Link Juice Explained
I just received an email from a webmaster asking me what “link juice” was and where could he buy some. While it is possible to buy links, they are actually worthless if they don’t give your site any weight. He had heard of the term “link juice” when it was used by Matt Cutt, Google’s spam cop, in an interview with SEOMOZ. The truth is, it was Greg Boser whose site Web Guerrilla first started the new buzz word.
Personally I refer to the weight of a link as “Pass Through Ratio” and wrote about it in my post Website Linking Strategies: Overview Of Pass Through Ratios. The concepts are very similar. Link Juice refers to the quality or weight that any website can pass on to other sites through links. If you are looking at buying some links or setting up some multi-link deals, then you are going to want to take a hard look at where your links are going to be placed.
Link Juice Pass Through Ratio Rules
I agree that link juice is a hipper name than pass through ratio or PTR, so I will stay trendy and continue to use it for this post. Since this is a core part of my business I am not going to give away some of the more advanced tools I have to calculate link juice on a site, but these following rules will still serve you well:
- Know The Page - if your site will be linked to from anything other than a home page, make sure you know exactly which page your link will be on. Some of the more shady link brokers won’t tell you exactly which page your link will be on, until you have already paid. This is a bad sign. All good brokers show you in advance where your link will be.
- No More Than 100 TOTAL Outbound Links - the page linking to you should not have more than 100 TOTAL links including internal navigation and other site control links.
- No More Than 25 Paid or Sponsored Links - make sure they don’t have a ton of paid or sponsored links. Really 16 is my rule of thumb for paid links, but enough industry people agree on 25, but the less the better.
- No More Than 2 Google Adwords Boxes - any site that has more than 2 Adwords boxes will not help you.
- At least 1 Point Higher In Page Rank - the site should have at least a 3 PR, as well as being higher than your page. Sites that have below 3 PR have little or no pass through.
These are basic guidelines for accepting inbound links. The thing to remember is; your own internal pass through, or link juice, also depends on your site following the basic rules of linking. Don’t have more than a couple advertisements, no more than 100 total links on a page, etc. By properly stuffing keywords and creating optimized content your pages will have more weight, which will in turn make your internal links have more go juice.
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Live Search Webmaster Portal In Beta
Well Microsoft Live Search is finally joining Yahoo and Google in giving webmasters access to information about their sites through a webmaster portal. Even though they are behind the times as usual, at least they are doing it. Get Found Now are beta testers of the portal and we will be passing along useful information to our readers as we use the new portal.
The public release of Live Search’s Webmaster Portal will be available to the public sometime in the fall. Since March Microsoft has been working on tools to help webmasters. I am sure you noticed that you couldn’t search for backlinks on Live anymore. This is the result of fixing the problems that link searches created. They will also be adding these tools:
- Troubleshooting tools to ensure MSNBot is effectively crawling and indexing your site
- Sitemap creation, submission and ping tools
- Statistics about your website
- Consolidation of content submission resources
- New content and community resources
This is a solid move on their part to increase the interactivity of their site. Even though Live is a distant third in the grand scheme of searches, their 8 or 9% market share still results in millions of searches per day. The bottom line is nobody is in a position to ignore any types of major traffic sources. We’ll be keeping an eye on this and will pass on to you what we have learned.
Website Usability 5 Rules That Will Never Change
Website Usability rules come and go mostly due to changing technology and design awareness. As time goes on users become more experienced with website design elements and learn how to use the standard features of their browsers. Even though many old website usability rules don’t carry as much weight as they used to, there are still a few that will never change.
Website Usability Rules To Ignore At Your Own Risk
So what are the steadfast rules that no designer in their right mind would ignore?
- No Unscannable Text - users just don’t want to read your site’s content. Sure this isn’t as true with blogs, but if your primary site is a blog, or you have over 25% of your inbound traffic coming into a blog that is part of your main site, you still need to follow this rule. Often called “Dense Content”, long sentences without paragraph breaks and headings make for a hard read. When a visitor hits your site or a page on it and they feel they need to work at getting the info they need, they will make like a tree and leave. You have to make your content scannable and use bolding to highlight the primary keywords within a paragraph. This is also a good SEO practice.
- Visited Links Must Have A Different Color Than Other Links - if you follow standard practices then you utilize breadcrumb navigation and other techniques to help your site visitors navigate your site. This is all well and good as long as the visited links have a different color than the standard blue of millions of hyperlinks all over the web. Users can get confused pretty easy and they should always know when they have followed a link. By changing the color of visited links you assure your users of knowing where they have been.
- No Pop Up Windows - if you use the Internet you must hate pop up windows. In fact most browsers, ISP’s and toolbars come equipped to block pop ups. So why do sites still use pop up windows? Who knows, but it is still a very bad idea.
- No Back Buttons - yes there are still sites that employ the hated “back” button. Back. Back where? Use bread crumb navigation at least, no back, down, up, forward, right or left. This is and always will be a bad practice.
- Don’t Over Do Ads - too many ads on a site is one quick way to loose whatever stickiness you might have had. Having banner ads all over the place will take away from whatever worthwhile content you might actually have on the site. Most users know by now that primary site features are usually in text or in buttons that correspond with shopping carts and images. Google Ads all over the site is a sure way to loose your visitors.
These are just a few of the steadfast website usability rules that have been passed down over the ages. Stick to common design practices and you will do just fine.
Related Posts:
Website Usability Overview
Home Page Usability
Website Usability and SEO
Search Engine Usability
WordPress Permalinks: Changing The Links On An Existing Site
Even though this article is primarily about WordPress, it is important for anyone that has a website whose URL structure is less than optimal. We all learn by doing, SEO isn’t a precise science, in fact the rules change all the time. With WordPress you have options when setting up your site, but what if you didn’t set it up right in the first place?
Well that is what happened to me. I followed the guidelines on the WordPress permalink page, and used the year, month, and day string in my URL structure as recommended. I set up my blog like that as well as most of my clients’ blogs. I jumped right into WordPress without really testing the waters like I should have. The problems weren’t really on this site, but on my wife’s site homesadvisory.com which has a 4 PR on the home page, but isn’t getting any love in Google. I found that a lot of her articles were in supplemental results. I know that Google is eliminating sup results, but I really don’t think that is going to do anything for her SEO.
After much research I realized I had broken one of my oldest rules: no duplicate content! So what to do? I found a lot of great websites with many different answers. I decided to just do what I knew is best, solid URL’s and no chance of dupe content.
The important thing is I don’t want to loose placement for posts that are doing well. For example I am #2 for “rss syndication services” which is accounting for 20% of my traffic. So if I change the permalinks within WordPress, I know that at the site level I am OK, but what about the links within the SERP’s and all the other sites that link into my posts?
The answer is a cool plugin called Permalink Migration from Dean Lee. It allowed me to easily change all the links on my site from /2007/05/02/postname to /postname.html. You see the main reason I want to do this is to stop Google from spidering my archives. I can easily do that by adding Disallow: /20* as a line within my robots.txt file, which will stop any date based archive pages or posts from being re-spidered, eliminating the dupe content.
This isn’t the only step though. If you use a sitemap plugin like me, you have to go in and manually change the settings to NOT add the archives to the sitemap. My sitemap is now totally clean and my URL’s are cool. The only thing left is the links within the posts themselves. I firmly believe in Deep Link Navigation so my articles have tons of internal links. These unfortunately weren’t changed.
I am currently looking into doing a replace within the MySql database rather than modify hundreds of posts. I’ll add comments to this post on the progress. If you have a WordPress blog and are using date based URL’s, you need to change your permalink structure! Leave any questions as comments on this post.
RSS Brings The News To You
I was just watching CNN and they were running a story on how many websites were losing major chunks of traffic. Sites like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, along with Fox and CNN are losing traffic. They are asking why, but the answer is right in front of them.
People no longer need to visit those sites. Everything you need to know comes to you via RSS right on your Google or Yahoo home page. A few years ago I discovered that My Yahoo allowed me to insert content from just about anyplace that had a feed. I didn’t know what a feed really was, but went ahead and created my first Blogger blog. It was very cool to see my words right there on my Yahoo home page. That blog about hard drive recovery is now syndicated worldwide and has hundreds of subscribers.
So if you are not on the RSS bandwagon, you better jump on, or you will be left behind. By easily allowing your sites’ visitors to subscribe to your news, you are going to be in constant communication with your audience. It is true, your site’s traffic will suffer, but by placing ads in your feed, you can still turn a profit if that is your business model.
The fact is sites like Bloglines, News Gator and Technorati have extreme page rank which means Google feels they are authorities on just about every subject. By planting your feeds, and submitting to directories you can reach an audience that just isn’t using search engines the way they used to. Why else would Google buy FeedBurner and start adding news and blog results in the SERP’s? Google’s implementation of Universal search is just a beta test of how it is going to integrate feeds into natural searches.
As a user, RSS has eliminated around 75% of my search activity. I scanned my history for the last 4 weeks and was shocked to see how few websites I visited. I live in Florida so I am keeping an eye on Hurricane Dean, but you know what, I never leave my iGoogle page. Everything I need is brought to me through RSS.
As a business man and a person responsible for the livelihoods of hundreds of families, I need to stay on top of the way people use the Internet, to better prepare my clients. You see, all my clients rely on the Internet to survive, and I am their Internet Presence Manager, so that makes me responsible for their employees as well as for myself. For those of you who are like me, I suggest you track your Internet usage, how you search and shop online. To be able to help your clients, you need to understand how visitors actually use the Web.
RSS truly brings the news and the world to you!
Related Posts:
RSS Overview
RSS Syndication Services
RSS to Email