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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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]