Nov
8
Do you know anyone that is qualified to run Text Link Brokers’ Strategic Linking department? If so you could qualify for a $5,000 referral fee. I have been working with TextLinkBrokers.com for many years and would apply for the job myself if I didn’t have to move to Arizona. The position is aimed at an experienced link builder with skills in SEO and project management. Of course the right candidate would have to have serious experience with link building. Click Here For Job Details.
As far as the referral fee goes, anyone who refers the winning candidate will get $5,000 after they have been with the company for 90 days. If you don’t know about Text link Brokers, they have been around for a few years and offer link building, sponsored reviews and other advanced SEO services. I have used several of their programs to much success with several clients. The fact that they are expanding is a good sign for the paid linking industry.
If you or someone you know has the skills to direct Text Link Brokers Strategic Link Building Department you can send a resume to:
Troy Ireland, Troy –at– Textlinkbrokers.com
or Jarrod Hunt, Jarrod –at– Textlinkbrokers.com
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Aug
30
Link Juice Explained
Filed Under Linking Strategies | 7 Comments
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.
Jun
25
Inbound links are the most important part of search engine optimization second only to keyword development and density of those keywords throughout URL’s, content and pages. You simply can’t have one without the other. All the keyword research and perfect optimization of those keywords throughout the site will amount to nothing without quality inbound links.
There are several types of inbound links and before we get into acquisition I am going to expand on the different types of links and how they effect your site.
The Different Types Of Inbound Links
The list below is broken down starting with the least powerful link to the most powerful link:
- Reciprocal Linking - The grand daddy of inbound linking, link swapping, which is basically: “I put a link on my site and you put a link on yours”, is out of date and has the least amount of weight. In fact there are some SEO experts now saying that reciprocal linking can actually hinder your placement. I am not sure I am willing to go that far, but they certainly don’t positively effect a site like they once did.
- Three Way Linking or Triangular Linking or Pyramid Linking - This scheme is a little better as far as weight goes, but I have been wary of it lately. With all the intelligence that goes into the algorithms of Google and Yahoo, I just can’t believe they can’t come up with a formula that can isolate Three Way Linking and filter it along with other spam tactics. The theory is simple and quite easy to implement when you or your link partners have multiple sites. Basically Site A links to Site B, which links to Site C which links back to Site A. Again there is no evidence that GoogleBot or Slurp have been tracking Triangular Linking, but I believe they do and will act on it, especially when abused. Another thing to worry about is the pass through ratio of ALL the corners of the Pyramid Linking foundation. If you don’t understand the pass through ratio check out my article: Website Linking Strategies: An Overview of Pass Through Ratios.
- One Way Inbound Links - This is a tricky, but highly effective means of boosting Page Rank as well as specific keyword optimization for a page. Link Baiting (Link Baiting has a bad reputation, but that is only because some tech writer used it in reference to those high-profile bloggers that tied “miserable failure” to George Bush’s profile page on whitehouse.gov, the fact is that trick was Link or Google Bombing, NOT link baiting!) is one of the most powerful ways to target your placement for a specific keyword. By obtaining several inbound links with the same exact phrase within the anchor text, you are effectively building authority for the site for that term. This tactic is especially effective when linking directly to the home page. If you are more interested in driving a tier 2 or tier 3 page up for a keyword, it requires more links. In fact if your trying to build authority for a tier 3 page, but the tier 2 page has weak pass through ratio, it will be much harder to obtain placement for the 3rd tier page. It important to understand that your websites linking structure both internally and externally are the foundation for your placement. You have to shore up the authority from your home page on down to your lowest page. A site that has many pages MUST employ Deep Link Navigation, not only from a usability standpoint, but from an SEO standpoint as well. No matter what your strategy, a one way link is nearly the most powerful type of inbound link. One key factor is the anchor text that links to your site should appear on the linking page. It is more about authority than it is relevance when looking at one way links. If you have any questions or need me to expand on this, leave a comment on this post.
- RSS Feed Link - By far the absolute strongest inbound link is when a website places your RSS feed on their site. If your feed is set up properly for optimization, your feed should have multiple attributes within the XML of the feed. The first attribute is “Publisher” this is the URL to your site that relates to the feed. For example if you have a blog, the home page would be the Publisher URL. If your blog is part of a larger domain, it is possible through XML-RPC to have dynamic feed content on your static home page. This would allow the actual home page of the main site to act as the publisher as opposed to just the home page of the blog. After “Publisher” comes the articles. Most sites will put up 5 articles from a site’s feed. They will obviously rotate as the feed gets updated. Here lies one of the problems with an RSS Link. If every time your feed updates then the search engine will be showing a different link since the URL’s of your stories are static. That is why it is imperative that you have the “Publisher” attribute in your feed. For more info read my RSS Syndication Overview. The bottom line here is that every time a site displays your RSS feed, your site’s authority doubles. The way to raise the authority for specific keywords is through the “Publisher Description” attribute. At this time I am not going to go over pingbacks, trackbacks and RPC as inbound links since that is going to be a 2 or 3 article series.
Inbound Link Gathering - How To Get Links
Looking at the above list about the differences between inbound links, I am going to spell out acquisition strategies in the same order. I don’t think I need to go into detail about reciprocal linking, since it is lame and doesn’t work anyway, but if you are hell bent on doing it, find related websites and send them an email with your information and where you put their link on your site. Back in the day I would do Link Extortion. In other words, I would put up 20 or 30 links on a page, build up its Page Rank, wait until Google was showing the links in the natural SERPS, i.e. link: www.domain.com, then send them an email with a link to Google’s page showing my inbound link to their website. I would point out to them that my link was already showing in Google and if they wanted to keep that link, they would need to reciprocate.
When acquiring links, the bottom line is you have to communicate with other website owners. The only other alternative is to purchase or rent links from a broker. This is another industry that has gotten a lot of bad publicity over the years. The fact is a good broker only places relative links. In other words the sites are somehow related. I only use 2 brokers. Text Link Ads, and Text Link Brokers. They both have outstanding inventory as well as common sense when it comes to SEO.
Another option for one way links is to use a service such as Review Me that puts together bloggers and advertisers. Basically you can either search for blogs that are related to your site and pay a one time fee to have a blogger either review your product or write about your site. They cost anywhere from $30 to $300 depending on the Page Rank of the blog. Make sure you research the blog. Make sure that articles that are 2 or 3 months old have the same or close to the same page rank. This is how you can gauge the pass through ratio of the blog.
Finally we get to RSS. Again this is a subject that will require 2 or 3 posts to cover, but here is the nuts and bolts. I use WordPress. WordPress is built for SEO and communication. It comes out of the box ready to communicate with search engines and RSS directories, but you still have to do a lot of work. There is a great service called pingomatic that notifies a slew of directories every time your blog (or if you are like me and have XML-RPC on your static pages as well) or site has been changed or an article has been added, or a comment has been made on an article.
Outside of this service there are a ton of news or RSS directories that you will have to manually “plant” both your blog/site and its feed. Once your blog and feed are planted, you will be able to plant your articles as well. It took me a whole month to get my blog, site, and feeds planted in the top 55 directories. I am now just starting to plant my articles, but already I have seen my inbound links within Google’s Webmaster Center, as well as Yahoo’s Site Explorer triple! Yep triple. I am not going to candy coat this. It is a lot of hard work, it took a lot of time, but my traffic has increased as has my search engine placement. I am now looking at a visibility index of 45% for the 125 keywords I track. Prior to implementing XML-RPC my index was around 22%.
My next article about linking is going to drill down into XML-RPC and how to employ it on more than just a blog. As always I welcome all questions, but I ask that they are put in as comments so I can get better placement and others can see the questions and answers. Remember that it all boils down to your inbound links!
Jun
7
Website Linking Strategies: An Overview of Pass Through Ratio
Filed Under Linking Strategies | 4 Comments
Linking is the single most important part of search engine optimization. You might have built the most spectacular website in the world, but if no can get to it, or if users can’t find it in the search engines, it serves no purpose. Search Engine Optimization really boils down to 3 basics:
- Keywords - identify the words that users will type into search engines to find your site.
- Optimize - place your keywords within the domain, the URL’s and throughout the site’s content.
- Link - list your site in directories and obtain links from other web sites. Have a good internal linking structure.
Internal Linking Strategies
The most important part of your website is your content, but how that content is accessible is just as crucial. If your users can’t readily find what they are looking for, then they will leave your site and never come back. Every site has some sort of navigation. Whether it is a fancy Flash menu system with rollover effects going across the header or simple text links running down the sidebar, you have to have navigation.
How your internal pages link together outside of the navigation or footer links is extremely important for SEO as well as usability. For now I am concerned with SEO, but if you are interested in linking for usability read: Website Usability Deep Link Navigation. The search engine spiders follow the links within your content as well as the links within your navigation and footer. In fact it is the content links that are of more importance, especially on the home page.
A website and its pages are broken down into tiers. The top tier pages are your home page and any pages that are linked directly from it. The second tier pages are linked from pages other than your home page. For instance if you have a link from your home page to your services page, and from services you link to the individual pages that explain your different offerings, those sub pages are second tier. Those pages that are not linked to the home page, but only to your service page are third tier pages. If you have sub-pages under the different individual services those would be fourth tier pages and so on.
The graphic below shows a 3 tier system and how Google Page Rank diminishes the further a page is linked from the home page. This demonstration is taking into consideration that the tier pages have the proper “Pass Through Ratio”.
Search engines, particularly Google prefer that pages are within the root directory. Many webmasters will make a separate sub folder called /services/ and put that categories pages within it to better organize the files on the web server. Unless your site is dynamic or you have thousands of pages you should keep your pages within the root. This is also important to the tier linking. Pages within the same directory have a much better chance of passing the Page Rank on to its sub pages.
Pass Through Ratio And Why Its So Important To Linking
The pass through ratio is broken down into 2 types:
- Domain Pass Through - the carry over of page rank to pages linked from overall website elements such as footers and navigation.
- Page Pass Through - the carry over of authority and page rank from one page (or tier) to another.
When you are first developing a website drawing out your site linking structure is one of the most overlooked facet of design. You must plan your internal linking carefully to not water down your top tier pages. Too many outbound links on a page (even internal links) will take away its authority and ability to score higher page rank.
More importantly, on an existing website, the addition of new pages and their ability to rank in search engines depends on pass through. Top tier pages that need to also support pages under them must have outside linking to them directly for them to be able to pass on their authority.
When obtaining inbound links whether you do reciprocal link exchange or buy links from a broker make sure to also get links for your internal pages. That is the most important aspect of pass through, the weight of the internal tier pages. My next article will go into detail about link gathering tactics.