My motives were both business and personal. When I hear people talking abut link building software, they almost always focus on the time such software saves. What they don’t talk about as much is the impact (or lack of) it has on either click traffic or search rank.  Over the years I have probably tested and used over 100 different programs that in one way or another assisted with some aspect of the link building process. Many are long gone. Some are wonderful and incredibly powerful, others should be taken off the market. 

The reason so many link building tools and programs exist is because of the gold rush mentality many link builders have. Anyone can create some type of linking related software, slap it on the web, and sell it.  My hunch is that 95% of all linking related software programs, whether client based or in the cloud, are useless.  In fact, it was becasue they were all so useless that I ended up creating my own.

“My hunch is 95% of all linking related software programs, whether client based or in the cloud, are useless”

Link Building Software – What to Avoid
First, if the software gives you an option to send email automatically to a supposed link target site, run for your life.  This part of the link building process can never be automated and implemented correctly.  This is not to say all automation during the link building process is bad, but rather that there are certain aspects of the process that should never be automated, and email is at the top of that list.

Second, any software that uses Google’s Pagerank as a key part of their process is doomed.  I could write 500 pages about why, so you’ll have to trust me here.  Letting Pagerank dictate your linking strategy is foolish, and any software that gives you any other impression is trying to scare you.  Pagerank is a very useful metric, in certain ways and in certain situations, but I would never pursue a link target because of it’s Pagerank, and I’ve sought links from hundreds of sites that had none.

Third, if the software queries a search engine that no linger exists, you might be suspicious.  I’m not kidding. At least two programs that help identify link targets include search engines that no longer exist.

Fourth, just because some link building software provides a module for creating and managing a links directory does not mean you should implement one, or use that software to manage it.  If you want to hear a few horror stories about why, contact me privately. 

Link Building Software – What to Seek
This one is so obvious most people overlook it.  What company created the software? Do they have a good reputation? Do they have a successful history you can research.  Do they provide names of people who work at the company? Are they trying to be a one trick pony and claim expertise in link building when they have never actually done any link building themselves?  And just because a tool ranks well for the term link building software does not mean that software will be effective.  I remember several link building software programs that stamped a sitewide link on every page of the auto-generated directory pages they created.  Once upon a time sitewides were thought by some to be clever.  Now, siteswides are largely devalued.

I’ll close with a more philosophical question.  Most people agree that publicity, links, and awareness within the right vertical are the key to success for any web site.  Links play a role in nearly every type of online marketing activity, from a plain vanilla links page to a Twitter tweet.  At the same time, at the end of these billions of links is a mouse poised to click, and a person is holding it. A Person.  The web is about people and passion and interests and curiosity and having a voice if you want one.  People.

Do you really want to put the most important part of your online strategy in the hands of something created by someone you don’t know, and who doesn’t know your business?

Link Building Software – Who Does It Right
If I you are in charge of link building, research and pick from these tools. Consider using more than one.

Link Insight (disclaimer – I am co-creator)
Buzzstream
Ontolo
Open Site Explorer/Linkscape
Majestic
SEO Book
Raven

Link well!

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We often forget that no every speaks, or reads, English. The US, Canada, Australia, UK, Ireland and Guyana are the only areas that speak English as the main language. There is a handful of other countries that speak English, but not as their primary language. Then there is everyone else.¹ There are billions of people who don’t read English, yet few blogs offer translation options on their site.

To easily translate your blog from one language to anther you can add a Google Translate menu to your site and let Google handle the translations on the fly. They may not be perfect, but they are better than having none.

I like the Google Translate option as it’s easy to install and doesn’t cause any duplicate content issues. Plus it will work on any blog or website.

Another option is the Global Translator WordPress plugin. This one adds flags into your sidebar and creates sub-directories for all the translated content. All these sub-directories are then indexable creating a lot of additional pages on your site. They are duplicate content, yet in different languages, so I guess it’s up to the search engines to figure out how to handle that.

No matter how you do it, offering up your content in different languages opens up your site to a larger audience.

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The only way to avoid being criticized is to never have been alive.

As history books have shown, even the dead can’t escape criticism. So, those of us who are alive must simply learn to deal with it; even as we often try to avoid it.

As much as we hate it, criticism isn’t all bad. Criticism, regardless of how it was intended, can help us adjust and adapt to situations. It can provide useful insight, justified or not, into our lives and give us the opportunity to become a better person.

Rarely do we enjoy hearing it, but criticism is a needed component for growth as a person.

There is an old Arab proverb that says, “if one person calls you a donkey, forget it. But if five people call you a donkey, buy a saddle.”

Or, take a lesson, and perhaps try a different approach.

In most circumstances, you can freely ignore criticism coming from a single source, or perhaps a few dubious sources. But be careful about ignoring criticism from someone who knows you pretty intimately and is likely point out things that other people won’t–or can’t.

Regardless of the source, if you find yourself hearing similar criticisms from multiple avenues, it might be a good idea to take stock in what’s being said. Failure to do so will only result in the same mistakes being made time and time again.

Of course, not all criticism is justified. Sometimes we get criticized for things that other people don’t understand. Often ignorance or lack of information, combined with a healthy dose of bias, can bring someone to criticize something that they really don’t get. I have recently found this to be true of myself. People just don’t know the full story of what is going on in other people’s lives, but they often find it easy to criticize anyway.

Preacher, Henry Ward Beecher stepped up to the pulpit one Sunday morning to deliver his sermon. As he put his bible on the pulpit there was a paper with the word “fool” written on it. He lifted the paper for the congregation to see then announced, “Generally I receive letters from people who write letters and forget to sign their name. This letter is different. The person signed his name but forgot to write the letter.”

There is nothing you can do about unjustified criticism other than to let it roll off your back. Don’t let it get to you, don’t let it bother you or change you. But take note of what you hear; if the same criticisms keep coming up from multiple and trusted sources, then it may be justified. In which case you need to accept it, learn from it, and change what is necessary to become a better person, employee, business owner, spouse, parent, grandparent, friend, etc.

Criticism is a part of life. But, what we do with it makes us who we are.

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Why you might be scratching your head at my analogy(and they are not always the best), there is quite a lot of validity in this statement considering that organic traffic increases can be much like that shiny car, pretty on the outside and hollow on the inside. For the most part, any SEO firm at some point can perform enough basic SEO and content creation to lift a site’s traffic simply because at some point you will drive so much long tail traffic that referrals will likely increase. What so often looks like a great report should have additional questions posed.

A review of your site analytics and these factors in mind can paint a better picture of whether your SEO program is targeted appropriately.

What site sections are driving traffic?

       -   Site sections such as a blog can drive a lot of traffic for a blog but often are virally motivated and this traffic can result in a 80+% bounce rate. Your traffic should be landing on your homepage or key pages that are a starting point for your conversion funnel or a page along this pathway.

How do organic visitors consume your content?

       -   Only in a perfect world does someone stumble upon your site and immediately become so enthralled that they instantly perform the intended action you are attempting. From an organic-wide view you need to ensure that page views, pages-per-visit and time on site are gradually increasing. This is also a way to show that site content has been developed for search engines but also for human visitors as content is compelling and there are links and calls to action to help propel visitors throughout the site.

Are organic referrals branded or non-branded?

       -   Every time you go all out on an offline effort or social promotion you are building your brand. And while not every offline viewer picks up a telephone and not every social user follows a link these web users search for company through a branded term. It is very important to parse your SEO reporting by branded and non-branded segments. Non-branded development should most often be your focus as a common SEO goal is to gain visibility across popular brand/service related terms.

How well does organic search referral s convert?

       -   Yes, I know, this is obvious. However, I am still surprised at how many people do not even think about this factor but more so with the climb in traffic. A thousand visits that do not convert at all are not as important as one visit that converts (brand identity freaks excluded). Analysis of these conversion metrics will allow you to figure out the most important goal of whether visitors are doing what you want them to.

Asking these questions of your SEO firm or analyzing these areas for yourself will help you to identify if your SEO campaign is successful or if the traffic numbers are misleading. Rankings are great but if they drove hollow traffic there is no importance for having a listing in that position and driving meaninglessness traffic. Who knows, if your site is a likely candidate for the conditions above, hopefully after a little work your traffic will drop next month…and your conversions will increase.

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Although the field of SEO is probably one of the most open when it comes to giving out tips on rankings, there is often so much contradictory information out there that you will see people trying to settle small differences of opinion with links to various forum posts.

What kind of advice should the amateur (or up and coming) SEO practitioner look for in the world of Search Engine Optimization?  Here are a couple that might

• Someone Already Tried That Trick. In many cases we work with clients who try to do something that was already discovered (and filtered) by search engines a long time ago. For instance, people seem to come up with “tiny text that blends into the background” on a frequent basis without being prompted. It is always good to see people thinking logically and creatively, but it pays to run your idea by someone who has been around the block a few times.

• SEO Jobs are often given to those who don’t know much about SEO. We often see webmasters arguing that the site has “great SEO” because they added 500 phrases to the meta keywords tag. Don’t be afraid to ask questions, or seek out a second opinion. When in doubt, it pays to get a little self-education to see which “expert” is the most up to date.

• The Landscape Changes All The Time. Although this can be said for many technological fields, SEO is probably a lot more dynamic than programming or product development trades. This is because optimizers have to react to today’s update in Google or Bing, while keeping an eye out for the next search engine or social media trend. The best SEO consultant might be one that tells you to scrap the project he recommended to you yesterday because Google changed its mind!

• You Have To Become An SEO Historian. A programmer does not have to know anything about Charles Babbage or Blaise Pascal to build code for your site, but an SEO expert should have an advanced knowledge of yesterday’s SEO. This is especially true because there have been so many “black hat” tricks used in the past that your current SEO project needs to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. (If you’re in the Gray Hat realm, you also need to know the appearance is avoided while the impropriety moves forward.) Many innocent techniques could get mistaken for Cloaking, Keyword Stuffing, Hidden Text, Duplicate Content, Doorway Pages, and Link Buying. If your SEO expert is unaware of these outdated tricks, your site may be traveling through an optimization minefield.

• You Don’t Need Experience To Get Started. Even though the above tips counsel the use of an expert, you can still begin your SEO project by yourself with minimal SEO knowledge. There is no substitute for experiencing optimization firsthand, and many of our best clients would make for above average optimizers in their own right. Knowledge of how search engines work, and what they are looking for, can guide you in DIY SEO processes, and help you find a consultant who can take your site to the next level. Until that point, you can begin sprucing up your site (carefully!) and see how the search engines react to better titles, upgraded content, and readable code.

Everyone in the SEO field started somewhere, and is usually guided by their initial experiences. People who have been around long enough may have used techniques that were perfectly acceptable (or very successful!) for a time before they fell into the “black hat” category. The more agile SEO experts have moved toward standard best practices that include turning the site into a resource and creating linking campaigns that fall within the realm of acceptability for Google and Bing. The difference for seasoned experts usually involves more involvement in the SEO community when it comes to discussion and information sharing, plus a continuous educational process. Unlike most other specialties, the need for constant learning in optimization can be the difference between success and failure whether you are looking to improve your own site’s rankings or get a job in SEO. While there may be more challenges and knowledge needed before you can consider yourself a true “SEO Expert” there are also a great deal of opportunities for people who can prove themselves on Google’s playing field, and plunging head-first into search engine optimization is the best way to start.

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I wanted to highlight a little problem that might see you being outranked for your own content. I am not talking about scrapers either, legitimate situations. You may ultimately be screwed for all your hard work developing quality content. Actually, the better you do your job, the more likely it is.

In the present world of SEO (and internet marketing in general) we all know that the ‘build it and they will come’ approach just ain’t going to cut it. One way to get the word out and even build some authority is the use of content syndication. This is generally in the form of RSS. And a LOT of us use this approach.

Did you know that this might just be a bad idea? Especially with a full feed?

Talking to Googlers

Some 18 months back the folks at WebProNews asked me if they could syndicate my content, verbatim, on their family of IM news sites. Right away one has to start worrying about this as they might just out-rank me for my own content, (given that they have greater authority). Thus I decided to talk to a Googler pal to see what the advised approach for this is.

At the time I was told that as long as the secondary source had a link back to the original, things should work out fine. And this did seem to be the case 80% of the time. Occasionally I’d get outranked (oddly Google was showing BOTH identical posts 1-2 in the SERP), but that was the exception, not the rule.

Fast forward, early 2010. I was working on a project in the finance world which was syndicating content out to a variety of locales including heavy weights such as ‘the Street‘. We noticed that, even with linkage to the original, we were getting spanked in the reg SERPs and Google News.

Back to Google we go.

This time I was told that we should look to throttle the RSS by delaying it some to ensure it was the first version picked up. Ok, great, so it seems that authority sites most certainly can still kick yer ass if you’re not careful.

The Case Study

I was chatting in the SEO Dojo chat room with my pal (and social media guru) Samir Balwani whom was having some issues with his blog and this very problem. As an example we can look at the post; 5 Things I Would Tell a Social Media Professor

If we look at a search for some leader text we see this – Or a Google search via post TITLE such as this here; “5 things I would tell a social media professor“.

You can see he is getting outranked by not only SMT but FaceBook as well (where he had a full feed). This, as you might imagine is not an ideal situation. Interestingly it should be noted that both of those entries actually link to the original via redirects. As we know there is some link love loss from that which means our 20% just got even worse.

Ultimately these domains had more authority and are effectively stealing his thunder AND rankings. Sure, we all want the authority building that can come from being in these publications, but at what cost? At very least we should be controlling which content gets syndicated and which doesn’t (I have a deal with WebProNews that they don’t touch any pillar content for example).

The Fix

And so what can we do to have the best of both world? To get the name out there without having and adverse affect on our SEO efforts? A few things come to mind and have been shown to work in these situations.

• Delay RSS – this was Google’s advice although I have not found an option for this in (their own) Feedburner system. This means you need to do it via the RSS programming on your site and then hook that up to the feedburner system.

• Only use partial feeds – this is certainly another option that will also help solve the problem, though in some cases they don’t allow that. For example SMT says, “ We do not use partial feeds or content summaries or posts without a photo or avatar. We are a community, not a link referral service.”

• Make sure article TITLE is linked up – while not huge, it can help to further strengthen the post itself for the core terms being targeted. Every little bit helps.

• Don’t let them link to RSS UTM – in the SMT instance, they linked back to the actual RSS feed link which get’s parsed as a 301 and certainly loses some juice to the original. Where possible, avoid this.

As you may have figured out along the trail, this is certainly something that we need to be aware of. In Samir’s case, he really wasn’t paying attention and this has been going on for quite some time. I can only imagine the traffic losses he’s suffered because of it. If you are syndicating your content via FULL FEED, you should be monitoring it to ensure that this isn’t happening to you.

And Google? Guys, if you’re aware of the problem in the search dept., why not give a head’s up to the folks at FeedBurner while we’re at it ( I tried to ) and get an option to be able to delay the feed, just for such situations. #justsayin’

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The latest SEOmoz video outlines what kind of links you need to focus on in your SEO strategy. Depending on your situation–your site, your link profile, your competition–the kinds of links you need and the things you need them to do for your site can vary significantly.

So which types of links are going to bolster your SEO efforts? Rand outlines 4 different factors that determine the type of links you need:

1. Link Juice – Quality is better than quantity. Rand says that two links from a high authority site (such as Nasa.gov) is better than thousands of links to lesser known sites.
2. Trust / Authority – Ensure that the links you get are high quality and from trustworthy sources.
3. Anchor Text – Can signal to the search engine that a page is about a particular subject even if that content isn’t on the site.
4. Diversity – The more different sources that your links come from the better. The search engines will give you more credit if you have 50 links from 20 different websites than 100 links all from the same website.

You need to look at all these factors when determining which type of links you are falling behind on. Check out Rand’s video below for more details.

If you’re looking for help in getting an SEO campaign up and running, then check out our guaranteed SEO services.

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Dave’s Answer:

This isn’t true, and I don’t know why people think it’s a risk. Google has a ton of smart engineers: do you think they’d have a popular product like Google Analytics (which I run on this site) be something that could be exploited by hackers? I sure don’t.

But to clarify, I asked my friend Bennett Haselton to share his thoughts on this matter. Bennett writes for the programmer/geek site Slashdot, among others, and has a good handle on how people who break into sites exploit weaknesses. Here’s what he said:

Your friend, or his web team, is in the twilight zone or something. It’s not even theoretically possible for Google Analytics to provide a “doorway” to hackers.

When you add Google Analytics code to your website, your webserver just sees that as normal “content” — just a sequence of bytes, like an image or a video file or a text file — and when the user requests it, the webserver sends it to them, just as the webserver sends other content like images and videos. Thus it’s not possible for adding Google Analytics to enable anyone to “hack” your site, because from the point of view of the webserver, it’s just normal content that it sends to the user.

What follows is how I would summarize it for a non-techie audience, although only a non-techie can tell if the explanation is any good

What happens when someone goes to your website, if you have a Google Analytics tag on your page:

1. The user loads your page
2. The user’s web browser sees that you have a tag on your page. This tag is basically a set of instructions that tells the user’s browser to request some content from the Google Analytics server.
3. The user’s computer requests that content from the Google Analytics server.
4. At the end of the month, you as the webmaster, can go to the Google Analytics page and log in to your Google Analytics account, to see how many times a user loaded the content that was requested in step #3. That way Google can tell you how many times the content was loaded, what countries it was loaded from, etc. That’s what Google Analytics does.

Note that in these four steps, there is never a point where any “instructions” (code) are actually run *on* your webserver. After step #1, your webserver is out of the loop entirely. The Google Analytics code is a set of instructions on your webpage, but those instructions (which say “Go and fetch some content from Google’s servers”) are instructions that are followed by your web browser. The Google Analytics code doesn’t tell your webserver to “do” anything.

The only time installing third-party programs onto your website could expose your website to security attacks, would be in the case of programs like WordPress, because WordPress consists of code (instructions) that is actually run *by the webserver*. If the authors of WordPress have programmed it carefully, the code won’t do anything harmful, but sometimes attackers will find ways to exploit it and cause it to do harmful things. In that case you always have to make sure you have the latest WordPress fixes installed.

The distinction between *code* and *content* can help simplify things without having to spend years learning about computer security. It’s what makes it intuitive to see why installing Google Analytics (or an image or a video file) cannot enable anyone to “break into” your website, but installing WordPress could (sometimes) enable a break-in.

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ComScore‘s most recent search engine ranking report offers new insight that will make us rethink how we publish content, increase its findability, and facilitate sharing.

In comparing February to January, Google remained on top with 65.4 percent of all core search activity. Yahoo followed with 17 percent and Microsoft ranked third with 11.3 percent.

Things become interesting when we analyze search queries as opposed to core search activity. The landscape broadens beyond traditional search.

Just behind Google, but ahead of Yahoo, YouTube ranks second for search inquiries overall. In 18th and 19th place, Facebook and MySpace also make appearances in the top 20 list respectively. Perhaps most intriguing is that neither Facebook nor MySpace offer true search functionality — but they still account for increasing search activity. Facebook is up 10 percent between January and February.

What does this all mean? As social networks gain in prominence, the amount of relevant information within each ecosystem increases in value and, as such, we deliberately seek content within the networks in which we engage.

It’s the Journey That’s Important, Not the Destination

Destination sites across the board are losing traffic and ultimately favor, simply because destinations are obsolete as intended or designed. The days of the traditional “start page” are coming to an end, only to be replaced with the “attention dashboard” — a dedicated application that aggregates the activity of those we follow in social networks into a series of digestible streams.

TweetDeck, PeopleBrowsr, Seesmic, HootSuite, Brizzly, and Facebook each represent a new generation of attention dashboards as they funnel social feeds into one clickable view. These streams look a lot like slot machines as information flies through dedicated columns, almost blurring the text beyond legibility. But this is where attention is focused and the content that appears within it represents the future of the information life cycle.

So how do we compete for attention if attention itself is learning how to adapt to a new media landscape?

Our job is to ensure that information travels outside of our domains and to the communities of interest in order to create a bridge back to our hub. And, content must adapt based on consumption and sharing patterns with our existing and potential stakeholders.

This is an important point and one that can’t be ignored. Social activity indicates that we are already moving away from the act of proactively traveling to traditional sites as a source of new content.

With the dawn of social media, the activity that brings social graphs and networks to life is quickly changing how we discover, learn and share and it is also forever reshaping the idea of online destinations as they exist today. It all comes down to attention and understanding where it’s focused and how it is tempted, lured, or distracted to click away from it.

The socialization of information is changing everything.

Connect with Attention Where Attention is Focused

Competing for attention is paramount. We lose most of the battles before they’re begun because we’re working against years of behavior that now represent the complete opposite of tomorrow’s consumption and sharing patterns.

Everything begins with identifying where attention is focused, combined with the new laws of attraction.

Gigya reviewed data from Compete from November 2009 and observed that some of the top media properties were already realizing a dominant effect in traffic from social networks. For example, USAToday receives upwards of 35 percent of its referral traffic from social networks and just over 6 percent from Google. People Magazine receives 23 percent of its referrals from social networks and 11 percent from Google. And, CNN earns 11 percent of its referral traffic from social versus 9 percent from Google.

Peer-to-peer activity strongly influences the resulting behavior of impressionable nodes defining social graphs, much in the same way we rely upon trusted referrals from our real life contacts. The more something appears within the attention dashboard, the more likely it is that someone will click through. In addition, the more intriguing it seems, or the stronger the reaction it engenders among peers, also increases its enchantment and thus beguiling spectators to willfully lunge towards a shared experience, most likely triggering a public response that continues the social effect.

Social Architecture and Connecting the Dots

Information is already socializing and changing the behavior for how people search, find, react, and curate. The difference between our present and future is defined by the roads and bridges we build between relevance and prevalence.

As content producers, our responsibility is to connect information and stories to existing and potential stakeholders. It’s also essential to package and optimize our content as social objects in order for them to work for us in our absence, when individuals actively seek content through contextual searches.

In part two, we’ll look at 11 steps for optimizing your brand for sharing and social search.

Comments

Ideally, the link profile of your site should indicate an entity that gives and receives links. The whole idea of a “web” indicates interconnected sites that reference each other. If your site receives links, but does not give any out, then it is going to resemble a dead end or a black hole. Even if your links are fairly unobtrusive, and go to informational sites (as opposed to competitor sites) you can create a more natural looking site profile as you build your link portfolio.

Lastly, it pays to avoid complex (or not so complex) interlinking to your own sites, or to “web rings” which all link to each other. In the eyes of a search engine algorithm, these relationships are easy to spot and can work against you. Your link building profile should make your site look like a great source of information that isn’t afraid to refer users to other sites for further study. As an added bonus, users tend to go back to websites that help them find what they’re looking for, and that goes right back into the directive to “build a site as if search engines did not exist.”

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