Posts on State of Search about ‘Linkbuilding’

Link Building in a Post Penguin World #seslon #seslondon

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We’re at SES London 2012 – so here is the first in our series of posts this week.

Link Building in a Post Penguin World

Moderator:

Bill Hunt, SES Advisory Board; President, Back Azimuth Consulting

Speakers:
Kevin Gibbons, UK Managing Director, BlueGlass Interactive
Paul Madden, Owner, Automica Limited

Session #1 – Kevin Gibbons – www.blueglass.co.uk, @kevgibbo

Links have existed long before Google, we just didn’t think in those ways. Links prior to the art of Linkbuilding as we know it existed were earned not necessarily placed via news, web portals, open directories and general web content.

Along came Page Rank > Money  – and we have eventually ended up with a post panda apolcalypse  launching a host of theories, ‘much needed’ cleanup, and the start of a different way of thinking when it comes to link building. (more…)

Announcement: New URL Submitter Tool from Majestic SEO

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After a week of smaller announcements, today Majestic SEO announce a new URL Submitter Tool.

This new feature is one of the most requested and is available for free and paid for accounts. The new submitter tool allows users to influence which URL’s are crawled and add those that may not have been picked up…yet!

With over 4 Trillion plus URL’s crawled in the historic index, the ability to add specific URL’s means that you help decide on a worldwide scale which URL’s get crawled first.

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Visualising the Link Graph, How Natural are you?

Visualising the Link Graph

Last Year I wrote a post about 16 ways to visualise back link data, to be honest I could have listed a hundred but didn’t for two reasons, one blog writing does takes time and two I listed ones I often used and found productive in one form or another.

Of course the landscape in search has changed over the past 12 months with the obvious question, how reliable is link data when a disavow tool has been introduced?

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2013 – How Will You React?

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“To every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction” ~ Issac Newton

I recently found an old blog post written by ex-Verve Search genius, Sam Murray. I say ‘old’, he wrote it two years ago, but we all know that’s light-years in SEO world. Sam was waxing lyrical about guest posting, and how SEOs should start using it as their prime link building strategy.

“By featuring on high quality blogs you get the traffic and social interaction from regular readers, and the possibility of being tweeted about or liked by visitors.” – Sam Murray

However, back in the day, Sam was one of few who were convinced that the effort involved in guest posting was worth the juice. Many SEOs, specifically the ones who were more interested in quantity than quality, completely ignored the concept altogether. This meant that for Sam, myself and a handful of other companies and individuals who invested in guest posting experienced fantastic response rates. I remember, only 12 months ago, when I’d contact site owners with guest posts and they’d apologise for not being able to pay me for the content. They really struggled to grasp that I was happy to give them the content even though I received ‘nothing’ in return. (more…)

Easy step-by-step guide to finding low quality links

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2012 was an amazing year for link building, a lot changed and to be honest I’m glad those changes happened. I think it is necessary in order for our industry to grow up and be taken more seriously in the marketing space. A lot of us add a huge amount of value to businesses, it’s time we were recognsised for that rather than relying on and being remembered for low quality tactics that should never have worked in the first place.

The first step for many is to undo the work previously done and this starts with finding the low quality links that may have been built many years ago. If you’ve been hit by a penalty, then you’ll also probably want to get them removed. This post is a step-by-step guide to finding what are likely to be low quality links.

This post will use a number of tools to help, however you need to use your own judgement and common sense too and not remove links which are clearly not hurting. I heard stories of people emailing Yoast to remove links from his site – that is just crazy. (more…)

Planning a Link Building Campaign

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Whilst some of my more successful link building efforts have been more along the lines of opportunistic and ad-hoc rather than planned to perfection, I still prefer to plan as much as I can wherever possible. Link building can be hit and miss at the best of times so you want to do everything you can to make sure you stand as much chance as possible of getting the links you want.

This post will outline the top level process that I’d recommend for planning a link building campaign with lots of things you need to consider. (more…)

5 Reasons Your Outreach Emails Suck

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If there’s one thing worse than getting a rejection email, it’s getting no email at all. At least you know where you stand with a rejection email; the angle you chose wasn’t relevant enough, they’ve already covered that event, they don’t accept guest posts. But when you get no response, that’s agony! How are you supposed to know what you’re doing wrong? Well, here are a few things to consider. Maybe you’ll even learn how to write outreach emails that don’t suck. (more…)

3 Ideas to Connect with your Audience and Attract Links #RCS style

Ideas to connect with your audience and attract links RCS Style

Content marketing is one of the growing trends at the moment, that although not new is gaining much more force as part of the SEO process as a consequence of Google’s Penguin and Panda updates and the understanding that to obtain consistent beneficial results in SEO we need to focus on developing a strategy to make our sites valuable and attractive so our audience reference and link them spontaneously instead of looking for shortcuts to gain links and a non-deserved popularity to rank faster.

Wil Reynolds’ Real Company Stuff (#RCS) and Rand Fishkin’s Strategic Side of Content Marketing presentations along with Tom Critchlow speech at MozCon covered this topic, called and inspired SEOs for a change. Wil even created an example showing how #RCS works developing “how your favorite startups make money” that has earned in a month and a half more than 1,400 links, some of them from highly authoritative sources such as Inc., Mashable and even MIT: (more…)

The 3 Link Building Tools I Always Use (And How I use Them)

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I’m often asked what link building tools I use.  The truth is, that I don’t use that many and the ones that I do use aren’t that fancy.  There are loads of tools out there and the market is certainly very saturated right now, but I always find myself using the same tools over and over again.  I admit that my process for link building may not be the most mind boggling, but it works for me even if it does take a bit longer!

In this post I’m going to talk about the tools that I use the most and for fairness, include a few others that I use but perhaps not as often. (more…)

Getting the attention to get your article into the wrap up posts

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Linkbuilding is still regarded as one of the most important factors when it comes to getting your site ranking well in search engines, especially Google. How to get those links always is one of the big issues. There is always the option of e-mailing websites trying to get a link on them, but that in most cases is a lot of work, plus you really need to do that right, doing it wrong is a waste of your valuable time. Other options are off course doing “linkbait” or there is the option of using services like Eightfold Logic Linker, which helps you find ‘suitable’ linkpartners. But still the best way to get the most valuable links is to write great content which others will pick up.

The question however is: how do you know what others will pick up? There are many “wrap up posts” out there, posts which give you a quick overview of what has been written around the web. The big sites are doing it on a daily basis, others weekly. These kind of wrap ups are very useful, for the readers to filter out what was important to read in the enormous amount of blog posts out there, as well as for the blog owners who through these posts have a way of spreading their content. And getting links…

But getting your article mentioned in these posts isn’t that easy. There are a lot of factors which decide if your article is worth it to be mentioned. Which factors? Well, why not ask the sources directly? I asked Barry Schwartz, who is responsible for the “Searchcap” wrap up on Searchengineland and who makes wrap ups for SERoundtable, Danny Goodwin, who collects stories for the “Search Week in Review” on Searchenginewatch and Susanne Koch, who does the weekly “Pandia Search Engine News Wrap-up” together with her husband Per Koch, on Pandia.com. Combined with my own experience on this (I’ve made these kind of posts several times, the State of Search news roundup which will return in 2011 is an example of that) you can get a pretty decent overview of what you should be doing to get ‘in sight” of these influentials. (more…)

How Google may Discount Infographic Link building

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The root of this discussion stems from this comment from Matt Cutts in an interview with Eric Enge back in July. Straight away there were people saying the sky was falling on infographics and SEOs should stop doing them.  Even I found this an over-reaction and I’m not the world’s biggest fan of infographics.  I’ve seen some truly awful ones that are not only badly designed, but are just plain wrong in their fact checking and presentation of data.

There is an argument here though – if these “bad” infographics still get links, which was the goal of it, it doesn’t matter.  If the goal of an infographic is to get links and it does, one could argue that the design, data and presentation doesn’t matter.  But that is me talking as a pure link builder.  I feel this is the type of thing that Matt is getting at with his comments.

But let’s take a closer look at his comments and try to not just interpret them, but say what this could mean in reality.  I’d like to open a discussion about what Matt actually said and if they really are looking to discount these links, how could they do it? (more…)

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