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.

-------------------------------------------
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

__________________________________________
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.