites do it as do crappy sites. A great site that reciprocates links with other great sites does not harm itself in any way).

For some subjects, it is perfectly normal, almost expected, that the link reciprocity percentage should be extremely high, approaching 100%. The more nichified your subject matter, the more likely it is you will have a high RP (Reciprocity Percentage) with sites that have the same or similar subject matter.

Case in point? The Southeastern Bat Diversity Network, an organization with a goal to "conserve bats and their habitats in southeastern North America through collaborative research, education, and management." Very noble indeed. I've always felt bats needed help.

If you take a look at other top sites within this subject area, you start to notice something. The other sites devoted to bats have a tendency to link back and forth to all the other sites devoted to bats. While this should not be surprising, many people miss a key point about what this means. Reciprocity link spam cannot be determined by a fixed number. A reciprocal links percentage cannot be set in stone. What's reciprocally spammy for one topic is perfectly natural in another topic.

Study the backlinks to a few related sites, such as BasciallyBats.org, Batcon.org, BatResearchNews, and North American Symposium on Bat Research (NASBR), and you see that each of these sites tends to link to the other, and vice-versa. The reciprocal linking percentage across the top five sites is over 80%, and for the top three, it's 100%. And this reciprocity percentage is perfectly natural, believable, and in no way an attempt to fool any algorithm or improve rank. These sites link to each other because they share the same passion for a very specific topic and want to make sure those people visiting and reading their content find the other sites about the same topic.

Now, if I examined five or ten sites devoted to another (broader) subject and found the same 80% or higher reciprocity rate, that IS suspicious. For example, if the subject matter is NFL jerseys, where hundreds of sites fight for SEO supremacy, it would be an absolute red flag for the engines if we found any ten NFL jersey sites linking back and forth to each other with the same high RP as our bat example.

In fact, I'd argue that 80% reciprocity among a collection of NFL jersey sites was a signal they might just be operated by the same people. That's the very definition of a link network and link spam, yet the reciprocity percentage was no different that my bat examples. The only difference was the subject matter.

Let's rephrase and repeat that.

"...the reciprocity percentage was no different between my bat example and my NFL jersey example. The only difference was the subject matter"

Which brings me back to my disdain for absolutes. You simply cannot make any sort of absolute statement as to what constitutes reciprocal link spam. Nor can you say that reciprocal links are always good, always bad, always suspicious, always helpful. They are never any of these, and they are always all of these. What you have to do is look at each case, at each site, and recognize the logical natural linking potential and reciprocity tendencies.

It's not rocket science either. Some of what you just read seems so obvious to us longtime link builders that it's easy to forget. The cult of reciprocal links advocates and enemies would do well to call a truce and stop looking for absolutes, and start looking for illustrative examples to help each site know if, how, and when to implement reciprocal links properly, or at all.

Link well, friend.

Picking The Right Shovel (LinkMoses Resurrected 4)

For backdrop, read Stephan Spencer's
Link Economics 101: A Prerequisite For Advanced SEO.

When you focus and practice a specific skill set long enough, one of the unexpected benefits is you become an unintended expert in spotting those with no skills at all. In fact, at this point my bullshit meter is a finely tuned instrument.

More than anything else, I wish the "sellers of the useless" in the link building industry would just go away.
But they don't.

The frenzy for link building today must be like what I imagine the gold rush was like in the 1800's. You could probably pick from many different types of gold digging shovels, all claiming to be stronger or better than each other, all making sale after sale after sale. Only after you got to the desert did you realize your shovel handle was made from cheap wood instead of Ash and the blade was stamped, not forged. If only you'd done a little homework first.

In my industry niche, I can spot a bad shovel a mile away, and I've saved many a company from making a very expensive link building vendor mistake. Some of the advice I give I am amazed I still have to give period. "Don't use a company in India to build your links?" Well...duh. "Join the local Chamber of Commerce and get a link on the member section?" Well, yes, of-freeking course. "Don't buy anchor text links across 47 school newspaper web sites?"

You mean like this pile of crap below? Click for a close up look.

Good God please help me. When was the last time a college kid needed restaurant supplies? Or a limo in Orlando?

I think it's funny that all over the country school newspaper publishers are wondering why their ad revenue is sky high while the rest of the economy is in the dumps. They think it's their content, when in fact it's .edu link chasing morons. And I mean that whether it works or not. It's crap. Stop it already.

At the same time I'm not so vain as to think I have what everyone needs, because I most definitely do not. But what I do know better than most, perhaps due to longevity, experience, and trial/error is what type of link building approach and service(s) is most suited for any given content deployment scenario.

Call it a link building blueprint.

Every site needs to create a link building blueprint, and whether they create that blueprint in-house or hire someone to create the blueprint for them (like I've been doing for oh, two decades), that blueprint needs to be created by someone who understands the complexity and nuance of link building etiology. Every link building blueprint must be 100% custom to the site it was created for, in order to have any long lasting impact.

And sites that have been around a long time need more than a blueprint. They need a link portfolio evaluation and a forward moving strategy that maximizes what they have already, and augment it with all they have missed without knowing they missed it.

I hate to beat this horse, but it is true; every site has specific optimal inbound link potential. Few sites ever reach that potential, because they don't know what that potential is, or they spend too much time (and money) chasing the wrong types of links. My job is to show them what their site's true link potential is, and help them get closer to it, even if that means sending them to a provider other than me.

Linkmoses can't help everyone.

LinkMoses Resurrected #3 - When Cheaters Win, aka Peewater for Links

(Editor's note: See Peewater, as defined by Urban Dictionary)

You'll hear the following question/argument asked at just every online marketing conference, discussion/forum, and I'm asked it at least a few times a month.

"Why should we play by the rules when it's still possible to cheat and rank?"

I understand your frustration, and I can't argue your point, because every day my own analysis shows the exact same thing.

It annoys me as well because I will not use those tactics nor advise a client to try them.

When I begin working on link development for a client, I study the inbound link portfolios of the top 30 or 40 ranked sites across the four largest engines. And plain as day I see countless examples of pure peewater ranking well.

But...

Taking a deep breath, I begin to crunch the backlink data, and I mean hammer on tens of thousands of backlinks across 40 or 50 competitors, all fed into my old school but wickedly cool macro laden excel spreadsheet (60k records at a time, anyway).

What I see emerge time and time and time again is that it isn't always JUST the crappy links and tactics that are working. In other words, the crappy links are there, yes, but there were also some sort of merit based earned inbound(s).

I'm not saying this is the case every time because it isn't. Yes, some sites do rank with nothing more than pure peewater for links. But almost every time I've seen that happen, it's a site in a niche where there is little to no hope of getting merit based links in any volume in the first place. If the keyword searched for happens to fall into one of these niches, Google still has to do what Google does, i.e., rank them. And even if the signals are nothing but the aforementioned junk, Google will faithfully do its job, and rank someone #1 and someone #100, according to whatever signals Google can find, even if those signals are weak, or yellow. After all, is it Google's fault you are lying cheating stealing online pharmacy? No it isn't. (online pharmacy was only an example, please calm down.)

I repeat what I stated, and stick to it...

"...Yes, some sites do rank with nothing more than pure peewater for links. But almost every time I've seen that happen, it's a site in a niche where there is little to no hope of getting merit based links in any volume in the first place.

Since I know the engines are all trying to improve detection of junk links from impacting their result pages, I can't in good conscience recommend or use a tactic I know helps make the results that much worse, and which will stop working, whether tomorrow or next year.

But I also understand business. I just choose not to participate in tactics that make the web uglier.

Next up on LinkMoses Resurrected: How To Make Sure Your Press Release Is Completely and Utterly Useless

LinkMoses Resurrected #2 - What If Everything You Know About Link Building Is Wrong?

So let it begin.

Over at Search Engine Land today I wrote Betting On The Link Building Boondoggle Bonanza. I mentioned a couple very specific link building tactics in that column, press releases and directory submissions. What's being sold is, to be kind, bad and worse.

As for directories, some of this you surely already know. I've written about it before. A year ago I wrote Don't Blame Google For Your Own Linking Failures. The salient quote from that article was...

"Are you really going to tell me you are shocked that Google no longer thinks a link from link-o-matic, link-to-my-loo, and LinksForNoGoodReason.de are of any value? Please. But if you knew that such links would someday lose value, why did you take money for that very service? And if you didn't honestly know such links were pointless, how can you call yourself a link builder?"

Here's how I can at least try to make this post constructive, rather than just calling a tactic stupid.

All sites exist on a popularity continuum like this...

Links from general directories that nobody has heard of will only be of value to certain types of sites, namely sites on the left side of the continuum. These will be sites with few links and credibility to begin with, or brand new sites with no links at all. For existing sites that have already shown the ability to earn links, there will be no value from links from these directories. In simpler terms, a site like CNN.com could care less about getting links from directories. But your site isn't CNN.com. True, but is it BrandNewSite.com? Probably not. Your site's linking pedigree falls somewhere between these two examples, as do most sites.

So, am I saying that for a brand new site links from no-name directories are useful after all? A little, but not much. In my private consults the point I make is this...

"Your site will not succeed or fail based upon getting links from no name directories. If those are the only links you can earn, you are dead. Your site will only succeed over time if it attracts merit based links within your industry's universe. And that will require content of merit that can earn such links"

I've made it pretty clear above that certain types of sites might get a small benefit from directories. But a site that can benefit from such a silly type of link isn't much of a site now is it? Why is that so hard to accept folks? Now take it a step further. Let's hypothesize. Why couldn't the search engines use those same directory links as reverse signals? Any site that has links from 57 directories, which as time passes does not also earn merit based links, has helped point itself out as pure crap to the engines. Thanks for the help. Same with press releases BTW, but more on that tomorrow.

As for companies that are selling directory submission services, yes, your service may very well be outstanding. But the best thing you can do is provide this or a similar type of disclosure to your clients before they spend money with you. Don't hide behind "buyer beware" and "free market" arguments. If you know a site will not benefit, don't sell it to them. Is that so hard?

Lastly, there are many directories that are in fact extremely good link building targets. Thousands of them. I use them all the time, when the client's site is a fit. They exist in verticals. Verticals can be subject specific, geo-specific, industry specific, feature specific, even author specific. Credibility and intent are key. If you operate a directory please don't assume I'm lumping yours into the useless category. I purposely have not mentioned one real directory by name in this article. The point can be made without it.

LinkMoses Resurrected - Thirty Link Building Rants and Commandments

By now most who know me know the LinkMoses backstory.

I retired LinkMoses 15 months ago. LinkMoses had a fabulous run, earned over 100,000 links, (smoke that linkbait) and the post LinkMoses Linking Commandments - Part I remains one of my site's top five most visited pages.

So why bring LinkMoses back for thirty posts? Three reasons.

First, it's easier for me to speak my mind when I'm in LinkMoses mode. A defense mechanism that allows me to say things I'm chickenshit to say as Eric Ward. LinkMoses=Buddy Love, Eric Ward=Sherman Klump.

Reason 2?
The awesome post "Is Most Of SEO Just A Boondoggle?". Jill Whalen took heat for it, though she's one of, if not the most under-appreciated and intelligent voice out there. If you aren't reading High Rankings Advisor Search Marketing Newsletter, I have to ask you what the hell are you thinking? Stop reading this post immediately and go subscribe.

Reason 3?
I never wrote LinkMoses Linking Commandments - Part II. There was no reason to be greedy, and why be a Link Whore?

But, it's time.

LinkMoses will be back here for thirty posts. Rather than tell you what my goal is in doing this, I'll let the posts speak for themselves. The first LinkMoses Resurrected Post will be:

"What If Everything You Know About Link Building Is Wrong?"

It will be here Tuesday.

So let it be written...

Admitting You Have a Social Network Linking Addiction

The below article from Stepcase Lifehack really resonated with me from a link building/publicity perspective.

Managing Your Social Network Addiction

In my earlier years, I often felt the need to sign up and create accounts every time a new social network or related venue/tool appeared. It's easy to get caught up in it all. Then, as time went by and those same hot brand new venues became ghost towns and/or vanished, I realized they weren't quite as crucial to my client link building efforts as I initially thought. Go back even further, and the same addiction applied to search engines. I think I submitted a few thousand URLs to Excite once upon a time...The lesson for me has been that there will always be something new, bigger, brighter, cooler, and none of them matter. What matters is meritorious content, influencer identification, and topical merit based link seeking based on one to one interactions.

To bring this around to something tangible, if you have truly outstanding and useful content, you don't have to have a perfect understanding of how to get links from every single communication tool or social network. Learn a bit about a few of them, like Twitter, delicious, digg, reddit, and stumbleupon, and then...at most all you'll need is a content publicist (aka link developer/builder) to show you how to get the link waves started.

Riding The Twitter Link Waves

(Updated August 1, 2009)

Over at SearchEngineLand is an article of mine written on March 31, 2009, titled Twitter: Incredibly Valuable Or Utterly Useless As A Link Building Tool? .

In the article I wrote:

"Where I see the real value in Twitter as a link building tool is in recognizing that many people who use Twitter have influence in very specific subject areas. If I'm announcing a niche health related web site, I can do a bit of research and quickly find which Twitter users are regularly tweeting similar health related URLs, and reach out to them...Twitter's surface allure is about fame and followers, everything shiny and bright. Twitter's deeper value, for those of us laboring away to constantly improve our search marketing campaigns, is about resource discovery and new links via a handful of experts behind the scenes, in the corners of the web most people ignore, but engines don't."

Let's follow up with a live case study, using a newer article from SearchEngineLand titled

Understanding Federated Link Building: A Primer With Examples.

The above article was posted at 10:25am on June 16, 2009. Fourteen minutes after it posted, a Twitter user named @seomasterlist tweeted a link to it. Here it is (image below).

Waves and Echoes
Since seomasterlist has 1300+ followers, that means at least 1300 people had a chance to see and click that link to the article I wrote.

But this is just wave #1. In addition to @seomasterlist's tweet, 40+ other Twitter users have tweeted or re-tweeted that link.

I like the analogy of tweets and re-tweets as waves and echoes, with waves being high follower influencials and echoes being less followed but still extremely important. See this Twitter search result list which is only accurate for a few days or weeks after this post was written.

Remember that over time the above search result will show LESS activity, not MORE, because Twitter search doesn't archive and then grow that archive over time like Google does. In a beautifully ironic twist, as Tweets age they vanish from Twitter search, and start being found by Google. Click this Google search.

Federated Link Building site:twitter.com






Notice as of July, Google is showing over 120 Twitter users have tweeted links to my article, Whereas Twitter now shows none.

Note among the Google results the variety and style of links, all ending up at that same article. You have to follow the result to the Tweet permalink, but what you'll find is some links tweeted via a URL shortener, like this from @tweetingseo

Search Engine News - Understanding Federated Link Building:
http://bit.ly/pX9Oh

Some are to the SEL RSS feed, like this from Twitter user @mcmaktoby

Understanding Federated Link Building: A Primer With Examples http://feeds.searchengineland.com/~r/searchengineland/~3/OY9dSZDG69o/understanding-federated-link-building-a-primer-with-examples-21056

And some are direct links, like this tweet from @craig_burgess

Understanding Federated Link Building: A Primer With Examples http://searchengineland.com/understanding-federated-link-building-a-primer-with-examples-21056

Each of these links will deliver a clicker to my article. Think pass-along readership from the print world. But...remember not every tweet is seen by every one of your Twitter followers every time. When you are offline you don't see my tweets, and when I'm offline I don't see yours. By the time you log back in to Twitter, my tweet is likely off your list of current tweets, and may never be seen at all. You can't click what you don't see.

Still, here's some Twitter math to illustrate the power of Twitter Link Waves. As of 2 days after the initial tweeted link to my article...

Total Twitter users who have tweeted a link to the article
41

Total number of followers those 41 Twitter users have
53,282

Total number of Twitter users who had a chance to see a link my article
52,270
(I removed my own followers keep this honest)

As for how many of those 52,270 people saw, clicked on, and read my Federate LinkBuilding article at SearchEngineLand, only the folks at SearchEngineLand can know for sure. What's truly amazing is the speed with which links ride waves/skip through Twitter-space. It's only been two days since I posted that article, and all because of Twitter, over 52,000 people had a chance to see it.

Follower Overlap and Co-followers
Remember this is just the Twitter users, and only those Twitter users who used the article title in their tweet text, meaning I can find them by searching. Not everyone tweets an article title. Some just write "good article" and include a short-cut link, meaning I wont find those with a keyword search.

We also have to remember that within any vertical, follower overlap is higher. In other words, since my articles have a tendancy to get shared the most within the SEO/SEM industry, and since many folks in the SEO/SEM industry follow each other, I must assume that the 52,000 followers include a significant overlap.

For example, I follow 20 of the 41 people who tweeted my article link, so I would see that same link tweet 20 times. For the sake of argument let's assume a 50% follower overlap. Even then over 25,000 people received that link.

Interesting side notes

- Speaking of Twitter follower overlap, check out Venn'd which offers a nifty twitter follower overlap analysis, or twtrfrnd, which will show you the common followers for any two twitter usernames. And Who follows whom let's you do cofollower analysis for up to five usernames.

- You can search Google for tweets, by restricting your search to the twitter domain like this

"Understanding Federated Link Building" site:twitter.com

See the image above in the earlier example. The Google result will, especially over time, give a far more accurate count than Twitter's own search engine will.

What Does It All Mean?
You should be incorporating Twitter into your link sharing/building efforts, but don't make the mistake of thinking Twitter is just a link broadcasting tool waiting for you to exploit it. There are very subtle aspects to Twitter which belie the 140 limit. Tweeted links can definately affect rank, but as much as Twitter is "new school", proper use of it is very much "old school" in that you still need to identify and reach out to a key influncer on a one-to-one level. Twitter is simply a very cool tool that allows us to do this. You just have to know how to do so properly.

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NOTE: To ask a link building related question, click the "comments" link below, or the "Post a Comment" link at the bottom of any individual post. You can also email your question to eric [at] ericward [dot] [com]

Up Close Look at Eric Ward's Link Building Desktop

I was reading Matt Cutts post the other day titled My 8.7M Pixel Display, and it hit me.

There is no site devoted to showing the various desktop rigs for those of us who earn our livings in the SE/SEO-SEM/Link Building/Online Publicity field (seorigs.com is available, btw). I've found a couple other people like Matt and Danny Sullivan who've posted pictures and descriptions of their desktop setups, monitor's etc., and having been asked many times over the years how I manage my daily workflow, I decided to explain it in pictures.

How I Work - Full View
This first shot shows the full command center (click it to enlarge). Bookend laptops, an HP on the left and a Dell Mini 9 on the right. Under the desk is a Dell Studio XPS. Four monitors (15 inch on the left lap, then to the right a 24 inch, a 22 inch, and a 9 inch). Note there are no wireless keyboards or mice. They were always more trouble than they were worth, plus having wired mice and keyboards makes it easier to hurl them greater distances when I have one of my moments (tip: If you use the cord like a lasso and the wind is blowing, you can sail a keyboard over 50 yards.

The Mini Me
That tiny laptop in the above picture (larger picture to the right) is a Dell Mini 9, and that's the one thing I take with me when I leave the office. Very handy. Mini Me's sole mission during the day is to run TweetDeck, which is what you see in the smaller photo. When I take it in the house after work, I use it like a Kindle. My first cell phone was about the same size. Seriously, I had that phone. In fact, note to Dell: please make the Mini a phone for us old school types.


ADD Cental
Just above the Mini is a 22 inch monitor, pictured closer at right, and this is what I call "Feed Central" aka ADD Central. It's blurry becasue that's what it looks like to me most of the time. Feed Central is my iGoogle homepage, and it currently has 57 feeds from folks I keep up with. I use this to scan all the news my brain can tolerate during the day, the amount of which varies depending on my Mtn. Dew blood level. On the positive side, this overload approach will help me know before anyone when my brain is turning to mush, because one day I'll look up at that monitor and ask who this Matt Cutts guy is?

Side Note: I use Firefox's find feature for the feed Central page to highlight the word "link" so that any time link appears in any post's title, I see a visual cue. That way I can scan and spot any post from any of the 57 sources that might be more pertinent to my work.

You can't see it very well, but the first three feeds across the top are Matt's, SEL, and WebProNews. I set all 57 sources to show the maximum 9 posts, so that's 513 posts live on that monitor at any given moment. Thank goodness for OCD, ADD, and Red Bull, or someday I'll be giving interviews like this nice chap to the right, mumbling "linking quid pro quo is spam, Clarice..."

The Main Workhorses
The HP Laptop and the 24 inch Dell monitor on the left are where the real link building takes place. I run Firefox, IE, Thunderbird, assorted tabs and tools, plus a remote session to my link analysis script box located at...Ha! Like I'd give that secret out. If I'm in a phone consult, I'll have skype, a web cam, glance screen sharing, and often trillian running at the same time. I usually have about ten windows open via tabs when I'm in heavy duty link dev mode. My Firefox is tricked out with about 25 add-ons. If you look closer, you can see that I keep a sidebar open on the left, and my tab bar open on the right. I do a lot of dragging and dropping, and even though there are countless link building tools, apps, and thingamabobs, it's often the simplest approach that works best. It's sad that I would call what I just described in this post simple, isn't it?

Multitasking Without Distraction
It's worth noting that when I go deep into link building mode for a client, I go invisible to outside communiques except as they relate to that specific project. I also turn off the Feed Central monitor and TweetDeck. Too distracting. There are some days where all I do all day long is I.D. targets and send email or make phone calls. Pure link seeking. I try not to do this too many days in a row, because it can get tedious, but...it's been proven to me through the years that you can't work at link building for just an hour or two a day. It takes long stretches of intense focus. I devote at least 4 consecutive hours or more of each day to client link building work. Back in the day, when I was starting out and the web was exploding, my wife and I worked side by side, often for 12 hours straight. This was before we had kids and mortgages.

The rest of my day is spent publishing URLwire, doing outreach and rep mgt., research and running link analysis scripts. Over the weekend I usually have 5-10 link audit scripts running, so on Monday there's always a pile of linking data for me to distill into reports.

That about covers it.

Why?
Part of the reason I've posted this is that many folks in the industry refer to me as "old school", and while I take it as a compliment, others regard that term with disdain, thinking my approach to link building is something like this. Hardly. As you can see above, my control center is not for the faint of heart or for those who can't multitask with abandon. Total the info points across my desktop, be they tweets or IMs, add in six email inboxes, and I figure I'm handling and scanning through roughly 3,000 items every day.

If that's old school, so be it.

What has remained old school is my ethos and outreach communication style and technique. And guess what? They work even better today than they did then.

Desktop Rig Links
If you have a page where you've shown and/or described your desktop setup, send me your link, and I'll post it here, hopefully creating an ever growing log of how we all actually do our thing all day.

Eric Ward (your on it)

Matt Cutts
Danny Sullivan
Craig Burgess of Digital Tsunami

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To ask a link building related question, click the "comments" link below,
or the "Post a Comment" link at the bottom of any individual post.

Best Practices for Feeling Sorry for Yourself

Over at Outspoken, the place where I secretly wish I worked (if I was 15 years younger and had any youthful hotness remaining), there was a firestorm over Lisa Barone's post It's Not the Recession, You Just Suck

Some loved it, some didn't, some seemed offended. I read it with detached bemusement, which is professionally my favorite emotional state. Being an elder statesman has it's perks and detached bemusement is one of them.

Another perk of being a gray-beard in this biz is watching the younger crowd earn their stripes as the years go by. Even though I really don't know these folks, I watch them from a distance, follow them, comment on their blogs from time to time, and oddly take great pride when one of them becomes as successful as I thought they would back when I first met them, when they might not have known if they were going to make it big or not.

Rae Hoffman is a perfect example. I had been speaking at conferences for many years and then she happened to be on a panel with me. I don't remember the specific conference, as I've done over 100, and I don't remember who else was on that panel. What I remember was Rae knew her shit cold. Smart as hell, fearless, willing to speak up. I remember her saying she was glad to be on that panel with me and then thinking to myself I should be thanking her. I also remember thinking to myself that she was going to be a force in the industry, and soon. I so much love being right.

On Lisa's post above, Rae commented...

...a few of them might do what I did ten years ago and say "you know what? I want more. And I CAN get it..."

Yes, indeed you can. Long before Mike Grehan and Greg Boser and Debra Mastaler decided my new SEO handle was LinkMoses, which was circa 2002, a full decade earlier in 1991, I lost my job when my division was sold to Time Inc., and my boss informed me I was not a part of the "new organization". The economy was in a recession (you thought this one was the first one?), and I spent three months in a funk before I realized nobody was going to rescue my sorry ass. I did what Rae said. I decided "I want more" and got up and did something. You all know the rest of the story.

So take everything Lisa and Rae said, put it in ALL CAPS and multiply it by 10. Then it will be perfect.

Nobody, and I mean n-o-b-o-d-y gives a shit about your future enough to put your faith in them. We are all free agents, and like it or not, you cannot hide your weak-ass game for long in this industry. After 14 years at this, I could easily just phone it in. Sit on the porch with a blunt listening to the best band nobody's heard of (on 8-track). Hell, I've earned it. Fuck that Twitter shit and why the hell do I need a blog? I'm freaking Link-Moses.

Right?

Wrong.

I know what I know because I refuse to stop. I refuse to let my skills rust. And more important, I know what I do not know, and it's a lot. So I go learn it.

The special thing about our particular industry is how it's still in its infancy, and nobody is such an expert at any aspect of it that they can stop learning. At the same time, it's all right there for the taking, if you want it, and are willing to learn it, and then earn it.

-Eric


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NOTE: To ask a link building related question, click the "comments" link below, or the "Post a Comment" link at the bottom of any individual post. You can also email your question to LBBPQ@ericward.com

How Twitter Can Impact Link Building

Live now over at SearchEngineLand is this week's Link Week column:

Twitter: Incredibly Valuable Or Utterly Useless As A Link Building Tool?

Before you start your attack, yes, I know people are saying Twitter has already jumped the shark and become nothing more than a popularity contest. In some instances I agree it is, but from a merit based link building perspective, forget the Twitter masses.

Twitter is not just about Shaq and his 490,000 followers, clicking like sheep whatever URL the big guy tweets.

Twitter is also about small groups of subject specific influencers, and what they do with the links they learn about.

Read more

NOTE: To ask a link building related question, click the "comments" link below, or the "Post a Comment" link at the bottom of any individual post. You can also email your question to lbbp@ericward.com

Best Practices for Flickr Link Building

Every once in a while I read an article or blog post related to link building, and it's so good I nearly wet my pants. Of course, I'm in my forties so it could be incontinence, but that's a story for another post.

There is a right way and a wrong way to go about link seeking and link building, and then there are ways that rise above everything else. A technique so sublime that as you read about it you are both mad (that you didn't think of it), but smiling at the sheer brilliance of it.

I'll get to the specific example in a moment, but first it's important to explain that when I say there is a right way and a wrong way to build links, what I should say is there are a hundred right ways and a thousand wrong ways. The approach and strategy you employ will ALWAYS depend on the venue you are pursuing links from, the content you are pursuing links for, your creativty, and your own internal ethical compass. The strategy I'm about to point you to will not work for everyone, nor should it. But the lesson to take from it is priceless.

I'm fond of throwing around the phrase "holistic link building". It makes me sound smarter than I am. The two core strategies behind holistic link building are that 1). your site is more than it's homepage, with multiple opportunities for content specific deep links, and 2). the web is filled with passionate experts who create a variety of content that you can leverage.

OK, enough introduction. This article from Lisa Barone and Rae Hoffman titled "Getting Links AND Content From Flickr" shows just how creative and clever link building can be. It does so not just by theorizing, it does so by sharing a real life case study and examples. But besides that, and perhaps most importantly (here's where I get all misty), this article shows how link building can (and should) be a very human process, not a task to be dreaded, or a chore to be completed. Please read it and see if it inspires you like it has me.


NOTE: To ask a link building related question, click the "comments" link below, or the "Post a Comment" link at the bottom of any individual post. You can also email your question to LBBPQ@ericward.com