8 replies to this topic

[Scottie]

OK, so I feel like doing a little live blogging- here we go.

Sitting here with Greg Jarboe and Amanda Watlington and the session is just beginning. Amanda and I have been discussing the difficulties of getting good help. Good AND dependable? Seems an impossible combination.

Alan Webb is up. To get links, you need content. But to get the content found and linked, you need links? How do you get the links in order to be found so that more people will link to you? How to you kickstart your website and get the word out?

The "for free" options:

• Social media optimization, bookmarks
• Usenet. Not so popular anymore but still out there
• Newsletter- write your own newsletter
• Blogs, great for new stuff
• Forums- don't spam! Will backfire on you. Post helpful posts first before dropping your own information. Will give you a bad name otherwise.

The "for money" options

• Keyword Advertising
• Press Releases
• Traditional online media buy- banners and ads
• E-mail newsletter marketing
• Missed one- sorry!

Alan Webb's Personal Top 10 Link Bait Content

1. Tools- create a useful tool
2. Contests. Use some creativity and make a contest that provides and unusual prize or is interesting.
3. Online games, like flash games. Make it addictive. Develop it with a theme for your niche.
4. Breaking News- maximize your knowledge of breaking events
5. Lists- Top 10, Do's and Don'ts- very popular, people love lists.
6. Controversy- create a buzz, get people talking. Can backfire, so be careful.
7. Competitions
8. Giveaways or freebies- screensavers or other digital media. Software tools. E-books
9. Studies, white papers, tutorials- particularly powerful if they go against the common thinking. Must back it up with research.
10. Cool Design

What is the best day of the year to create linkbait?
April 1st!
Coming up soon....

Cool page: http://producten.hema.nl Great linkbait, poor usability. Lots of sites link to this page. Successful linkbait although it's not selling anything on this page.

Sex sells: www.neckermann.de Combines shock, controversy and fun. Alan shows how to find linkbacks using linkdomain and -site to remove internal links on Yahoo. A new wrinkle is that you can put keywords in the linkdomain command and find only sites linking to you with those keywords. Gives you the thematic links.

linkdomain:www.neckermann.de "job award" -site:neckermann.de

*NSFW* You've been warned.

That's the end of Alan... Next up...

[Scottie]

Mikkel promises another controversial presentation.

Everyone understands the power of links, right? Good.

Shows some link bomb examples. Adobe-> Click Here #1 out of 2 billion pages, but Click here doesn't appear on the page. You can rank a page with links alone, but you can never rank content without links.

Traditional link requests, he thinks are dead. Had analysts work on studying linking requests- the value of link requests dropping (shows silly graph).

New Trends in Link Development

Links are important for indexing too now!
Links used to mostly influence rankings- now you depend on links for frequent crawling and proper indexing too!
Basically: you do not get 20 million pages indexed on a PR2 domain!

Golden Links Count More
There is increasing value for top links for most industries

We need more deep links
We need increasing number of links pointing directly at relevant subpages, not just the front page.

We need more fresh links!
Link growth rates and the patterns of fresh links seems to be more and more important.

Why ask for links? (getting into the shady area)

Black hat link building techniques from the past
Comment spamming
Log Spamming
XSS links

What's next for black hat spamming? Web 2.0 is a spammers paradise! Interactive websites allow for lots of injection possibilities. Go home and make sure your programmers know how to protect your site from XSS.

The great things about black hat link building
You don't have to ask
You don't have to pay
You can scale up

THe bad things about black hat
People hate you. They want to hit you.
The risk of getting penalized is great
Might be illegal

Mikkel does not recommend you do black hat linking.

Shows example of XSS links- SQL injection. Yahoo displays XSS links, Google has filtered them out.

Shows example of log file spam- when logfiles are online and not password protected, you can get a link on their referrer page easily with a bot. (nasty domains on the example) Can be fun to trick your colleagues with logfile spamming.

Back to White Hat techniques:

One page, one link strategy-

Turn your community into active SEO's
Most often active community members have a vested interestin in the popularity of their contributions. (revenue share, ego boost...)
Help them to help you and themselves by teaching them basic SEO

ONe link is not that hard to get
Teach them to get links for you.

Missed a section- sorry!

Buy redirected links from golden sites
It's hard to get those golden links ...
Sometimes they won't link to you
Sometimes they are too expensive
Sometimes you just don't want to pay them

Most websites do link out!
Make a list of the websites they link to (try using Xenu)
Evaluate the sites the golden site links to, will they sell to you?

Mikkel has ended.

[Scottie]

Brian Turner is up.

Link Building 2: Advanced

Once upon a time there was a niche market in widgets- red and yellow were direct competitors. They send lots of begging link requests, they pay for some links. (HE shows a dot graph of the links.)

This is the traditional way to think about linking, but the situation is more complicated.

Google is a link-driven search engine. Some of the more profound reasons for this is that websites are social nodes. The linking out is a form of communication- if you think of it like that, new potentials arise.

Linkshare is thinking about linkings to rank in Google. The real reason you want to rank in Google is to get market share and sales.

Linkshare + mindshare=

He shows his dot map organized by theme. He goes back to the yellow-red company. He outlines that yellow OWNS all the news sites and theme sites. They have been building authority sites all along. You may consider buying the websites that are authorities in your markets.

Yellow widget company not only has linkshare, they have mindshare and authority. It's a long term strategy. Yellow widget company happy- red widget company not happy.

Expand your idea of links.

Content & Aquisition Development Strategy

Don't spam- content spam
Be great to customers
Long term goals
Remarkable strategy
Win communications war

If you buy sites for authority, you must continue to maintain them. Don't just buy them and start selling links and turn them into spam. You need to keep investing in them.

The Achilles heel- if you control the communication channels, you have to protect the reputation of those companies. Letting them go can turn against you quickly and alienate users who will turn to new authority sites.

[Scottie]

Questions coming up:

No questions from the audience.

Mikkel talks about writing controversial articles, cites an article he wrote called "Linux Sucks". He says they are very sensitive people. Was effective linkbait.

Question from audience: International issues with language. Make sure you are using a local domain for countries. Links from UK domains are more powerful for UK results. Get localized links. Alan Webb says he ranks well in .DE but can't be found in .com or .co.uk because his links are all from German sites and his host is in Germany. He has an English blog with links from English sites that is doing well for .co.uk. Mikkel mentions that he may be hosting in the US and I'm not sure what his point is. OK, he says hosting plays a role. But you need to build enough links for localized national sites to offset the hosting location. Doesn't matter where your site is hosted if you have local links.

No more questions... asking for more questions... large audience is quiet.

OK, guy asks about hosting and links and blogs. Is there any impact from acquiring links from the US blogs to his UK blog. Mikkel says all links are good links. His blog is in Danish but he gets lots of .com links, like from the conferences. If he could design it he would try to gain as many local links as he could, but any link is a good link so don't limit it. Brian says authoritarian links are always important no matter where but UK authoritarian links are going to have more impact for a UK site. Mikkel says some countries are really strict on allowing local domains- you must have a local business registered so they may be localized sites on .com domains, etc. The local links help to sort it all out.

[Scottie]

That's the end- can't say I learned anything new here, I've been recommending building authority sites forever. My social media presentation covered the same outlets as Alan covered. No interest in XSS or black hatting links...

But it was entertaining, for sure.

[Jill]

Scotttttttttieeeeee! How can you be in London without me????

Surely you need me to show you the way on the tube and all...oh wait, it was me who needed you...

[Scottie]

LOL!! It is weird being here without you. Chris and I are rooming together and the room just seems so big without a third bed shoved in here...

Headed off to tour Edinburgh today with Mona Elesseily for the weekend. Should be fun!

[Jill]

Awesome! If I weren't in Hawaii, I'd be totally jealous. No wait, I'd be there with you!

[robwatts]

Damn Scottie, I was in that same session! I really need to read conference agendas! Hope you had fun at Edinburgh