skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Before we get into this article let me first state, link building is not dead. There are a lot of opinions floating around the web on both sides; this is just mine. Google has shut down link networks and Matt Cutts continues to make videos on what types of guest blogging are OK. If links were dead, would Google really put in this effort? Would anyone get an “unnatural links” warning?
The fact is, links matter. The death is in links that are easy to manipulate. Some may say link building is dead but what they mean is, “The easy links that I know how to build are dead.”
What does this mean for those of us who still want high rankings and know we need links to get them? Simply, buckle up, because you have to take off your gaming hat and put on your marketing cap. You have to understand people and you have to know how to work with them, either directly or indirectly.
I could write a book on what this means for link building as a whole, but this isn't a book, so I'll try to keep focused. In this article, we're going to focus on one kind of link building and one source of high quality link information that typically goes unnoticed: referrer data.
I should make one note before we launch in, I'm going to use the term loosely to provide additional value. We'll get into that shortly but first, let's see how referrer data helps and how to use it.
The Value Of Referrer Data
Those of you who have ignored your analytics can stop reading now and start over with “A Guide To Getting Started With Analytics.” Bookmark this article and maybe come back to it in a few weeks. Those of you who do use your analytics on at least a semi-regular basis and are interested in links can come along while we dig in.
The question is, why is referrer data useful? Let's think about what Google's been telling us about valuable links: they are those that you would build if there were no engines. So where are we going to find the links we'd be happy about if there were no engines? Why, in our traffic, of course.
Apart from the fact that traffic is probably one of, if not the best, indicator of the quality and relevancy of a link to your site, your traffic data can also help you find the links you didn't know you had and what you did to get them. Let's start there.
Referrers To Your Site
Every situation is a bit different (OK – sometimes more than a bit) so I'm going to have to focus on general principles here and keep it simple.
When you look to your referrer data, you're looking for a few simple signals. Here's what you're looking for and why:
- Which sites are directing traffic to you? Discovering which sites are directing traffic to you can give you a better idea of the types of sites you should be looking for links from (i.e. others that are likely to link to you, as well). You may also find types of sites you didn't expect driving traffic. This happens a lot in the SEO realm, but obviously can also happen in other niches. Here, you can often find not only opportunities, but relevancies you might not have predicted.
- What are they linking to? The best link building generates links you don't have to actively build. The next best are those that drive traffic. We want to know both. In looking through your referrer data, you can find the pages and information that appeal to other website owners and their visitors. This will tell you who is linking to you and give you ideas on the types of content to focus on creating. There's also nothing stopping you from contacting the owner of the site that sent the initial link and informing them of an updated copy (if applicable) or other content you've created since that they might also be interested in.
- Who are they influential with? If you know a site is sending you traffic, logically you can assume the people who visit that site (or the specific sub-section in the case of news-type sites) are also interested in your content (or at least more likely to be interested than standard mining techniques). Mining the followers of that publisher for social connections to get your content in front of them is a route that can increase your success rate in link strategies ranging from guest blogging to pushing your content out via Facebook paid advertising. Admittedly, this third area of referrer data is more akin to refining a standard link list, but it's likely a different audience than you would have encountered (and with a higher-than-standard success rate for link acquisition or other actions).
As I noted above, I plan to use the term referrer data loosely. As if point three wasn't loose enough, we're going to quickly cover a strategy that ties nicely with this: your competitor's referrer data.
Competitor Data
You probably can't call up a competitor and ask them for their traffic referrer data (if you can, I wish I was in your sector). For the rest of us, I highly recommend pulling backlink referrer data for your competitors using one of the many great tools out there. I tend to use Moz Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO personally, but there are others.
What I'm interested in here are the URLs competitors link to. While the homepage can yield interesting information, it can often be onerous to weed through and I generally relegate that to different link time frames.
Generally, I will put together a list of the URLs linked to, then review these as well as the pages linking to them. This helps give us an idea of potential domains to target for links, but more importantly, they can let us know the types of relevant content that others are linking to.
If we combine this information with the data collected above when mining our referrer data, we can be left with more domains to seek links on and broader ideas for content creation. You'll probably also find other ways the content is being linked to. Do they make top lists? Are they producing videos or whitepapers that are garnering links from authority sites? All of this information meshes together to make the energies you put into your own referrer mining more effective, allowing you to produce a higher number of links per hour than you'd be able to get with your own.
Is This It?
No. While mining your referrer data can be a great source of information regarding the types of links you have that you should be seeking more of, it's limited to the links and traffic sources you already have. It's a lot like looking to your Analytics for keyword ideas (prior to (not provided) at least). It can only tell you what's working of what you have already.
A diversified link profile is the key to a healthy long term strategy. This is just one method you can use to help find what works now and keep those link acquisition rates up while exploring new techniques.
Original Article Post by
Dave Davies @
Search Engine Watch
Many people have had great success snapping up expired domains and using those sites for link building purposes. One of the main reasons for this was that it saved work, as you could grab a site that already had content and backlinks and at least a baseline established presence.
However, after the past year with all the Google changes that make link building trickier than ever, this process is no longer as easy and safe as it once was, but it can still be valuable if you think about what you're doing and don't just buy every domain that has your desired keyword in it then hastily 301 redirect it to your own site or trash the content with links to your main site, expecting miracles.
Affiliate marketers are also fond of expired domains to use for their work so while we won't go into detail on that, we will cover some topics that are relevant for that specific use.
How to Find Dropped/Expired/Expiring Domains?
Domain Tools is one of the main places that I check but there are many sites that list expired or about-to-expire domains that are up for grabs. Network Solutions has custom email alerts where you can put in a keyword and get an email when domains matching that are expiring so that's a nice option for those of you who like a more passive approach.
Snap Names is also good, as is Drop Day. You may find that there are certain sites that are best for your purposes (whether it's keeping an eye on ones you want or getting ones that just expired) so look around and figure out what best suits you.
Want a domain that's at least 9 years old and has a listing in DMOZ? Domain Tools is where I'd go for that, for example:
Of course if you come across a domain that you like and it's not set to expire any time soon, there's nothing wrong with emailing the owner and asking to buy it.
How to Vet Expired Domains
- Check to see what domains 301 redirect to them. I use Link Research Tools for this as you can run a backlink report on the domain in question and see the redirects. If you find a domain that has 50 spammy 301s pointing to it, it may be more trouble that it's worth. Preventing a 301 from coming through when you don't control the site that redirects is almost impossible. You can block this on the server level but that won't help you with your site receiving bad link karma from Google. In that case, you may have to disavow those domains.
- Check their backlinks using your link tool of choice. Is the profile full of nothing but spam that will take ages to clean up or will you have to spend time disavowing the links? If so, do you really want to bother with it? If you want to buy the domain to use for a 301 redirect and it's full of spammy links, at least wait until you've cleared that all up before you 301 it.
- Check to see if they were ever anything questionable using the Wayback Machine. If the site simply wasn't well done 2 years ago, that's not nearly as big of a problem as if you're going to be using the site for educating people about the dangers of lead and it used to be a site that sold Viagra.
- Check to see if the brand has a bad reputation. Do some digging upfront so you can save time disassociating yourself from something bad later. You know how sometimes you get a resume from a person and you ask an employee if they know this Susan who also used to work at the same place that your current employee worked years ago and your employee says "oh yes I remember her. She tried to burn the building down once"? Well, Susan might try to burn your building down, too.
- Check to see if they were part of a link network. See what other sites were owned by the same person and check them out too.
- Check to see if they have an existing audience. Is there an attached forum with active members, are there people generally commenting on posts and socializing them, etc.?
How Should You Use Expired Domains?
Many people 301 redirect these domains to their main sites or secondary sites in order to give them a boost. Others turn them into part of their legitimate online arsenal and use them as a proper standalone resource.
Some people add them to their existing blog network and interlink them. Some people keep them and use them to sell links. Some people keep them and try to resell them. Some people use them to try their hand at affiliate marketing.
However that's talking about how people use them, not about how they should use them, but how you should use them is up to you.
I once worked with an account where we used tons of microsites. They were standalone sites that each linked to the main brand site and we built links to them. It worked for a while (and still works for many people according to what I see in forums) but as far as I can tell, most of those microsites are no longer in Google's index or no longer contain live links to the brand site. That's because in that case, it stopped working and became more of a danger than anything else. They served no purpose at all other than to host a link to the brand site, and since they gained no authority, it just wasn't worth the trouble of keeping them up.
I've also dealt with someone who successfully bought expired domains and redirected them to subdomains on his main site in order to split it up into a few niche subdomains. He didn't overdo it, and each expired domain had a good history with content relevant to what the subdomain was, so it all worked very well.
As mentioned early on, affiliate marketers also use expired domains. One big benefit of this is that if you plan to just use PPC for affiliate marketing, you don't have to be as concerned about the backlink profile of the domain as you might not care that much about its organic rankings.
Some Good Signs of Expired Domains
Some of these probably depend upon the purpose you have in mind, but here are a few things I like to see on an expired or expiring domain but please keep in mind that these aren't discrete defining features of a quality domain; they are simply a couple of signs that the domain might be a good one to use:
- Authority links that will pass through some link benefits via a 301 redirect (if I'm going that route.)
- An existing audience of people who regularly contribute, comment, and socialize the site's content (if I'm going to use it as a standalone site.) If I'm looking to buy a forum, for example, I'd want to make sure that there are contributing members with something to offer already there. If I want a site that I will be maintaining and adding to and plan to build it out further, seeing that there's an audience of people reading the content, commenting on it, and socializing it would make me very happy.
- A decent (and legitimate) Toolbar PageRank (TBPR) that is in line with where I think it should be. If I see a site that is 7 months old and has a TBPR of 6, I'll obviously be suspicious, and if I found one that was 9 years old and was a TBPR 1, I would hestitate before using it, for example. I also have to admit that while I don't rely on TBPR as a defining metric of quality, I'd be crazy to pretend that it means nothing so it's definitely something I look at.
- A domain age of at least 2 years if I was going to do anything other than hold it and try to resell it.
- Internal pages that have TBPR. If there are 5000 pages and only the homepage has any TBPR, I'd be a bit suspicious about why no internal pages had anything.
A Few Red Flags of Expired Domains
- Suspicious TBPR as mentioned above.
- The domain isn't indexed in Google. Even if you look at a recently expired site and see it has a TBPR of 4 with good Majestic flow metrics, is 5 years old, and has been updated in some way until it expired (whether through new blog posts, comments, social shares, etc.), it's safe to ssume it's not indexed for a good reason and you probably want to stay away from it.
- Backlink profile is full of nothing but spam.
- All comments on the site's posts are spammy ones and trackbacks.
Bottom Line: Is Using Expired Domains a Good Idea?
As with almost anything in SEO right now, some tactics aren't really great ideas for the long-term but since they work for the short-term, people still use them. Some tactics that won't work in one niche will still work well in certain other niches and some sites seem to be able to weather just about any algorithmic change in Google.
That's why it's hard to say that you shouldn't do this, or you should do that, because every case is different, every webmaster/site owner has a different idea about risk, and a lot of people have made a lot of money off doing things that I personally wouldn't do.
I don't have time to keep up the blogging on my own site so I would never expect that I could keep it up on five sites, each devoted to a specific area of my industry, but with the right manpower and the right people, this can be a successful strategy for many.
If you plan to use them for affiliate marketing and you're going to use PPC for that, you don't have to worry about some of the things that you would have to be concerned with if you planned to rank well.
In the end, it depends on what you want to do, how much time and effort you have to put into doing well, and how much risk you can handle, just like everything else.
Original Article Post by
Julie Joyce @
Search Engine Watch
When working for clients (or starting fresh on your own site) one of the best things you can do at the beginning of a link building campaign is pull in a few quick wins. Too many people have been burned by shady SEO practitioners in the past, or link builders who just didn't deliver.
My motto for launching a campaign is always "start at the start." You see, it's pretty easy (and tempting) to immediately dive deep into a campaign and go after big campaign wins.
Big wins are great. Everyone loves them - clients, leadership, the team. Everyone's happy. The problem is, big campaign wins are hard work, and certainly don't happen overnight. They require perseverance, patience, resources, and sometimes a little luck.
So, before (or even while) we go after those big wins, I take the time to work through my list of potential quick win opportunities - searching for quality links - in order to build trust, enthusiasm, and motivation.
The Quick Wins List:
- 404 Pages and Link Reclamation
- Competitor Analysis
- Fresh Web Explorer/Google Alerts
- Local Link Building
- Past/Current Relationships
Note: Each step will be covered in separate installments of this Link Building 101 series.
404 Pages and Link Reclamation
Websites change over time – it's a fact of life. Products come, products go, information is updated, URLs are modified, resources are reworked; pages are edited, shifted, and moved.
While a lot of this sounds like on-page SEO, it affects off-page SEO as well – specifically links.
If you've secured hard-earned links and then update that page's URL, change subfolders, or even change the information on the page, you've just affected that link, typically by losing it.
Oftentimes page migration involves a 301 redirect, so visitors will be passed along to the new page. This passes link equity as well, although some is unfortunately lost.
However, if there's no redirect in place, and there are inbound links pointing to the old URL, that's link equity lost. So, when picking up a new client, I like to ensure there aren't any dead/404 pages with external links pointed at them.
Salvaging even a few quality links here can be a fairly significant win – especially right off the bat, when you're establishing trust and confidence.
Let's take a look at a couple different methods to find 404'd pages that potentially have inbound links.
1. Webmaster Tools
Getting Webmaster Tool access is the most straightforward (and free) method of finding pages returning a 404. Beyond finding 404s, you should have Webmaster Tool access for general SEO purposes. So, you should be working to get access regardless.
Once you've set up (or received) Webmaster Tool access, you can quickly check 404 errors by going into the crawl errors section:
Also note that you can navigate with the menu on the left, by clicking on Crawl>Crawl Errors:
This will display a list of URLs with issues on your website. You'll want to focus in on the URLs returning 404s:
You should take care to clean up these broken URLs as soon as possible. While you do that you should also run these URLs through a backlink analysis tool to determine whether there are links pointing at these lost/dead pages.
Tools that will do this:
Which tool you use mostly comes down to a matter of preference. For this post I'll be referencing Moz's Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO.
To run an individual URL/page, you simply go to the home page of any of these tools and input the specified URL into the search bar.
Here's what running an individual page/URL looks like in OSE:
And in Majestic:
Putting your 404 URLs in here will show you if any pages are linking to your 404'd pages, and allow you to navigate to the linking pages to analyze the link(s).
From here, you'll want to set about recovering any links pointing at broken pages. But before we get into that, let's take a look at another method to discover 404 pages that have links: Open Site Explorer from Moz.
2. Open Site Explorer from Moz
Open Site Explorer is also capable of reporting inbound links pointing at broken pages.
OSE isn't as prolific a crawler as Google, however. Google just has so many more resources invested into crawling the web – so OSE might not find the same amount of 404s as Google Webmaster Tools. However, it's always great to have a second data source, so definitely check with OSE, especially if you already have a paid account.
So, how do you find the inbound links pointing to 404 pages with Open Site Explorer?
Head over to OSE and enter your domain's URL into the search bar. Then, switch to the Top Pages tab:
Now, download your Top Pages as a CSV:
Once you have the CSV with a complete list of your Top Pages, you'll want to filter by HTTP Status:
Head over to Data and then click on the filter tab to filter the data:
Here's a link to common HTTP Status codes. What you're looking for is anything reporting a 404, and possibly 302s (302s are supposed to be temporary redirects – they aren't designed to pass link equity, so any links going to a page that has been 302'd are essentially wasted).
Now, choose 404s, 302s, and No Data. Note that column F is the number of domains linking to your website. Your sheet should now look like this:
So, any 404s with multiple domains linking to it should be worth checking out (just throw the URL – column A – back into OSE to find the linking sites/pages).
And that's all you need to find your 404s with OSE.
Now let's head into the actual process of link reclamation (reclaiming links pointing at dead/incorrect pages).
Link Quality Analysis
Any sites linking to your 404 pages should be first examined for authority and quality before reclaiming the link. A few factors you should look at:
- Relevance of the website.
- Relevance of the page.
- PR or DA of the home page.
- PR or PA of the page.
- The content quality of the page.
- The placement of the link.
- The anchor text used.
- Other links on the page.
- Other pages on the site.
That should give you a sense of the overall quality of the site, the page, and the link. All are important elements of overall link quality, and shouldn't be excluded. If the link isn't relevant to the site, or even the page, then the link probably isn't quality.
Eventually when you examine enough links you will develop a link sense, often referred to as the smell test – because you know when a link stinks.
So, if the link is worth saving? Two options:
- Create a 301 redirect for the 404'd page to a relevant page on your site.
- Contact the linking site's webmaster and let them know the page has moved and ask if they could update the link.
Typically, the first option is the best, unless you only want to reclaim a single link as opposed to every link pointing to the page. You lose a little bit of link equity (the power of the link) using a 301 redirect, but you don't have to annoy and rely upon a webmaster, who might just pull down the link altogether.
Recap
- Webmaster Tools is best (and free) for finding 404s, although OSE works as well.
- Use backlink explorers to test pages returning a 404 for inbound links.
- Manually check any links found pointing to dead pages for relevance and quality.
- Use a 301 redirect to a relevant page to recapture link equity (most common) or ask the linking site's webmaster to fix the link.
Original Article Post by
Jon Ball @
Search Engine Watch
Although there are varying ways to destabilize the organic visibility of a website on Google, this article will focus on the most common attack: when a competitor buys and points low-quality links to website to diminish the rankings of the said website by causing it to be filtered or receive a manual action (penalty) from Google.
Let's look at some common features and distinctions of link-based negative SEO attacks, illustrative examples, and preventative steps and ideas for what to do if your site is affected.
Several Key Distinctions
Although negative SEO is a well explored and controversial topic, there is some vagueness about low-quality link buying as a negative SEO tactic. The fact is, low-quality link buying to a competitor actually takes a number of different forms and there are several important distinctions to be aware of. Here are a few:
Buying Low-Quality Links to the Homepage vs. a Subpage
Some aggressive agents will only seek to take down a certain page. In this case they will build the low-quality links to a subpage. Generally speaking, subpages have historically had a greater tolerance for anchor text rich links, so generally more links are built into subpages to try to take them down.
Single Spam Attack vs. Multiple Attacks Over Time:
Often times, spam attacks tend to be in the form of single attacks. A single attack occurs when a large number of low-quality backlinks with a single phrase as an anchor are pointed to a website on one day. However, multiple attacks also occur. These are cases where for about 3 - 6 months, a homepage or subpage gets thousands for backlinks for a single phrase as an anchor.
New Website vs. Established Website
Is your website new and does it have just a few natural backlinks? Or is your website well-established and does it have a healthy backlink profile with thousands of natural links? More established website tend to have more established backlink profiles and are much harder to successfully target with a negative SEO attack than a new website.
Motive for Attack
Taking down a competitor website isn't the only motive for building low-quality links to a website. Occasionally, spammers will build low-quality links to help boost the equity of links pointing to their site from your site.
Negative SEO link attacks that are focused on diminishing the organic search visibility of a website tend to be targeted to the homepage, low-quality backlinks tend to point to the homepage. Conversely, negative SEO link attacks that are targeted for boosting existing links on a page tend to appear deeper on a website, low-quality backlinks tend to point to deeper of a website, often areas where there is user-generated content.
Google's Position on Negative SEO
In the interest of being comprehensive on our discussion of this topic, we would be amiss not discuss Google's position on link-based negative SEO. Google's position on negative SEO is that it is possible, but difficult, according to Matt Cutts, head of the Google webspam team:
Last year, Google revised its official wording about negative SEO, saying "There’s almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index" to "Google works hard to prevent other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index."
Cutts has essentially stated that all the claims of successful negative SEO attacks Google has looked into don't hold up.
So, at minimum, Google grants that it is possible to successfully execute a negative SEO attack. Furthermore, some marketing experts posit that because the Google webspam team has become more aggressive in controlling activities they believe are spam, that it is now easier to execute some types of negative SEO attacks. This is especially true regarding activities that fall under link schemes in the Google Webmaster Guidelines.
Some Negative SEO Examples
Now let's look at two contrasting examples of negative SEO attacks that were verified by the author, one of which was unsuccessful, and one of which succeeded.
Unsuccessful Attack
This particular attack was on a website that was registered in 1998 and it isn't in a massively competitive niche. This website has a forum on it. A spammer used this forum to do a type of link attack using the site which I am referencing as a site in a link chain.
The spammer added spam forum links with anchor text into new comments on old threads, where moderators are less likely to see them, if anyone was managing the forum to begin with. These comments with anchor text rich links were added to about 20 threads.
After the comments were published, the spammer then built thousands of links to the various spam forum comment pages with pharmaceutical phrases. The particular site that was attacked wasn't about pharmaceuticals.
When I pulled up the anchor text of this particular site, I found that all of the top phrases in the anchor text distribution were for different pharmaceutical phrases. To illustrate, I had to scroll through to the very bottom to see their real links. However, when you look at the traffic of this site, it is very stable.
Why This Attack Didn't Work
- The anchor text sent to the site didn't match the topic of the site at all (this has to do with the intent of the spammer, which was not to spam the site but send backlinks to another pharmaceutical site).
- Before the attack, the website had no anchor text rich links.
- The attack was a one time attack.
- When the webmaster found this attack, they immediately removed the comments and made their forum private, so that all of the links form the comments were no longer indexed.
Successful Attack
This particular site was registered at the very end of 2011 and is in a really competitive niche. The website domain name was also a partial keyword match, which is to say that their domain name include a target keyword but the domain name was not just a keyword.
For link building, this particular site had some directory links with branded anchor text and some article submission also with branded links pointing back to their website. There were also some forum links that pointed back to their site with just URL.
As such, because some of the directories were not the best, they were not in the best link neighborhood. There were also a couple of links that had rich anchor text, however, this number amounted to under 10 linking root domains.
Over the first 7 months of the life of this website, the site was cruising along and building rankings for several long-tail and a few mid-tail phrases. Overall, the site was doing pretty good in terms of number of visitors.
In the summer or early fall of last year, the website traffic from Google organic dropped almost entirely. What was found was that for three straight months prior to getting hit, a competitor was building low-quality anchor text rich links to the homepage of this site. If you look at Majestic SEO link history, you see very few links being built each month followed by a hockey stick jump in number of new links.
Sidebar: Given the reasoning above, I think that some readers may suggest that there is a greater burden of proof on me to prove that the site above was hit beyond a reasonable doubt. I thought about diving into this in greater detail but I chose not to since it is outside of the scope of the intent of my article overall. However, I will say that myself and under peer review were able to identify a direct correlation between the drop and the competitor link building.
Why This Attack Worked
- This site is in a very competitive niche, which Google probably monitors a little bit more closely than the site above.
- This site was very new, it was under a year old at the time that it got hit.
- This site didn't have a strong backlink profile. Although, this site was being very cautious in terms of obvious spam indicators such as anchor text – comparative to the rest of the site in this particular niche – their backlink profile still wasn't in the greatest neighborhood.
- At the time that they were hit, they just built some low-hanging fruit links just to get found. Because they didn't have an established backlink profile, they were very vulnerable to even unsophisticated attacks.
Takeaways From Examples Above
New Websites
If you have a new website, you're vulnerable, especially if you're in a competitive niche.
- Focus heavily on online PR [public relations, not PageRank]and branded link building for at least the first couple months after site launch.
- Make sure to monitor your inbound links at least once a month for the first year of the life of your site. Catching competitor based link attacks early will save you a lot of pain later.
- Avoid low-quality link neighborhoods or any kind of submission based link building, if possible, since sites that will freely link to you will also freely link to any other site, which may not be relevant or may itself use low quality link tactics.
Established Websites
In general, established websites are much safer from negative SEO link attacks.
If you manage an established website or a website that relies heavily on user-generated content, remain aware of how you manage outbound links, even if you automatically wrap out bound links in user generated content in nofollow.
What to do if You've Been Impacted
Although the exact next step for what to do if you have been impacted by a negative SEO link attack varies depending on your unique situations, here are some general recommendations:
Evaluate the Scope of the Hit
- Was the homepage impacted? Were subpages impacted? Or a combination of both?
- Check your traffic in analytics and webmaster tools. Is there any volatility or downturn in traffic?
- Check webmaster tools for an unnatural link warning.
Disavow the Spam Links
Submit disavows for both Google and Bing. Disavow the links from the spam attack.
If You Lost Traffic and Received an Unnatural Link Warning...
You will need to submit a reconsideration request in addition to submitting a disavow.
Additional Resources
Original Article Post by
Bonnie Stefanick @ Search Engine Watch
Just because your business doesn't have traditional seasonal spikes doesn't mean that you can't use a seasonal approach in order to capitalize on the increased interest that comes with everything from annual events and major holidays to simple seasonal associations (like warm weather driving up sales of pool floats in the Southern USA.)
Link building for seasonal events is definitely a bit tricky because the positive effects of links can take some time to show. You can crank out a ton of paid ads for Valentine's Day flowers a few days before Valentine's Day and have that work well, but where links are concerned, waiting 'til the last minute only means one thing: your competition will crush you.
Step 1: Do Your Demographic Research
Where Does Your Main Target Audience Live?
If you target local shoppers in an area of not more than 250 square miles, you're probably pretty well versed in how to properly conduct seasonal marketing, but what if your audience literally lives all over the world? Do your demographic research. Sean Revell recently composed a massive list of data resources and I highly recommend bookmarking it.
Segmentation
Segmentation is useful here, as you can craft specific content for the different hemispheres, for example. If you have a big sale, don't send the email to Australians saying "save big at our massive end of summer closeout!" when it's winter there.
Analyze your customers and find out where they live before you send them something that shows that you have no real clue about who they are. You can get this information in a variety of ways (analytics, physical addresses, survey questions, etc.) so use it.
When Are the Main Country-Specific Public Holidays for the Area You're Targeting?
There are tons of lists of these online but I usually rely on either Wikipedia or Time And Date.
When Are the Religious Holidays for the Area You're Targeting?
This is really tricky, as obviously there are many different religions represented in one area.
There's a good list on Interfaith Calendar but you should definitely do some research into the religions in your targeted areas in order to get as much information as possible.
If one of your main demographics is observant Jewish people and you send them an email on their Sabbath advertising a one-day only sale that's happening right now, it might not be seen if they are avoiding electronics for that day.
What Annual Events Take Place in These Areas?
Music festivals, horse races, museum galas, tax-free shopping weekends, large conventions and conferences, sports events, etc. are all amazing sources of fodder for content that can generate links and get your brand out there.
Step 2: Keep Informed On What's Going On In Your Niche
Find Out What's Happening
You may already have some good ideas based on holidays, events, etc. but using free alerts will help you generate content based on what's happening in relation to your niche. You'll want to keep on top of anything news-related or interesting since you can use it to your advantage.
Types of Alerts You Should Set Up
I probably err on the side of having way too many alerts but I do find them incredibly useful for staying informed about what's going on. For this purpose though, I'd do at least the following basic alerts in relation to your niche:
- Season
- Seasonal event
- Monthly event
- Yearly event
- holiday
- month
You should set them up way before anything will pop, as you don't want to just be reading about Valentine's Day on February 13. In addition, to stay informed about something unexpected that you can capitalize on for content, you can set up some alerts for your general keywords. Hopefully you're doing this anyway but if you aren't, now's a good time to start, and you can set some up just for News. Set up alerts for competitors in case they catch something you didn't.
Generally with alerts, you may get nothing from some of them and you may get way too much from others, so play around with them and adjust them as needed in order to best fit how you work.
If you see a site repeatedly showing up, but the info is usually not relevant for you, you can exclude it, and you can specify that you want to be alerted only for certain sites for certain keywords. That can be especially useful for seeing what your competitors are doing.
For the alerts themselves, I really love Talkwalker Alerts, but Google Alerts is good too.
Other Ways to Get Ideas
Checking Google Trends, following relevant people on Twitter, checking out Facebook pages of your competition, seeing what people are asking questions about on Quora, and paying attention to the actual news are ways that to keep informed about what's going on. There are some great apps for mobile as well, especially Zite, which showcases popular stories in categories that you want to see.
Newsjacking has been the big buzzword lately but to capitalize on something newsworthy, you do have to get in front of it quickly.
Step 3: Set Up A Basic Content Calendar
You can flesh it out more later but it's important to set up the basics for what you will do, then you can do new content generated by ideas based on what is happening. Figure out how often you can produce content, make a list of ideas based on what you know will happen (like Valentine's Day…it's not going away anytime soon), and schedule in some time to produce content on the fly.
For a content calendar, I just use Excel. It's basic, it's easy to understand, and it works for me.
However, using Google Docs is a good idea if you're sharing it with several people and need to update on the fly.
I've seen so many formats that look great but have too much information but hey, whatever works. I just like to have an idea of what to write, when it's due, and who's responsible. There's also a good post about creating a content calendar here.
Step 4: Generate The Content
Don't neglect video as it can be a very powerful form of content that draws some great links. Make sure it's ready for release well before the event in question is actually happening.
Make sure that if it's on your site, it's going to be prominent when the time comes. Work in last year's seasonal content to the new seasonal content.
Step 5: Link Internally
If you have a seasonal product that's critical, make sure you link to it from the home page. New pages take time to get spidered and start showing up. If your content is buried somewhere deep inside the site it may not get indexed in time.
Step 6: Promote The Content
If there are sites devoted to the seasonal event, contact them well ahead of time and see if you can get a guest post on the site or work with them in some way. Plan a way to socialize it before it "happens" if you can.
Make sure you're socializing it when it's happening. Be careful with still socializing it after it happens though, unless you've got a good way to do so, as you certainly don't want to annoy customers by promoting a sale that has ended, for example.
You can start intentionally building links to seasonal content before it happens, of course. If there are bloggers with whom you have a relationship, contact them well ahead of time to tell them what you'll be doing. Create some buzz about it.
For example, if you'll be unveiling a piece about the actors who have scared us the most in movies, you can easily put up a page that has content about it, a contest for a prize awarded to the reader who has the most correct 10 guesses, a Twitter hashtag, etc.
You can link to it from the homepage and tweet about your "coming soon" content. You can contact celebrity bloggers who can help you garner interest in the piece, and then when it's out there, you will already have links.
What Does a Seasonal Link Graph Usually Look Like?
It's sometimes full of link spikes as shown in the example below, which is a for a business that installs inground swimming pools:
It's important to recognize that this is a natural pattern but it's also a good idea to look at your link history (as shown in Majestic SEO) and try to build links during your typical off seasons so that your graph isn't as spiky. Just as you can look at your analytics and see when your typical seasonal highs and lows are, you can view your link history graph over the past few years and better plan for content that can help generate links all throughout the year.
An Example
Think about summer camp. If you're a parent whose child goes to summer camp, you've probably been thinking about it for a couple of months, will hold off for another few months, and will then be thinking about it again. My children participated in camps run by two different outfits this summer.
One is held at a school where they've attended camp before. If you're on the email or regular mail list, you get notified about the upcoming camps a few months in advance, usually around March. This year, however, for some reason we never got an email or a mailed brochure as we usually do.
The information was up on the site though, so I could plan what I was going to do. However, I'm one of those people that, if I can't do something online, just won't usually do it.
Many people are the opposite. If they didn't get the emails or mailed brochures, that could be lost opportunities. By the time the mailed brochure got to me, I'd been registered for over 6 weeks. Two friends of mine were depending on that information, didn't look online, and made other plans, so I know it cost them at least two campers. Maybe that's not a big deal but considering the cost of summer camp, I'd say it's not a good thing.
The other camp was run by a teacher at my children's school. In the spring, information about the camp was sent home with every child. Teachers talked about it with their classes. It was in the PTA newsletter as well.
In short: We all knew about it, knew the dates, times, prices, offerings, etc. We knew about it and could plan as early as March, while with the other camp, unless you went looking for the info, you'd not have been able to plan anything until late April.
With a seasonal approach, if you snooze, you could lose. You may have the content but if you don't get it out in front of your audience, what good is it going to do?
A Few Things To Consider
Without going into a lesson combining science and geography and throwing in some cultural relativism, it's important to realize that the way your world looks to you at this very moment isn't necessarily the way it looks to someone else.
Christmas in Australia takes place in their summer, for example, and right now while it's hot as heck in North Carolina, it's winter down in Oz. Some holidays occur on different dates in different places. Mother's Day, for example, is in May in the U.S. but in March in the UK.
Obvious points really, but they're points we sometimes forget when marketing. The results of that oversight can be offensive and cost you business. There's being politically correct just for the sake of appearances and there's being culturally sensitive because it shows an awareness that your way isn't the only way that matters.
What Might Look Odd
(I say might because I've seen enough creativity in this industry that I can tell you that for everything I say will look strange, someone can work it so that it looks perfectly natural.)
Building links with the anchor for something that's completely out of season (like Valentine's Day anchors going up in a great number in April, for example.)
Putting up content about how to enjoy your summer on an Australian blog in July.
Putting up content about something that happened last month and won't happen again for another 11 months.
When to Implement Can Be Tricky
James Agate had a great point about how having success with both your customers and the search engines is difficult with just one release date:
Customers will want to read your content about a particular seasonal event much closer to the event than you need to start your link building so you need to ensure you have the lead-in times planned out correctly. You can’t sell the seats on a plane after it’s taken off.
This really is critical. You need time for the links to start coming in but most people don't want to read about back to school organization in December.
If this was a post about anything other than link building, it would be much easier to define when implementation should occur. You can get PPC up fast, as I've said. You can create content quickly and socialize it immediately. Links, however, take more time to happen, unless you're willing to take a dangerous and shoddy approach.
Just to add to the complexity, there are other factors that would dictate how much lead time you need.
If your seasonal product is incredibly competitive (like Valentine's Day flowers), then you'll probably need to start earlier than if you were dealing with something where the pool of competition was much, much smaller.
Agate offered another great piece of advice, which is to ramp up link building to the homepage:
It would be more prudent to ramp up link building to the homepage for example, with the view to then having a seasonal look to the site and links to the seasonal page from there. You could also link to products or categories that perhaps sell well in the upcoming seasonal event but aren’t necessarily just for that time of year i.e. stationery sells well just before children go back to school but it wouldn’t be all that odd, to be proactively link building to those pages most of the year round, in the way that trying to score links to artificial Christmas tree pages in the middle of summer would be.
Summary
Seasonality is a defined part of many businesses' sales cycles but even if it's not part of yours, it doesn't mean that you can't harness the upswing in seasonal trends and build more links for your site. It does take planning and a lot of upfront work though, so be prepared to get ultra-organized early on.
Article Post @
Search Engine Watch
Every day, individuals who are new to SEO need to learn the basics of link building and important concepts and strategies within a campaign. This link building 101 post will continue the education of new link builders, this time on the topic of how to perform a backlink analysis.
Being able to perform a thorough backlink analysis is a fundamental element to any link building campaign. What's more, running backlink analyses can help develop your fundamental knowledge of links, link building strategies, and link quality.
What are the elements of a thorough backlinks analysis:
- Total number of links
- Number of unique domains
- Linking domains vs total links
- Anchor text usage and variance – branded, keyword rich, etc.
- Fresh/incoming links
- Page performance
- Link quality*
*Learned only by experience, running multiple backlink analyses, and manually checking links.
The Importance of Link Portfolios
A link portfolio (or profile) is a fancy way of saying all the sites currently linking to your site. Links matter. Big time.
So, when you run a backlink analysis on a site – whether it's your own or a competitor's – you're looking at the websites linking to that website, in what manner, and to what page.
And, since we understand Google's algorithmic reliance on links, we know that a website's ability to rank in Google is largely dependent on the websites linking to it (i.e., its backlink portfolio).
So, before you can even begin to consider a link building campaign you need to understand the site's current link portfolio. There are a variety of tools to help you along this path:
All of these tools will do the job properly, and choosing one mainly comes down to a matter of preference. If possible I would recommend using two or more of these tools to ensure you're getting as much information as possible.
Currently I use Open Site Explorer and MajesticSEO, so the walkthrough will be based largely on the use of these two tools, and the screenshots you see will be pulled from these as well.
Getting Started
To start, you simply go to your chosen tool's website and plug in the target website's URL. This will immediately take you to an overview page, in which the target website's backlinks are summarized in full.
I highly recommend that if this is your first time ever using a backlink explorer, you take 30 minutes to an hour and simply click around and familiarize yourself with the various tabs, graphs, functions, filters, etc.
Being comfortable with the tool is extremely important in understanding the data it can reveal, as well as the implications therein.
Once you've acclimated to your new SEO tool, the first element you should analyze of the site's backlink portfolio is the total number of links.
1. Total Number of Links
Open Site Explorer:
This will be at the top of your screen once you've searched the URL. Red highlight is mine.
Majestic Site Explorer:
Once again, highlighted in red.
(Note: there's a large discrepancy here. Majestic commonly reports more links than Open Site Explorer, but in this case it seemed to be picking up some recent ads as links, creating a large inflation.)
Understanding total link count is a good start to understanding how competitive a website is currently (especially if you're looking at competitors link counts, too). However, it's easy to spam a high link count with tactics such as sitewide links, article directories, blog comments, etc. So, total links definitely doesn't correlate to a strong link profile, or high rankings.
The next step, which helps understand link quality, is to check the number of linking domains as well.
2. Number of Unique Domains
Unique domains are typically a better metric than link count, since multiple links from the same domain are typically considered to have a drop off in value.
Of course other factors weigh in, such as site relevance, quality, anchor text, link placement, etc. Still, looking at top-level metrics you want to ensure you're analyzing linking domains as well as total links.
3. Linking Domains vs. Total Links
Linking domains versus total links is done by simply comparing the two numbers we've taken a look at thus far. If you have thousands upon thousands of links per linking domain, that could definitely be a red flag for an unnatural link portfolio. And again, it's accepted that link value drops off as you accumulate more and more links from a single domain.
The goal should be to have as even a ratio as possible when comparing unique domains versus total links, although obviously there will always be considerably more total links than linking domains. A single site-wide link can quickly inflate this ratio, and should be something to look out for and avoid when it makes sense.
4. Anchor Text Usage and Variance
For Open Site Explorer we click on this tab:
This tab displays a list of anchor text terms, the number of linking domains using that specific anchor text, and the number of total links using that anchor text.
For Majestic:
Majestic will also provide you with a list of anchor text complete with linking domains, total links, along with trust metrics.
Alternatively, you can also flip to Majestic's summary tab, which will actually have an anchor text graph available:
There are two things you should be looking for when you're examining anchor text – usage and variance.
First, you can tell based upon links which keywords have been optimized (and potentially over optimized). Doing a quick search in Google based upon the link anchor text should tell you how a site is performing, and reveal potential insights.
Once again, diversity is key here. Although many link builders used keyword rich anchor text (i.e., "dog beds" or "diesel generators") as the link in recent years, with the implementation of Penguin 2.0 it's more important than ever before to ensure diversity and branding (i.e., your brand name instead of the money keyword you want to rank for).
Understanding the current anchor text portfolio for a website is extremely important before launching a campaign – you want to ensure that branding is by far the largest piece of the pie, and that any keyword rich anchor links are used intelligently.
Furthermore, you can make sure to avoid anchor text that's already been overused, and implement other anchor text that's been underutilized.
5. Fresh/Incoming Links
Once again there are tabs within both Open Site Explorer and Majestic that will show you fresh or recently discovered links:
Both of these tabs sort by newest found and display their native link data. Majestic also displays a handy graph for quick reference and monitoring incoming links by day or date range:
Fresh link data is important for several reasons – you can see recent links built which can let you decipher current/recent strategies, if suspicious link building activities are underway, and generally notice any unaccounted for large spikes in link velocity (amount of links built in a short time).
I would definitely say that seeing thousands – or even hundreds – of links built per day would raise a red flag, unless the website in question is sizable and well known.
Again, fresh links is a great metric to check if a change in ranking has happened recently. Although often Google's algorithm and subsequent actions are outside of our control, we should always be aware what's going on with our own sites as well as competitors.
6. Page Performance
Here is where we look into the breakdown of links per page, and see which pages currently have the most links.
This is extremely important in understanding current site performance, especially for various resource pages. This can help guide discussion about underperforming pages, pages that are currently doing well (and perhaps why), and where the focus of a link building campaign should or should not be.
A couple screenshots of with the page tab highlighted:
Clicking over to these tabs will give you a list of the top link grossing pages per site, from largest to smallest.
Typically the home page will be number one. The top linked pages feature is absolutely great for quickly finding previous wins and shedding a little light on what might work well and prove linkable within a vertical.
I've also found it to be an absolutely great metric to break down competitor wins – you can see what resources they've created that have resulted in high link counts, and use that to brainstorm resource creations of your own.
7. Link Quality
This is the time I spend manually clicking around, exploring links, and simply checking everything out. Usually it's only a thirty minute endeavor to make sure I'm working beyond the tools, and have truly dived into some of the data.
Sure, it's nice to have various tools helping you understand a website's link portfolio, but in all honesty if you're not spending some time manually examining links yourself, you're missing the point.
Here's what I generally look at when checking out link quality:
- Relevance – including the site, page, and link.
- The domain author/Page Rank of the site and the page authority/Page Rank of the page (assuming the relevance checks out).
- The placement of the link – natural versus shoe-horned, helpful for the user versus obvious link building, etc.
- The anchor text.
- The overall believability of the link – how editorial does it seem?
As you spend time working on link building campaigns and examining backlinks you'll find there's a natural instinct that lets you know when a link is good and when a link is bad. Obviously, spam itself is easily identifiable. Link sense can develop well beyond that, however, and help you find suspicious links that can fool tools. Often we refer to this as the smell test – because you know when a link stinks.
Taking this All to Excel
All of this data from each tab can be exported into excel as CSVs for further revelations and extrapolations. This gets a bit more advanced, but is a must if you're going to be doing a comparison of multiple sites, or wish to do a competitive analysis with your site and a competitor.
Here's a great guide on competitor backlink analysis in Excel. Here's another advanced guide using Open Site Explorer and link intersect – definitely worth a read if you're looking to learn competitive analysis. And finally, three phenomenal Excel spreadsheets for link analysis.
There are many guides that can walk you through how to export this data, combine each into an Excel spreadsheet, and even do a competitive analysis.
It's definitely worth exploring, but a bit more than I can go into detail here. It's also a bit more advanced, so make sure you're comfortable with backlink audits and analysis before you being exporting it all to Excel and playing around.
Recap
Backlink analysis is one of the first skills you should learn as a budding SEO practitioner and link builder. Being able to confidently dive into your website's (or a competitor's) link profile will help you learn more about the SEO industry and gain much needed experience.
For basic analysis, you should be looking at:
- Total number of links
- Number of unique domains
- Linking domains vs total links
- Anchor text usage and variance
- Fresh/incoming links
- Page performance
- Link quality
There are so many possible opportunities for insight within a backlink analysis. You can learn:
- Competitor's link building strategies
- Competitor's top performing resources
- Underutilized link opportunities with your own site
- Viable link strategies within your industry
- Over-optimized anchor text
- Links that need to be removed
- Etc.
So go get your hands dirty and dive into your first backlink analysis today!
Article Post @
Search Engine Watch
Posts
