Search Marketing» Link Building Blog Posts – Epiphany Solutions Digital Marketing Blog

Five Ways to Turn Your Blog into Link Bait Gold

Scott Malthouse — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 10:16:29 +0000

Believe it or not, there are still people out there who think that blogging merely consists of pouring one’s heart out into self-absorbed, diary-like posts. In their minds bloggers are hormonally antagonized teenagers weeping over their keyboards, listening to The Smiths. You and I know that the blogging spectrum has inflated vastly over the past ten years and that the platform is now a huge and vibrant repository of knowledge, the larger ones carrying as much weight as mainstream news sources.

Your blog probably isn’t as big as Jezebel or Gizmodo, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t strive for the same great content and get a heap of links out of it. It’s not going to be a quick fix, but with this handy guide you should see a rise in links month on month.

Publish fresh news as it happens

Following news in your niche is something that you’re probably already doing, but it’s likely you’re getting a lot of it second-hand from other blogs. If you want people to link to you, you’re going to have to leap onto news as soon as it’s published. Set up Google Alerts so that it updates you as and when a story is released so you can act as soon as possible. Sign up to newsletters and RSS feeds of industry leaders in your field and consider signing up to press release distribution channels to be the first to know about new developments.

Put a spin on recent news

If you don’t catch the latest news, then don’t worry, you can still get some great links from putting your own personal spin on developments. Consider writing a ‘top x things you need to know about [news subject]’. Constructing news, especially if it’s complex, into an easy-to-digest format can make people link to your post as an alternative to the original source of the story. You can also post your own opinion on the matter, but note that a controversial opinion is one that’s more likely to be linked to than if you go with popular opinion.

Install social media counters

Most bloggers have social media buttons already installed, but adding a counter to each button will help you track your most shared posts, giving you an indication of what kind of posts are popular with readers. This means that follow-ups and similar posts will likely be well-received and likely gain some links. These counters are relatively easy to install, especially if you’re using WordPress or Blogger.

Interview figures in your niche

Not only will interviews with prominent figures garner interest but they will also add more authority to your blog. You might not think you’re able to get an interview, but you would be surprised. People are always looking for free publicity and taking ten minutes out of their day to do an interview is well worth their time. However, if you’re going to conduct an interview, make sure your questions are interesting. Research interviews that have been carried out in the past with that person and think about questions that haven’t been asked yet. Always try to extract an exclusive out of them. If you don’t ask, you won’t receive and a juicy bit of information is powerful link bait.

Post every blog update on all your social channels

If you’re only uploading blog posts and leaving them sitting there, you’re wasting potential link bait opportunities. Post each update on all your social channels, so Twitter, Facebook and Google+. If you’re only on one or two of these networks, get on the others. The more networks you’re on the higher the probability that your post will be amplified through a Like, Re-tweet or a Share, and the more likely it is that someone that sees it will want to link to is.

Please leave your thoughts below or on Twitter - @scottmalt

Taking Your Link Building Campaign to the Next Level

Scott Malthouse — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 09:25:10 +0000

The game has changed. Panda is perpetually changing the search landscape and only through adaptation will we be able to work effectively in this brave new world. There has never been an era where practitioners of the SEO profession have had to be so intuitive and smart about their jobs. This, my friends, is the next level of link building.

Old practises are no longer on the cards and most of us in the industry wouldn’t touch them with a 10ft barge pole with a 50ft barge pole stuck on the end of it. After all, what’s the point in going against the grain when you can be at the forefront of link building innovation? In this article I’m going to run through a few thoughts for you brave pioneers who want to get the best organic links in this tumultuous landscape.

Building Links is an Opportunity for Creativity

The first thing you need to do is cast off any notion that building links is arduous and oftentimes unforgiving. We’re living in a digital age that encourages creativity and innovation over mundaneness. You’re no longer plugging text links wherever you can and article spinning is a thing of the past. Instead, you’re making high quality, original content that will be linked to because it’s actually worth something. I repeat – we’re all pioneers now and it’s our time to experiment and find out what works and what doesn’t. Think of the internet as our laboratory and we’re the scientists, testing and reviewing our methods and putting our results up for peer review on blogs like this.

Use a Variety of Tools

There’s no doubt that we need tools to do out work. The thing is, we often become too reliant on one or two and don’t bother going out and exploring what other options are out there. The obvious downside to this is that most tools can be fairly expensive, but they will usually have a trial so at least you can test it out. Another tip is to try and learn more about the tool that you’re using. By that I mean, you may only use one part of the tool but it could have hidden potential that you’re not currently harnessing. Learn the tool inside out and you may be surprised with what you find.

Be an All-Rounder

It may have been fine back in the day to just plod on throughout the day with standard link building, but nowadays you have to be multifaceted in your approach. On top of being a scientist, you should be a journalist, public relations agent and all round web expert. You should be writing guest posts, press releases and finding out where you can get the best links from for a particular client. Keep your eye on the news to find new opportunities and follow niche media pertaining to your clients to see what is relevant and what you can take advantage of. Read lots of press releases and articles to find out how best to write them. Get a list of blogs and sites on all aspects of SEO and web design, even if it doesn’t come into your day-to-day work – you never know when that kind of knowledge might be needed. Not only that, but having a broad knowledge could allow you to hit on ideas that nobody has ever thought of.

Learn How to Best Utilise Social

You have loads of toys to play with when it comes to social media, but that doesn’t mean you should be relying too heavily on it. You need to learn how best to use social to get the links that you want. This can be down to trial and error, but you need to also use your common sense. Interacting with bloggers on Twitter can be a great way to gain a rapport, but if you’re going crazy and asking for links from ten bloggers at the same time then it not only looks spammy, it also looks insincere. However, taking your time to build up a real relationship that will be valuable in the future for both parties will see that your link building campaign gets the results you want. Similarly, rapid and repeated tweeting of links to your newest infographics may get you exposure to more followers, but it’s annoying and people will pick up on it. As I say, it’s common sense, but I see this time and again. Just learn when it’s appropriate to use social media and you will save yourself a world of hassle.

I hope this has been informative and has inspired you to think of link building as an opportunity rather than a necessity. Let me know how your campaign strategy is standing out in the post-Panda world. I’d love to hear about it. - @scottmalt

Using QR Codes as Linkbait

Steve Walker — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 15:36:49 +0000

A QR code is a 2-D barcode that can be scanned by your smart phone’s camera which then passes information over to your phone. Marketers around the world have seen how useful QR codes can be because of the interaction it creates with the public. It’s an efficient way of furthering the advertisers message by directing people through to webpages, phone numbers or even directions to the nearest store.

It seems that even with such a new technology as this, people have already got bored with the small black and white boxes and decided to put their own spin on the codes.

PR companies have been using creative QR codes for the last few months as a way of getting their clients coverage; this also creates an opportunity for online marketers by using them as linkbait.

Here are some of the best examples I’ve seen over the past few months:

These graphical interpretations of QR codes were created by UK design company Stupid. All of the codes link smartphone users to app stores so that they can download the application. These aren’t ‘official’ and weren’t created for the app developers but they are a great showcase of the design agency’s abilities. So far they have worked well as linkbait, resulting in links from a number of digital marketing blogs including simplyzesty.com.

This is the world’s largest QR code! It’s more than 10,000 square feet and took 20 people a whole day to create. It was created by Skanz, a social media app that links all of your social media profiles into one QR code and can then print them onto t-shirts and wristbands.

The ‘World’s largest QR code’ PR stunt seems to have been replicated on many occasions but it has still been picked up on a number of sites including Mashable and Adweek.

Here’s a video of it being made, which has got more than 25,000 views on YouTube.

It seems like giant QR codes are pretty popular at the moment with another great example from Audi Japan. QR codes have always been very popular in Japan and are a bigger part of life in the eastern hemisphere than they are here. Here’s a video of it being made:

This video was picked up by a large number of blogs and news aggregators but didn’t seem to result in any high profile links. It did however gain more than 50,000 views on YouTube.

Financial services company AXA constructed a QR code using 3,844 paint cans, which was then attached to a giant banner. The 220-square foot code transferred users to AXA’s ‘renovation loan campaign’ mobile site.

This video shows how the code was created:

This was not only a great way of directing people who pass by onto the mobile site, but it was also a very successful PR campaign with coverage from a wide number of QR code blogs including industry experts 2d Code.

Some of the above examples were obviously large scale PR campaigns that have enormous budgets, and would not be able to be replicated by the majority of online marketing agencies. However, as with the examples from design agency Stupid, for it to be successful as link bait, it just needs to be a creative twist on the norm, and can be as simple as an image.

These were some of the best creative QR codes that I have found, but have I left any out? Do you think QR codes can be used as linkbait? Please your comments below or on @stevowalker.

Creative Link Building for Small Businesses

Steve Walker — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 15:46:24 +0000

Small businesses have a lot to offer and with a bit of creativity, you can turn some traditional methods of link building into a winning campaign. Here are a few ideas to help small businesses use those methods to build links to their sites.

Press Releases

Do you have newsworthy content that you think people will be interested in? If you own a pet shop and have just opened a new branch in a small city, which publication would find that newsworthy? The Guardian? The Financial Times? Probably not.

However, a local newspaper might though, or a local city guide. These types of sites aren’t publicly well known but they are likely to be high authority domains that your site would benefit receiving a link from. The key to this one is to research your link targets correctly and don’t think too big!

Pros: Very low start-up cost and all you need is the content for the press release.

Cons: Popular sites receive hundreds of spam press releases every week so make sure yours stands out in a crowded inbox.

Interviews

Why don’t you interview a celebrity? Or an industry expert? Depending on the sector you are working in, you should determine the type of link you are targeting and in turn, who you would want to interview. Blogs and news sites always like the idea of getting a ‘scoop’, and this might be an opportunity to offer some new information that people will want to read.

You may think that it would be really hard to get a celebrity/industry expert to partake in an interview; however, you would be surprised how many would be happy to piggyback off your promotion efforts. After all, it benefits both of the parties involved.

Pros: It’s a very underused tactic and websites are surprisingly receptive to it.

Cons: It can sometimes take a while to receive a response from the industry expert/celebrity with the answers from the interview.

Surveys

Have you ever heard of services like surveymonkey.com, smart-survey.co.uk and dotsurvey.com? These are great online services that allow people to create their own surveys which are then published on a bespoke url. News sites love writing about the latest research. Here’s an example from leading UK newspaper The Daily Mail:

Don’t start your diet on a Tuesday! Women who start then most likely to fail.

The research used in the article was commissioned by Tesco Diets, a dieting website owned by Tesco PLC.

It’s important that you choose a topic that is relevant to your industry and that will be interesting enough for people to fill out the questionnaire. As mentioned earlier, the questionnaire is on a bespoke url so you can distribute the survey in emails, social media channels and on your own website. Once you have the results, you can pick out a headline from the data.

Pros: Because the questionnaire is ‘fresh’ information, if the headline is good enough, it can get quite a lot of uptake by newspapers.

Cons: It can be relatively difficult for some industries to get large amounts of people to fill in the questionnaire to generate the data.

Freebies

This is a classic PR method of promoting products and brands, and yet it seems to be underused. It’s relatively easy to organise. All you need to do is create a list of websites that you believe would offer a product review in return for a sample of one of your products. They of course get to keep the sample and in return you ask them to link back to your site.

Pros: People love free stuff!

Cons: What if the company you are promoting doesn’t have physical products or samples that can be given away? E.g. service industries

These are just a few ideas for small businesses to utilise for creative link building. If you think I have forgotten any please leave your comments below or on Twitter -@stevowalker.

The Top 11 SEO Plugins for WordPress

Alex-Postance — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 15:16:29 +0000

WordPress solves a lot of typical SEO issues straight out of the box; however, with a bit of tweaking and fine tuning, you can drastically improve the performance of your blog in the search results.

There are an overwhelming number of SEO-related WordPress plugins, from the “all in one” solution to a simple sitemap generator. For the purpose of this post, I’ve picked out some of my tried and tested favourites.

W3 Total Cache

With Google’s big push on the importance of page load times and the direct correlation this has on rankings, not to mention the positive impact improved site speed has on a user’s experience, it is now more important than ever to ensure your site is performing at its optimum level.

W3 Total Cache is (in my opinion) the best WordPress caching plugin by far. In their own words, the plugin “improves site performance and user experience via caching: browser, page, object, database, minify and content delivery network support.”

There are a lot of articles already written about installing and setting up the plugin so I won’t repeat that information here. However, what I will say is that at first, the sheer number of options and settings available can seem overwhelming, but it is worth your time to understand how to configure it correctly.

To demonstrate this, I have carried out a quick before and after test, measuring site performance using the Google Page Speed tool and the Yahoo YSlow tool.

Before

After

As you can see from the above charts taken form YSlow, by installing the W3 Total Cache Plugin, I have reduced the number of HTTP requests from 71 to 10, a fairly dramatic improvement for only five minutes of work. This improved the overall grade of the site from an F to a B in YSlow and from 32/100 to 72/100 in Goole’s Page Speed tool.

Zemanta

Although not really an SEO plugin in the traditional sense of the word, Zemanta is a great way of improving the quality of the content you produce on your blog, making it more link worthy and also promoting it to other Zemanta users (of which there are more than 75,000).

So what is Zemanata? Once installed, Zemanta analyses the content of your posts as you write them and suggests related content to link to or embed in your post. It also has an internal linking function that links relevant internal articles.

Here’s what Zemanta is reccommending to me as a write this post:

Zemanata also provides a featured service where they will index a large volume of your articles via a feed and provide recommendations to their network of users based on a CPM model; this is an excellent technique for ethical link building.

If you havent already, I strongly reccommend checking out this service.

Poll Daddy

Continuing with the theme of non-traditinal SEO plugins, next up is Poll Daddy. Conducting polls and surveys on your site is a great way to engage with your readers and if done well, can be a great way of attracting links. There are a lot of good poll plugins available for WordPress but the best I have come across is Poll Daddy. It’s easy to setup and install, and has a variety of different great looking styles. Check out the example below:

WP-Touch

With a continual increase of people browsing the web using mobile devices such as the iPhone and iPad, it is now more important than ever to ensure your blog is mobile and touch screen friendly. Again, perhaps not one that would usually be classed as an “SEO plugin”, but ensuring your site is accessible to mobile users should be an essential part of any SEO strategy.

And that’s exactly what WP-Touch does. Simply install and activate the plugin and anybody visiting your blog via a mobile device is served up a mobile app version instead of the standard theme. There is also an option for users to switch back to the original theme.

Responsive Layouts

An even better solution to ensuring your blog is mobile friendly is to use a responsive design. Responsive means that the layout will adapt to the screen that it is viewed on. For example, for a desktop monitor, iPad or mobile phone screen, the layout will intelligently adapt so that no content is lost and there is no need for annoying zooming and pinching.

You can’t use a plugin to achieve this effect but there are some great responsive themes available.

HeadSpace 2

Page titles, meta data and the Headspace 2 Plugin are some examples of the more traditional SEO issues. There are a variety of other meta data management plugins available, but in my experience, Headspace leads the way in terms of features, ease of use and reliability. One thing I would not recommend is leaving the management of your meta data and page titles up to the default settings of WordPress. The outcome of this is never satisfactory.

Full details of what HeadSpace 2 offers can be found here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/headspace2/

SEO No Duplicate

One SEO issue that WordPress does tend to throw up is that of duplicate content. Due to the category structure of most WordPress sites, posts with multiple categories tend to get duplicated across the category pages as well as on the homepage and in archives. Thankfully the good people at Omninoggin have created a plugin that makes use of the canonical tag to specify your preferred URL for each post. Its simple to use and does exactly what you need.

With Google’s crack down against duplicate content, it is probably a good time to sort out you own duplicate content issues.

Redirection

Sometimes it’s necessary to move a page or change a URL on your blog. Unfortunately, if the redirect from old to new is not handled correctly, you risk losing search rankings that that page may hold as well as losing any incoming “link juice” to the old page. Left to the native settings of WordPress, moving a page will likely result in the old URL 404ing and not 301ing, an SEO disaster. Redirection solves these issues by allowing you to easily implement 301 redirects as well as capturing a log of 404 errors which can then be corrected. Full details of the features of this plugin can be found here.

SEO Friendly Images

With the ever crowded universal search results of the Google SERPS, making your images accessible and understandable to search engines is key. Although WordPress does allow you to set “title” and “alt” tags to images, if you have an image heavy site, doing this manually for every image can be time consuming and monotonous. This is where SEO Friendly images comes in. The plugin automatically assigns a “title” and “alt” tag to every image you add, according to the options you set. The plug recognises two tags: %title (title of the post) and %name (filename). By using a combination of the tags, it is possible to create relevant and unique tags for all images.

Analyticator

If Google Analytics is your web analytics platform of choice then Analyticator is a great plugin to enable tracking of your WordPress sites. Although one of a large number of competing Google Analytics plugins, Analyticator stands head and shoulders above the rest due to its ease of use and great set of features, including a WordPress dashboard widget, site speed tracking, support of advanced tracking code and support of the latest async tracking method. Full details and downloads can be found here.

Sitemap Generator

Sitemaps are good for SEO as they help search engines crawl your site. This plugin does exactly what you would expect of a plugin named Sitemap Generator. Again there are loads of alternatives out there but this one made my list due to the fact that it is much more customizable than most. If you need an XML sitemap for your blog, you could do much worse. A full list of features can be found here.

That’s the end of my list. If you have a great SEO WordPress plugin that I didn’t include, please feel free to let me know about it in the comments.

White Hat Link Building: Using Unique Selling Points to Gain Natural Links

Jake Rainbow — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 13:17:42 +0000

This year has supposedly been Google’s year for a war on spam. In 2011, it has become ever more important for SEO firms to focus their efforts on attracting links as part of their campaigns, not automating or bulk buying them.

Attracting links isn’t always about big budget link bait ideas; it can be as simple as exploiting what’s right in front of you and close to hand.

Below is a list of unique selling points that can help create and attract links:

New statistics

Newspapers, magazines and general websites love new statistics, especially when it revolves around current news or controversial areas.

Surveys: if you’re not collecting information regularly, you probably should. Most B2B and B2C websites have a large user base to collect information from – utilise it! Another option is to use a poll company or host your own survey. Try to pre-empt what might interest another site.

Link Source Idea: chose the sites you want to go after and create a survey that might generate the kind of results their audience would be interested in.

Financial figures: a successful business will have growth. If you’re proud of it then flaunt it by making these figures accessible.

Link Source Idea: niche sector websites will see this as publishable news.

Industry statistics: charities, governments and other bodies regularly do their own studies. The results are a gold mine of information; use it to craft your own research.

Link Source Idea: to get the results seeded, all you need to do is run the pages containing the original stats through a backlink analyses tool – finding the sites that linked to them. If your stats are useful it is highly likely you’ll get a link from the same sites.

Breaking news

Every company has something that can be classed as breaking news and it isn’t something you need to go searching for. This is a unique selling point that is just sitting there waiting to be exploited on a regular basis. Breaking news could include:

New employees: well known and influential figure heads that have moved from one company to another, especially combined with a release of their job role and purpose at the company is valuable PR.

Link Source Idea: websites about recruitment and employment. Try looking at the leading companies in your sector and any recent PR pieces they have done around new employments. Run the links through OSE and contact the same sites.

New clients: if you’re a B2B company, then any recent coup in terms of a new client is always worth the same level of publication as a top level new employee. If you’re a B2C company then I’d suggest flaunting a notable customer – a celebrity or well-known figurehead.

Link Source Idea: the internet is full of SME business websites, from part-time bloggers, to full-blown magazines. Run a backlink analysis report on any recent competitor client acquisition PR pieces and look outside your industry for any recent big business news.

Awards: nearly every industry has awards and it’s worth getting it out there, whether you were just nominated or actually won; both are an achievement.

Link Source: They key to showing off awards is via niche industry sites.

Industry experts

Using people of influence within an industry to gain links is great for white hat link building. It is great for three reasons: websites get something useful, you can engage with your customers or user-base, and you get a link!

Interviews: whether you have someone known within your niche industry or not, you’re bound to have an employee, manager or director with enough sector knowledge to answer some thorough questions. A lot of websites would be grateful for free content, but only if it is interesting for their viewers.

Link Source Idea: pretty much anything related to your industry.

Quotes: instead of a full-blown interview, offering an opinion on something via a quote is another method.

Link Source Idea: search for articles related to an employee’s speciality using advanced search operators such as “allinurl:”. Contact the website owner explaining that your expert would like to give their opinion on the subject. If they don’t want to add the quote to the article, they might be interested in doing an interview instead.

Any points I’ve missed or suggestions, please leave me a comment below or on Twitter – @jakeyrainbow

(Photo: seo.com)

SEO for Beginners: Part Two

Anecia Jagpal — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 09:26:41 +0000

Welcome to SEO for Beginners: Part Two! In my last post, I wrote defined SEO and highlighted a few key factors which can help improve the overall architecture of a website. In case you missed it, you can read it here.

Intro

I’m sure you have heard the phrase ‘Content is King’. Well this is becoming more and more the important as the search landscape changes. Content can mean a number of things from product descriptions to blog posts and general page information, but how should you go about making sure your content is sufficient?

First, you have to look at your homepage, which generally follows the simple template (depending on your industry): header, navigation, sidebar, and images linking through to new key products or services, and finally the footer.

In the eyes of a search engine, apart from the section in the middle, this page is duplicated across the entire site and replaced with a list of products and images. There is also no textual content present to give the user more information about your brand and/or your products or to help search engines read your page.

Search engines will just be able to see images (hopefully with alt text in place!) and categories in the main navigation sidebar and generic footer.

Why is this a problem?

If search engines and users are unable to determine your product, brand or service, how are they able to determine whether you are what they are looking for? With regards to spiders crawling the site, textual content helps them to decide on how relevant your page is to specific search queries.

Historically this is the part where people just assumed that placing a paragraph stuffed with relevant keywords was the way forward; however, search engines are much more advanced and can spot this much easier now. It is therefore important to place content that will target the user rather than the search engines. You should also provide good quality information.

How can I improve my sites content?

As stated above, it is important to include homepage content – two to three paragraphs is usually sufficient. However, depending on the strength of your brand and your current brand presence, it is also important to ensure content is present on each category page to introduce the products. A good example of a site with good category content is ASOS.

Although there is no content on the homepage, the category content is sufficient as they are aiming to push visitors directly through to category pages and buy products rather than browsing through the homepage.

Another great example is Compare the Market as they have a very lengthy amount of textual content on their homepage, which is great especially in such a competitive market.

Improving your site’s content is not just down to on page information. There are a number of other ways to help:

1. Blog

Blogging is a great way to not only improve your sites content, but to engage with your customers, build a following and form community. It is a fantastic asset to any site and helps to build significant fresh and relevant information.

2. FAQ’s

Customers often have questions which happen to be asked again and again. FAQ’s can eliminate calls and questions and speed up the buying process as well as creating textual content in the product area. In addition to this, it is fantastic for customer service.

3. Product Reviews

It is great when people give your products a good review, so why not show it off and include product reviews? It is also a good way to inform potential customers about product information from real people whether it is good or bad. Last but not least…..it creates bespoke and unique on page content!

Duplicate content

With content also comes a warning!

Many sites have inserted content which has been duplicated internally across their own site which causes issues, so be careful to ensure you content is unique to every page. In addition to this, many products sold are also sold by a number of other companies online, which results in a huge number of websites placing the same ‘product description’ on their site. Stay away from manufacturers’ descriptions and create your own to ensure that your page is different from the others.

Follow this advice and you will have yourself a bespoke page which is search engine friendly, but more importantly, helpful to your users!

Quality Content

Remember: quality is key and good content attracts good links. Be careful not to write your content for search engines and aim solely for your users by creating a natural and helpful website which will in turn help your search engine visibility.

Any thoughts or questions? Please leave them below or tweet me -@NishaJagpal

Two New Tools to Improve Link Building Productivity

Alex-Postance — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 13:49:10 +0000

It would seem that link building tools are just like buses – you wait ages for one to come along and then two come at once. Case in point: this week I came across two new tools from Citation Labs called Outbound Scraper and Contact Finder.

The idea behind these tools (scraping a page and extracting outbound URLs then finding contact details for said URLs) is nothing new. However, what is different is that unlike previous tools that have promised these functionalities, these actually work but more importantly, they work well.

Let’s start from the beginning though. Why exactly would you need these tools?

As I’m sure anybody who has ever done any link building will know, lists are a link builders friend, and the Internet is full of lists. It’s a safe bet that whatever industry your working in, somebody somewhere will have compiled a list of the top blogs/sites in that industry, and more often than not, they will be annually updated.

The problem with lists, especially long ones, is that it can be very time consuming (not to mention boring) extracting URLs, visiting the sites and finding contact details and site metrics. This is where Outbound Scraper and Contact Finder come in.

I thought the best way to demonstrate how useful these two tools are was to show a real life example. We are currently working on promoting an infographic for a fashion client, a big part of which is conducting blogger outreach into the fashion blog community, so this was my starting point.

The first step is to find a list to scrape. In this instance I have two lists of fashion blogs that I am going to combine:
http://www.vouchercodes.co.uk/most-wanted/fashion-100-the-definitive-list-of-the-most-influential-bloggers-4008.html
and
http://www.customizedgirl.com/blog/?p=9

To use the Outbound Scraper you simply enter the URL of the page you want to scrape, give the job a title and hit the scrape outbound links button. Typically this process will only take a few seconds and will provide you with a CSV file of all that pages outbound link URLs via the “Outbounds” tab.

Click image to view large screenshot

I would recommend quickly opening up, checking and filtering the URL list to get rid of any that are unwanted. Usually you will find Twitter, Facebook and the like showing up on this list.

Now that you have all the scraped URLs, you can now enter them into the Contact Finder tool. Simply copy and paste all the URLs into the Contact Finder tool and start running the report. Again this will typically only take a few seconds to run and will provide you with a CSV of all the URLs with accompanying email addresses and/or contact page URLs. Now obviously, the success rate for finding the correct email address is not perfect. It is however very good. Also, when the tool is unable to find an email address, it will nearly always return a valid contact page/ form URL. In this example the Contact Finder managed to find contact details for 160 out of 252 URLs, and of the 13 reports I have run so far, the tool has had a 68% success rate at finding a contact detail.

So now that you have a long list of target URLs and the relevant contact information, whats next? Well usually I would want to prioritise my list of targets. To do this, I would require accompanying metrics for the sites in my list. This includes things such as number of backlinks and linking domains, Page Rank, DA, PA, and geographic location to name but a few. Collecting these manually for a list of more than a hundred sites would take a very long time. Fortunately this is where another great backlink tool comes i – Backlink Profiler from Link Research Tools.

Although this isn’t really what this tool is designed for, it is very useful. To automatically collect all these metrics, follow these steps:

Go back to your scraped list of URLs, copy and paste the list into a new spreadsheet, insert a cell at the top of the list and type “URL” into it. Save this as a .csv file. It should look something like this:
Now start a Backlink Profiler Report (BPR) in Link Research Tools (LRT).
It doesnt matter what you enter in the URL field as we’re not actually interested in finding any backlinks. You do however need to add a valid URL. For this example I’m going to enter www.epiphanysolutions.co.uk.
Click the choose file button and select the CSV we previously created with our list of URL’s. Ensure the “Analyze Uploaded File Only” option is checked. So now instead of retrieving the metrics for the URL we entered, it will only get them for the URLs listed in the CSV.
Next select which metrics you wish to use. This is entirely dependant on what you want to acheive. For this example I have chosen Basic SEO Stats, Google Metrics, Link Source Country, SEOmoz metrics and Majestic Metrics.
Hit “run report”

The tool will now go and collect all the metrics you requested for all the URL’s in your list.

Now all you need to do is export and combine this data with the contact details and you have a comprehensive list of target sites and contact details which can be prioritized however you like. For example, perhaps you only want to target sites hosted in the UK, or maybe you want to prioritise the most authoritative first based on Domain Authority. With all this data, this is easily achievable with some simple Excel filtering. This whole process, from scraping the URLs, to finding contact details and gathering all the site metrics took about ten minutes!

Any thoughts? @alexp622

HTML Parsing with Ruby and Nokogiri

Andy Webb — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 09:23:36 +0000

I’ve been working on a few health check/utility scripts and since I’ve been swaying towards Ruby as my language of choice recently (I’ve put Python on the shelf briefly), I decided to check out Nokogiri. Stupid name I know, but Nokogiri is a pretty powerful XML/HTML parsing library for Ruby. It was written in the C programming language (which means its quick) and supports XPath and jQuery CSS style selectors meaning no more complicated regular expressions! As with all the high level interpreted languages out there nowadays, Ruby/Nokogiri doesn’t fail to deliver excellent results within a few short lines of code.

Let’s take a scenario where we have (generously) been given a couple of links from a few of prolific sites in our industry. To make sure we stay in favour with these sites, we run a weekly check to make sure they’re still happy to link to us. Now weekly checks aren’t that much of an effort to carry out manually but its best to automate this check for a number of reasons:

1.) Who wants to be setting reminders and reading through web pages manually?

2.) If it’s not in the usual place for whatever reason, we’ve got to trawl source code to see where they moved it to.

3.) As small a point as this is, if we needed to check more frequently, we don’t really want to be triggering their analytics tracking, just in case they’re funny about robots giving a false impression of traffic. So step in Ruby and Nokogiri.

We want to:

1.) Visit the pages in question.
2.) Parse the HTML.
3.) Pull out all the links.
4.) Find ours and read the anchor text.
5.) Make sure it’s there and they haven’t no-followed it!
6.) Report back the status of the links.

Step in Ruby/Nokigiri:

require 'rubygems'
require 'open-uri'
require 'nokogiri'

our_url = "http://www.epiphanysolutions.co.uk"
urls = ["http://www.27bslash6.com","http://www.ford.com","http://www.seomoz.org/blog/improving-reporting-efficiency-and-relevance","http://csshook.com"]
today = Time.now.localtime.strftime("%d-%m-%Y")

begin
	# cycle through the URLs in the list
	urls.each do |url|
		# read the page and parse it into Nokogiri
		page = Nokogiri::HTML(open(url))
		# select any anchors that link to our domain. (in 1 line! Good old XPath.)
		links_to_us = page.xpath("//a[substring(@href, 1, #{our_url.size}) = '#{our_url}']")
		if (links_to_us.size > 0) then
			links_to_us.each do |anchor|
				# tell the user about the link we found
				printf "On %s we found a link to %s from %s with anchor text \"%s\"", today, anchor.attr('href'), url, anchor.text()
				# and tell them whether or not its nofollowed..
				puts anchor.attr('rel') == "nofollow" ? " but it's no followed!" : ". All good on that link."
			end
		else
			printf "On %s we couldn't find a link on %s to %s\n", today, url, our_url
		end
	end
rescue Exception => e
	# ... if we can't open or parse a page for whatever reason, tell us why
	puts e.message
end

And what do we get?

On 30-08-2011 we found a link to http://www.epiphanysolutions.co.uk/ from http://www.27bslash6.com with anchor text "SEO - Epiphany Solutions". All good on that link.

On 30-08-2011 we couldn't find a link on http://www.ford.com to http://www.epiphanysolutions.co.uk

On 30-08-2011 we found a link to http://www.epiphanysolutions.co.uk from http://www.seomoz.org/blog/improving-reporting-efficiency-and-relevance with anchor text "Epiphany Solutions" but it's no followed!

On 30-08-2011 we found a link to http://www.epiphanysolutions.co.uk/ from http://csshook.com with anchor text "SEO". All good on that link.

I’m sure you can see the potential of this tool if you start threading its functionality into databases, logs and alert mailing systems, and the XPath AND jQuery style selectors give it an extra layer of accessibility and flexibility. Say what you want about these slightly more obscure open source programming languages, but they get the job done quickly and reliably! They have also come up trumps many a time with me as the right tool for the job. They come with an array of libraries to do most day to day tasks and with them being an open source, people even compete with each other building libraries that do the same job – meaning even more simplicity and power!

What are your thoughts?

Beautiful People’s Ugly Linkbait

Andy-Heaps — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 08:31:45 +0000

As I headed into work this morning, I heard a story on BBC News about the online dating site BeautifulPeople.com. Apparently they have been hit by a virus which allowed ‘tens of thousands of ugly people’ to access the site. In light of the recent Sony Playstation hacks, this story, to most people, including the mainstream media, is just another cyber-security story.

Of course, anyone involved in search should see right through this. Beautiful People is well known for its elaborate PR / hoax style linkbait, probably the most famous of which was BeautifulPeople.com axes holiday weight gain members. With coverage – and more importantly links – from high quality sources such as the BBC (including priceless quotes such as “Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model”) – and many other reputable news sources, this was undoubtedly a massive success! So much so that Dixon of Majestic SEO regularly references this in his conference presentations!

And with this latest PR stunt they have done it again! At the time of writing, bearing in mind there will likely be a lot of coverage to follow, they have 106 significant news publications covering the story, including the BBC, The Telegraph, The Guardian and Fox News.

Hats off to the PR team at BeautifulPeople – another successful piece of controversy linkbait, playing on the recent cyber-hacks that have been so well documented by the nation’s news publications. It’s too soon to analyse just how successful a link acquisition exercise it has been, but from the sites I’ve found linking back to BeautifulPeople because of the story so far, I think it’s safe to say they’ll be getting a nice natural search boost.

I genuinely hope, for the sake of our nations journalistic pride that none of the reports *actually* think this is real… I can’t help but wonder though…

I’ll leave you with a few of the best quotes provided to the nation’s press by Beautiful People:

”We got suspicious when tens of thousands of new members were accepted over a six-week period, many of whom were no oil painting”

‘We responded immediately, repairing the damage from the Shrek virus”

”We have sincere regret for the unfortunate people who were wrongly admitted to the site and who believed, albeit for a short while, that they were beautiful.”

”It must be a bitter pill to swallow, but better to have had a slice of heaven then never to have tasted it at all.”

Brilliant

How Compare the Market Could Use Their TV Campaign to Improve Rankings

Richard Lawrence — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 09:10:31 +0000

A brilliant integrated marketing campaign by Compare the Market, the ‘Compare the Meerkat’ adverts, in which Aleksandr Orlov and his family struggle against mistaken identity, has muscled their way into everyday parlance (“simples!”) and even toy stores/seaside arcades.

The most fascinating aspect has been its integration with the online marketing of Compare the Market, due to the creation and promotion of the website that was the seed of the TV campaign concept: Comparethemeerkat.com.

This blog attempts to find out what impact this TV ad campaign has had on related searches, plus how successfully it has been used to support the SEO strategy of Comparethemarket.com.

Background

Compare the Market launched a series of TV adverts back in January 2009. These adverts were based around a TV character complaining about visitors confusing his website ‘Comparethemeerkat.com’ with ‘Comparethemarket.com.’ To coincide with the launch of this TV ad campaign, the ‘Comparethemeerkat.com’ website was launched, to capture traffic generated by the TV advert.

More recently, TV adverts have been based on further aspects of the character’s story, including his village and other members of his family. A further website ‘Meerkovo.com’ has been launched as a consequence.

Brand search trends vs. important TV dates

The following graph illustrates the change in search volume over time for phrases associated with the TV ad:

As you can see (and probably expected), the search trend for each phrase is very sensitive to the dates on which the TV advertising campaigns have been active.

It is surprising to note the extent of the impact that the TV advertising campaign has had on the number of searches including the word ‘meerkat’ – this is a breed of animal that existed long before a TV advertising campaign! In the week following the start of the TV ad campaign, the relative number of searches including the word ‘meerkat’ increased by a massive 817%.

At its peak in March 2009, the relative number of searches containing the word ‘meerkat’ was 1733% higher than the week previous to the beginning of the TV ad campaign. Wow!

However, another point to note is that search volume for ‘meerkat’ has generally been in decline since the launch of the first TV ad – a point that I’m sure has not gone unmissed by TV executives.

Despite this, searches related to the words ‘compare the market’ have remained more stable over the period of TV advertising activity. The contrast perhaps indicates that the TV advertising campaign has driven viewers to find out what the ‘Meerkat’ concept was all about, but once they have done this, the TV advertising campaign keeps refreshing the central brand in their mind. Researching for the ‘Meerkat’ website at a later date seems to be unlikely.

This is shown more abruptly by the search volume for ‘Meerkovo.’ During the first month of this TV advert, there was a spike in searches for the term but a later peak (seemingly at the start of the latest instalment of the campaign) is much smaller.

Linking domain acquisition vs. important TV dates

The important question from an SEO point of view: has the online interest generated from the TV campaign been converted into high rankings?

The best place to start in answering this question is to look at the link acquisition for the three main domains of focus in the TV adverts:

It is important to note that the volume of the graph sections combined is the total volume of domains linking to the three websites combined.

As shown in the key, the bottom blue section of the graph is the accumulation of links attracted to the central Compare the Market domain. After an initial boost during the first Meerkat TV campaign in January 2009, the velocity of the acquisition of websites linking to the main website was relatively steady – increasing by 40% less to the beginning of 2011 when compared to the increase over the two years previous to the Meerkat TV ad campaign.

The red section above this shows the accumulation of linking domains to Comparethemeerkat.com. As you can see, starting from 0 in January 2009, the number of linking domains now exceeds the main Comparethemarket.com domain. This is despite a lower relative number of searches directly related to the site – suggesting that the ‘link rate’ (visitors converting to linking domains) is much higher.

The small green section at the top of the graph represents ‘Meerkovo.com,’ launched to coincide with the TV advertising campaigns beginning in January 2011. Though far less established, it has also started to gain linking domains, with the majority of these acquired during the peak in searches during January.

Current relationship between the central domain and TV campaign domains

But how has Compare the Market harnessed the additional linking domains to Comparethemeerkat.com and Meekovo.com to achieve higher rankings for Comparethemarket.com – and can this be improved?

To pass the power obtained from the domains linking to comparethemeerkat.com (and other domains related to the TV campaigns) to comparethemarket.com, there must be links between them.

This is currently the case from the homepage of Comparethemeerkat.com:

As you can see there are links to each of the three domains – Comparethemarket.com, Comparethemeerkat.com and Meerkovo.com.

The only major thing that I would change about this page in order to help the rankings of Comparethemarket.com would be to change the order of the links, due to the Reasonable Surfer model. Basically, this is a way of determining the importance of links on a page by their positioning. On the Comparethemeerkat.com homepage, the link through to the rest of the Comparethemeerkat.com website is highest in the code so passes the most power.

To ensure as much power is passed to the Comparethemarket.com domain as possible from a very power page in order to increase the rankings of their target key phrases, this link should be the highest.

Another point to note is that the rest of Comparethemeerkat.com website is situated on a subdomain of Comparethemarket.com: Meerkat.Comparethemarket.com.

This is not an ideal solution from an SEO point of view. The best location for these pages would be on a subfolder of Comparethemarket.com – something like Comparethemarket.com/Meerkat.

This is because a subdomain is still essentially a separate website from the top level domain – in this case Comparethemarket.com. This means any links into it do not contribute to the overall strength of Comparethemarket.com. If the pages were to be located on a subfolder (/Meerkat), the links they gain would contribute to the overall strength of the Comparethemarket.com domain.

In addition, the links between Meerkat.Comparethemarket.com and Comparethemarket.com do not live up to their full potential in terms of contributing to increased rankings of its target key phrases.

Part of the reason is again their positioning on the page, low down below the fold:

The intrinsic and transparent relationship between Comparethemeerkat.com and Comparethemarket.com should mean that links between the two can be prominent without adversely affecting the usability of the site, or putting visitors off.

Power could also be passed directly to the sections of Comparethemarket.com to ensure their rankings are more directly affected.

Some of these things have already been implemented on the Meerkovo subdomain (Meerkovo.com links through to Meerkovo.Comparethemeerkat.com from similar holding page to Comparethemeerkat.com). For example, the link to Comparethemarket.com is high on the page. The relative strength of Comparethemeerkat.com and the associated subdomain make it imperative that you implement them here too.

Conclusions

The ‘Compare the Meerkat’ TV advertising campaign has generated an enormous amount of interest in both the ‘Compare the Market’ brand and the concepts contained within.

Though related searches are beginning to decline, the Meerkat TV advertising campaign is still proving to be very successful for obtaining linking domains – far more successful than the central Comparethemarket.com domain.

However, Compare the Market is not quite harnessing these linking domains to their full potential, with regards to achieving top rankings for relevant phrases to Comparethemarket.com. To ensure that the successful campaign is performing to its full SEO potential, I would recommend the following actions:

Explore the possibility of moving the Meerkat.Comparethemarket.com subdomain to a sub-folder of Comparethemarket.com to improve its overall power.
Ensure that links between the ‘Compare the Meerkat’ website (wherever its location) and Comparethemarket.com are further up the page to ensure more link power passes.
Link directly to more sections of the Comparethemarket.com site. This will transfer link power directly to these sections of the site, rather than flowing via the homepage and being diluted amongst sections that don’t necessarily need the help.

The result should be higher rankings for key phrases that contribute toward the business goals of Comparethemarket.com.

Let me know your thoughts – do you have any similar examples of offline campaigns that could lead to improved rankings?

World Stores – Highlighting Google’s Flawed Ranking Algorithm

Steve Baker — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 15:43:51 +0000

I read an interesting article on the BBC website yesterday: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2011/03/world_stores.html

It appears that an innovative entrepreneur in Twickenham has spotted that all you need to do in order to achieve a high ranking in Google is to buy a domain with the target keyword in it.

OK, it’s a little more complicated than that. For those not in the know, here’s how it works…

Google wants to display relevant websites, and two of the key things that they look at are the number of links to a website (which shows how ‘important’ the site is), and what the anchor text says (the text on the link to the website, which tells Google what the page is talking about).

But clearly this system can be gamed – if you want to rank for a keyword, all you have to do is to buy huge numbers of links, and use the same anchor text. Google has all kinds of checks in place to make sure that this doesn’t work – if all of your links have the same anchor text, Google will ignore them and possibly penalise you.

So how does this relate to World Stores? Well, there’s an exception that bypasses all of Google’s monitoring – they can hardly penalise a website for having the name of the website in the anchor text, can they? If a website were to link to Amazon, and the text said ‘Amazon,’ it would hardly be a sign of dodgy activity.

So if you have a website called ‘Wooden Beds World,’ you can put ‘wooden beds world’ in your anchor text as often as you like, and Google won’t penalise you. And as a result, you get great rankings for wooden beds, and similar keywords.

This probably isn’t news to anybody that uses Google, let alone anyone in the industry – search for almost anything nowadays, and it seems that half of the results are obscure websites that appear to rank for no other reason than they have the keyword in their domain name.

Clearly, this doesn’t offer a great user experience – search for Wooden Beds, and two of the top three websites belong to World Stores. You’d hardly call the user experience different:

The two websites have very similar ranges, the same product images, prices, and the same delivery options. They are even using the same fonts and buttons!

The same is true on Bing, where they rank first and second, and to a lesser extent on Yahoo, where they rank fifth and sixth.

“So why don’t Google do something about it?” Well to be honest, it’s not all that simple. After all, it’s commonplace to put the name of a website in the anchor text – as I said earlier, it’s hardly an indication that the website is up to something naughty. However, as this seems to be becoming more and more of an issue, I think it’s just a matter of time before Google clamp down on this. When Matt Cutts covered this topic recently (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAWFv43qubI), he indicated that Google were going to take action about the problem soon.

If I were a company like World Stores, I’d be making a point of keeping as quiet as possible, rather than doing interviews with the BBC, and making statements about how they “reverse-engineered the retail process.” They are virtually spitting in Google’s all-seeing eye, and sticking their tongue out!

An Innovative Approach to Social Media Promotion and Link Building

Matthew Buckley — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 13:29:38 +0000

I recently came across a pretty cool marketing campaign that combined link building and social media promotion. Before I begin, I must make clear that this isn’t a guide that would be suitable for every business. It would only work for a business that either sold inexpensive products or that had some sort of semi-valuable freebies to give away. People have got to want your freebies for this to work, so don’t just give away any old rubbish.

So the business in question sold security tags. The sort of tags that you can stick on your luggage and identify which one is yours. The tags contained a unique code and a phone number that would enable the finder to call up and report the bag had been found. The company would then contact you personally and tell you where your bag had been found. It’s a really simple idea, but it could also be pretty useful.

If you don’t fancy leaving your name and address on a piece of baggage for security reasons, this service is effectively a go-between that still allows you to locate lost items.

So this company announced that anybody who tweeted or blogged about their product would receive either a free set of baggage stickers or a metal baggage tag, and a year’s subscription to their luggage reclaim service.

Sending a tweet or doing a quick blog post takes a minimal amount of effort, so these freebie hunters are probably more than happy to fulfil the requirements.

This plan works in two ways:

It encourages rapid uptake of the service, and gets users into the system while spreading the word about the company. Both the stickers and the tags advertise the company so in airports and train terminals, the brand will be in front of a lot of people. The cost of the service would be very low to start with as this sort of business could be run by one or two people on a phone.
Secondly (and most importantly) it gets all those people to tweet/blog about your product.

Even if they don’t have powerful Twitter accounts, their tweets will still be counted as a vote of confidence for your website. Google will love you for this as websites have been proven to rank on tweets alone. Any links the company might receive from a blog post will count and help to increase your rankings naturally.

The three stages:

1) Find a suitable cheap gift to give away- (free subscription, mobile phone case, etc..).

2) Get people to promote your promo on their own blogs and Twitter in exchange for the gift.

3) Send out gifts and reap the rewards of your natural link building work.

Changes to the CAP Code- Google Finds an Ally in the War on Paid Links

Alex-Postance — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 13:51:13 +0000

It was announced back in September that the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) would be extending the reach of its influence as of the 1st March 2011, by introducing changes to its industry rule book, the CAP Code, to cover marketing on websites.

The CAP Code already applies to ads in newspapers, catalogues, posters and other media. Until now though, its digital remit covered only ads in emails and text messages and ads in paid-for space, such as banner and pop-up ads or keyword advertising on search engines.

Full details of the changes to the CAP code can be found here.

Interestingly, this expansion of the ASA’s powers is not only being fully supported by Google but also partly funded by them. Google’s UK managing director, Matt Brittin, has been quoted as saying:

If people have a complaint about a claim made on a website it’s important that it is properly investigated. We support the ASA’s aims of providing consumer protection and are happy to help get this up and running for the benefit of UK consumers and businesses.

So, why would Google be so keen to support this action? I’m sure that they do indeed want to see complaints properly investigated and improved consumer protection but, perhaps more telling, is the fact that this extension to their remit now brings paid text links under the scrutiny of the ASA. Specifically the fact that, in order to be in-line with the CAP guidelines, all paid text links would have to be clearly disclosed as being paid for.

Google have been involved in a long running battle to combat the technique of using paid text links for the purpose of influencing search engine rankings and to date have been mostly unsuccessful, with web sites in competitive sectors across the internet still managing to achieve high rankings through the use of paid links, despite it being in breach of Google’s guidelines. The problem is that deciding whether a link is paid for or natural has proved difficult for Google. So, the introduction of further legislation to reinforce their own guideline of disclosing paid links will certainly gain their support.

But how will the ASA, an organisation with relatively little experience in the online world, be able to succeed where internet giant Google have failed? Well, the initial online reaction to these announcements was that they wouldn’t, that this would be another unenforceable set of rules which would most likely be ignored by webmasters and advertisers alike, a view which I originally shared.

However, last week the ASA announced that it is launching a cross media ad campaign to raise awareness of the fact that its remit is being extended to cover websites, which will include utilising radio, press, outdoor and online media. To me this is a very shrewd move. By targeting a much wider audience than Google traditionally have with their webmaster guidelines, the ASA are making it much more likely that people will firstly see and be aware of these changes and thus more likely to adhere to them or report breaches of them. Realistically, outside of the Search Marketing/ Web-Dev industries how many people even know the Google webmaster guidelines exist, let alone have read and understood them?

In my opinion, webmasters are much more likely to avoid selling text links on their sites if they feel they are potentially breaking the law and not just Google’s guidelines, just as advertising/marketing agencies are less likely to pursue techniques that would in essence leave them liable to be prosecuted such as requesting that paid links are not disclosed.

As I am no expert on the finer points of internet law, I put these questions to someone with the necessary legal expertise. As well as hearing the legal perspective, I was interested to hear the point of view of somebody outside of the SEO industry, a view that is probably more similar to that to the people over at the ASA than those of people working within search marketing.

Emma Atkins, Commercial Litigation & Intellectual Property lawyer at Denison Till Solicitors, comments:

So, what exactly are the legal implications of the new codes and what should we be doing to prepare for the 1st March 2011?

The wording of the extension is wide and is intended to capture any communication that is designed to sell something. The new Code will not only cover advertisements but anything that appears to be in a similar form to an advert or makes easily accessible an ‘invitation to purchase’. An ‘invitation to purchase’ is any ‘commercial communication which indicates characteristics of a product and the price, thereby enabling the consumer to make a purchase.

In practice, this means that the new CAP Code will cover web pages, whether advertising and/or selling your own products and services or links to or from somebody else’s online service; importantly, having regard to recent trends, this includes advertiser-controlled pages on social networking sites. If you are a commercial entity with a web presence, unless your communication fit into one of the few available exceptions, it is safe to assume that the new Code applies to you.

So how concerned should you be?

In reality, as has always been the case, provided the communications you make are legal, decent, honest, and truthful and in the ‘spirit of the code’ you are unlikely to be at risk. Moreover, the ASA is a reactive enforcer rarely seeking out problems and preferring to wait until a complaint is made; most instances of minor non-compliance will likely go unnoticed.

Nevertheless, it has indicated that it will be making ‘spot checks’, monitoring problem sites and seeking the cooperation of search engines in punishing breaches of the CAP Code. Where a breach is found to have taken place the ASA will in most cases make a simple request for withdrawal of the communication. The ASA also has powers to:

> name and shame repeat offenders on the ASA website
> place warning advertisements alongside the search results listings of products and brands of non-compliant businesses
> force the removal of paid for links/advertisements that link directly to the page hosting the non compliant marketing communications
> refer matters to the Office of Fair Trading for action under the Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 or the Business Protection from Misleading Marketing Regulations 2008

This is said to be the most comprehensive and robust approach to the regulation of advertising online anywhere in the world but the reputation of the internet as being notoriously difficult to police will not be greatly affected in my view.

Nevertheless, anyone dealing with marketing communications, such as website owners and agents should amend their regulatory compliance procedures to account for the new rules. They should consider:

> introducing or amending procedures to ensure regular checking of their web presence
> training any employees contributing content on company’s website, facebook, blogs, twitter
> reviewing standard agreements to make sure references to relevant codes of practice cover the new CAP Code and other relevant ASA guidance
> ensuring agreements with advertisers/agents require compliance with all laws, codes and regulations in all territories at which the communication is targeted

The ASA has set up CAP Services, which provides free guidance and training on how to comply with the CAP Code and this can be accessed through their website. Alternatively, Denison Till advise on a full range of commercial matters covering terms of business with customers and suppliers and routes to market as well as more specialist areas such as software development, intellectual property assignment/licensing and all aspects of e-commerce.”

So in conclusion, I do not think for one second that these new regulations are going to bring about the demise of paid link building, in fact far from it. However to simply dismiss these new regulations would be naïve. The ASA seem to be taking a pro-active approach to creating awareness around this subject, at the very least they have put in place a new barrier for people who do wish to use undisclosed paid links, and this will definitely bring a smile to the faces of people over at Google.

To me this reinforces the fact that websites and agencies implementing one dimensional paid link building campaigns are running a very real risk of finding themselves on the wrong side of not only Google, but now the ASA, OFT and perhaps even the law. Now more than ever, successful link building should compromise a variety of techniques and strategies with the main focus on creating good content that offers value to readers and partners, and which is marketed in an ethical manner.

How Reasonable Surfing Affects Link Building

Alex-Postance — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 10:21:32 +0000

The Demise of the 301 Redirect?

Alex-Postance — Thu, 27 May 2010 08:12:13 +0000

Traditionally, the 301 redirect has been the SEO’ers favoured technique when redirecting an old URL to a new one due to its perceived ability to pass on a level of the old URL’s link juice.

However, at the recent SMX London conference, Rob Kerry from Ayima, during his talk on ranking factors, , stated that from research he has carried out he could conclude that 301 redirects no longer pass any link juice in the eyes of Google, a theory that was neither confirmed nor objected to by fellow panellist, SEOMoz’s Rand Fishkin.

So how are you supposed to tell search engines you’ve moved your page and pass on some of that precious link juice going into the old page?

Well it may just be a coincidence but the demise of the 301 redirects ability to pass on power seems to have coincided with Google’s roll out of the cross domain rel=”canonical” tag, a possible hint by Google that this is their preferred method for you to tell them that you have moved your page. Whether the rel=canonical will pass on any link juice…… well currently your guess is as good as mine but this is something we will be monitoring very closely.

Is rel=”canonical” the replacement for 301 redirect?

To put it simply- No. Even if the rel=”canonical” tag does solve Google’s problem of deciding whether to index your old URL or your new one, it still leaves you with a huge usability issue in that it does not actually take your users to the correct new page .

Okay so in Google’s perfect world, where every user started their journey by searching in Google the rel=”canonical” tag would probably do the trick, but in the real world some people do actually use alternative search engines (hard to believe I know!) which may not support the rel=”canonical” tag, and what about traffic coming from bookmarked versions of the old URL or referrals from sites linking to the old URL, not to mention the fact that Google themselves state that the canonical tag is a “suggestion” and may not always be obeyed. The outcome is that some visitors are going to end up stuck on a 404 page (albeit a 404 page that is no longer indexed by Google). So from a usability point of view (isn’t that what Matt Cutts is always telling us is important) perhaps sticking with the 301 redirect is the better way to go about it and is in fact what Google are still recommending over at Webmaster Central.

But What About My Links?

So what about all those links pointing to the old URL? Well if 301 redirects and rel=”canonical” tags aren’t going to pass on any of that precious link juice then there is only really one other option, you guessed it – manually re-pointing all those links to the new URL. If you only have a few links then this shouldn’t be too much of an arduous task. If you have thousands or even tens of thousands of links then I would suggest highlighting the most powerful and relevant ones, a task made possible through the use of back-link analysis tools such as Open Site Explorer or Majestic SEO, and prioritising from there. There is no way round the fact that this is going to be a time consuming and somewhat tedious task but the benefits of keeping those links is definitely going to make it worth your while.

So to conclude, whether 301’s do or do not pass on any link juice, from a usability point of view they are definitely still the way to go. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of the canonical tag for solving duplicate content issues but in this instance I’ll be sticking to 301’s. And if you’re worried about losing the links pointing at the old URL then manually contacting site owners and requesting them to be re-pointed to the new URL is the only way to go.

Link Builders Take Note – Google Is Smarter Than You Think!

Andy-Heaps — Wed, 12 May 2010 12:14:30 +0000

While Google have literally thousands of patents granted and pending, one that was granted yesterday will be of particular interest to the SEO industry. Described in detail by Bill Slawaski over at SEO By The Sea (even more detail is available via the actual patent), it looks at what factors can impact the ‘juice’ passed by any given link. Links are a high priority for Google and SEO’ers alike, and the granting of this patent has perhaps given us a rare insight into some of the off-site algorithmic factors that come into play in ranking web pages.

I highly recommend you read Bill’s full post for a more detailed list of the kind of factors considered in the patent – some are obvious, some not so obvious. The stand-outs for me – those that every link builder in the land should be taking note of – are:

Prominence of a link – We already know Google are able to assign different weight to links based on page segmentation / block level analysis (i.e. contextual ‘body’ links being more valuable than footer / sidebar type links) but I think few will have considered factors such as font size and colour versus the rest of the page’s content and the aspect ratio of images used as links. The important takeaway here, which is in line with the fundamentals of PageRank, is that links which are more likely to be clicked will pass more PageRank.

The website associated with the linked-to page – This is very subtle but very important and is likely to factor in multiple elements. I envisage these being at least:
- Is the target page in line with the overall theme of the website
- How obvious is that theme – i.e. is the website as a whole optimised well
- How well integrated into the website is the target page
- The authority of a website could impact the weight passed by links to it

The last point may be a bit dubious and would potentially lead to the ‘rich getting richer’ but I can certainly see it being applicable where websites have some sort of Google ‘black mark’ against them. It’s also fairly common to see large, authoritative websites needing minimal external links to a deep page for that page to rank – because the overall site authority amplifies link power.

User interaction with a link – While this is related to the prominence of a link it’s interesting to see the frequency that a link is clicked (relative to other links on the page) and factors such as ‘interests of the users’ are stated. The latter for me implies that personalised search comes into play – i.e. how relevant is a link to recent searches that have been performed. For me this says links need to be very tightly targeted (i.e. topically relevant) and must also entice a click – ‘sell themselves’ – to ensure as high a quantity of clicks as possible.

Smart link builders will inherently be doing much of this anyway – high quality links should be topically relevant and should be placed with direct traffic as well as rankings in mind – and so should be prominent. What we don’t know is how many of these factors are already in play. With the original patent filed in 2004 it’s safe to say Google has had the technology to do this for a while and have probably been factoring in at least some of the listed features for years. It’s also safe to say that there are probably many more factors being taken into consideration, or at least tested, since this patent was filed. Regardless, it’ll be interesting to see how (if at all) link building strategies alter now this information has been brought to the attention of the community!

Yahoo Kills a Web Classic and Potentially Wastes Millions of Dollars

David Wilding — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:10:21 +0000

After confusing the world with their seemingly meaningless latest ad campaign, Yahoo made another huge blunder this week after shutting down the long running Geocities website without paying any attention to some SEO basics, and potentially wasting millions of dollars in the process.

Geocities had been around since around 1995 and offered its users a free place to host their website. At its height, Geocities was the MySpace/Blogger.com/Wordpress.com of its day, leading to Yahoo purchasing the site for $3.57 billion in stock (yes that’s $3.75 billion!) back in January 1999.

Due to the age of the hosted websites themselves, and the large amount of (aged) links pointing at those sites, Geocities contained some of the most powerful webpage’s on the web in terms of SEO.

Before the big switch off Google UK returned 30 million results for the Geocities domain.
Many of these hosted sites ranked for many high traffic and competitive terms in Google.

Can you imagine how many links were pointed at those 30 million pages? Can you imagine the amount of traffic Geocities attracted on a daily basis? Personally, I don’t like to think about it…

I’m not saying that Yahoo didn’t need to do something with Geocities, they did, it hadn’t turned a profit for a while (if ever), and it had lost its meaning in a Web 2.0 world. But if there was ever a case of throwing the baby out with the bath water, then this was it.

If you were to visit a Geocities hosted webpage today you would be greeted with a bland 404 page, as the original content has been removed. This is pretty bad from a user perspective but what really upsets me is all the link equity that that page held (and 30 million+ just like it) has been lost. Gone, destroyed, wasted. Forever.

As every good SEO professional knows if you have a page that ranks for a particular keyword, or even if you remove (or even delete) a webpage you should 301 redirect the old URL (address) into a new location to carry across the age and incoming link equity that page holds.

Now, I’ve never 301 redirected 30 million pages and transferred the link equity those 30 million pages held into one new location, but boy I would like to try!

Yahoo could have also been more intelligent about this and redirected various URLs into appropriate places in their own portfolio. I can also think of various ways in which Yahoo could have used the power of the Geocities domain to embarrass Google significantly in terms of manipulating rankings. Can you imagine the uproar Yahoo could have caused if they’d starting selling links on Geocities?

If you’re thinking of closing down a section of your website, or even removing a few old pages, please don’t do what Yahoo did and waste the power of those old URLs, consult an SEO professional and make sure you keep your rankings and your link equity!