If not, Danny Sullivan eloquently covers it in detail in his post Google’s Results Get More Personal With “Search Plus Your World“.  If you only read one post on the topic, that’s the one to read.

But this column is called Link Week, and, since as most of you know by now I have been helping content and content seekers find each other since way before Google existed, I could not be happier. I had just about given up on telling people their linking and content publicity strategies should not be too Google centric.

Putting all your eggs in the Google basket was, is, and always will be a strategic mistake. I’ll repeat once more the statement I make at conference after conference: If Google vanished tomorrow would you go out of business? If your answer is yes, you have been going about link building and content marketing wrong, and I’ll gladly debate anyone any time as to why.

As a side note, I get about 6 million pageviews a year to my site, and Google is responsible for less than 6% of those visits. And I rank in the top three for all my key terms. Google can disappear like D.B. Cooper and I’ll keep on truckin.

I’ve accomplished this over time by developing a collection of thousands of inbound links that point at the hundreds of articles and columns and webcasts about link building I’ve created.

I’ve also freely offered to write for the major search industry publications. What you call link bait today we called sharing good stuff yesterday. I’ve never been shy about saying the pursuit of links should be for people first, engines second.

You can do both, actually, as I’ve also purposely created contemt for professors to use at universities, and sought out interviews and attention from the key Internet news venues.

But these are just a few of the many linking related strategies I’ve used over the years that were designed to build recognition of my site, name, brand, and send me a trickle of traffic.

Now, even though Google may be my single biggest source of traffic at about 360,000 pageviews per year, all those links I’ve gotten over the years collectively send me 5.6 million pageviews per year.

Simple analogy: It’s easier to get a million people to give you a dollar than it is to get one person to give you a million dollars.

Still, everyone keeps chasing that million dollar #1 ranking at Google. Big mistake. The less you chase it, the more it is likely to come right to you.  I’m living proof.

But back to “Search Plus Your World”.

Having made my case clear above, I must also state that I do have a Google+ page, and I wouldn’t for a moment suggest you ignore what Google is doing right now.

The key is don’t panic, and plenty of people are, because they have no idea where this will all lead, and exactly how it affects their SEO or link building strategies.

With this in mind here are the simplest linking strategies I’m recommending in response to Google’s launch.

1.  Now would be the worst possible time to abandon the traditional high value static link as a marketing strategy. Why?

Permanence. Social is fleeting. (Hey check this out, wow did you see this, hey read this article.) This is a far cry from a few thousand website curators putting together vetted lists of resources in any given vertical. I’m about to launch a site about hearing impairment, and my linking blueprint for this launch includes over 20 different strategies, with social being just one of them, and GPYW will be in there, but not my core long term ranking tactic.

Without permanent merit based links earned by content quality, no site will rank well.  You cannot social your way to the top, just like you can’t press release your way to the top, or directory your way to the top, or article blast your way to the top.

2.  Simple.

If you don’t yet have a Google+ page, create one, and if your website’s pages don’t have G+ buttons, add them.

It’s free, easy, and you should have already had one anyway. Here’s mine. I didn’t create this profile because I was after any linking related credit. I did it because it’s just silly not to.  It doesn’t change my core ethos and strategies towards linking, it simply augments it and takes advantage of the ever widening presence Google is creating.

3. Learn exactly how Google Plus Your World works, so you can start building your audience on Google+. It isn’t going away, and it isn’t that hard. I’ve barely used it and somehow I’m in over 2,000 other people’s circles? How did that happen?  I’ll take it.

So take the time to learn how Google Plus Your World works, from  avariety of sources, not just Googles’ official announcement about it. For example, here’s a great slide show tutorial from the Washington Post.

4. Most importantly, now is the time to expand your link thinking process beyond the traditional link building tactics that have slowly but surely stopped working with each passing year.

If you’ve read my work, you know I never used directories, article databases, press releases, swaps, paid links, or networks. They are too easily gamed and spammed. And I never dropped in rank with each passing Google update, because my link profile was real. I’m not that smart and I don’t know anything you don’t. I just chose to stick to a merit based path, while others chose something else.

Lastly, while I don’t usually give out my private linking secrets, do you know where I got most of my traffic last week? I wrote a list of link marketing tips for a private email based newsletter in the automotive industry.

That private email newsletter went to 35,000 people, many of whom had websites. That email also had a link to my site in it.

None of this had a thing to do with Google, Google+, Google Plus Your World, or any other search engine or social network. But it was still link building, or more accurately, link marketing. And it was a nice bit of traffic. That’s where you need to be headed in 2012.

There are a thousands ways to get links and traffic that have nothing to do with search. While you pursue your Google+ traffic, why not augment that thinking with ideas and strategies like mine above. The goal isn’t Google, the goal is staying in business.

Before I dive into predictions for 2012, let’s take a look back at where I’ve been wrong and right over the years. I have a fairly good track record, and I like to take a few chances with these, rather than taking the easy way out with predictions like “links will still matter”.

Footer Links Get The Boot?

I was quite wrong about search engines devaluing all footer link networks. As easy as these are to spot, it baffles me that some sites can achieve high rankings via this spammy tactic. Check out this amazing expose blog post from Joost de Valk.

Prediction for 2012: This will be the year the footer link truly hits the ignore bucket. This tactic has been around since the early 90s with “free web counters” that sneakily linked to other sites. Then came WordPress themes, then site-wides, blogroll spam, footer links and many other tricks. Key word: tricks.

I am frankly amazed footer links have not been blown up. Like they should have been way back when school newspapers first used them like this below.  Sorry, I’m not telling you the school.

Paid links on a school newspaper web site

Directory Links Take A Dive

I was both right and wrong about general (non vertical) directory links losing all value. While some of the worst directories have finally died a welcome death, I have still witnessed sites improve rankings via submissions to weak no-name directories. It will stop someday, it just didn’t in 2011.

Hopefully, 2012 is the year the generic link directory to nowhere and everywhere stops having any effect at all. How can any algorithm take seriously a directory that nobody uses other than the people submitting links to them?

Sorry, Link-o-Matic is ficticious

The name of the game here is curated verticality. And it’s what I’ve been going after since the day I started in 1994.

Name me one single mass general directory that comes anywhere close to truly organizing and cataloging the Web. None of them can. Yahoo! couldn’t. DMOZ couldn’t. The Web’s very nature is distributed links pointing at expert content. Single source directories are antithetical to the nature of the web’s design.

Prediction for 2012: Watch for hundreds if not thousands of small highly curated and vetted resource lists to appear. In fact, they already do, and have for years.

I’m not going to give away the farm here, but for a recent project I gathered over 80 veterinary resource collections based at .orgs, coms, and .edus. These are small curated lists. And they matter. They matter more that you’d ever imagine.

Notice the link on the bottom right: Veterinary Product Vendor Sites. 

Which of the two directories would you rather be in?  Link-O-Matic above or this one below?

Facebook Brand Pages Build Likes & Links

I was wrong thinking any company with an existing and well trafficked website could forgo having a Facebook page.

While not an absolute necessity for every site, (are enough people really going to become fans of the Preperation H Hemmoroid Treatment Facebook page to matter?) the sheer mass and potential matriculation across the Facebook links space make it a worthwhile alternative mode to reach customers.  At least for most brands it does.

Prediction for 2012:  Dare I say it, every brand not currently on Facebook will be by the end of 2012.

Please Like Us - We Stop Itching!

Twitter Link Cred

I was right about Twitter having a far smaller effect on organic search rank that most claimed it would. Tweeted links have yet prove to me that their rank has improved due to being tweeted. Tweets are good for quick drive by traffic and that’s about it.

The only Twitter impact I see in organic results is people with Twitter credibility will see their twitter profile rank quite high. I was a reluctant Twitter user several years ago, but I can’t argue with the fact that my Twitter profile ranks at position 4 for a search on my name, and I’ve done nothing other than be cautous about who I follow and what I tweet.

My Twitter profile Ranks #4

Prediction for 2012: People will stop chasing followers and work on sculpting a more authoritative Twitter profile. What this means is instead of following 17,000 people and having 17,000 followers, people will realize that to have any influence at all, you need have more followers than you follow, and you need to tweet about things other than how wonderful your most recent column was. Share the good, curate the helpful, and the followers will come.

Anchor Text Gets Devalued

I was right about anchor text being devalued. This was never a reliable signal, because it was too SEO centric a signal and too easily gamed. You’ve heard me say before, in 17+ years of requesting links, I’ve never once asked for anchor text.

The most trustworthy content on the Web is not going to give over editorial rights to you so you can anchor your way up the Google ladder. We are all the Hemingway’s of our own content, so don’t tell me how to link to you.

The engines more than likely did not realize just how far people would go to try and manipulate anchor text, but the ironic thing about this is the more you try to manipulate your anchor text, the more you create a backlink profile that looks suspicious when compared to the mass of historical anchor text data the engines have to study.

Prediction for 2012: Services like these below slowly but surely start to vanish.

Two Final Predictions

First, people will discover the fantastic and free linking data available from blekko. It’s incredible.

Second, people will realize the futility of relying on search engines for all their traffic, and put more effort into link marketing tactics and strategies that have nothing to do with search results, like this.

Don’t laugh, their last client’s QR code baked cookies resulted in a 40% scan and install rate for a mobile app. Forty percent. Via an edible baked cookie with a QR code on the icing.  And yes, it was my idea and it had nothing to do with search engines. Here’s one they baked for me:

Baked Cookie with QR Code

Sometimes us early adopters who have been around a while can see the forest for the trees. Have a great 2012!

There are some interesting lessons in it that can be applied to link building, especially related to unexpected and random events that not only affect people, the economy, news, and markets, but if you think it through, weblinks.

It’s rarely discussed for its organic ranking effect, but there can be no doubt random and unexpected events have a dramatic effect on the web’s link graph.

Some link spikes occur as a result of a news event that is shocking, like what has unfolded over the past few weeks with the Penn State football program, and as a related entity, affected a disadvantaged youth program created by Jerry Sandusky named The Second Mile.

How many of you had ever heard of SecondMile or been to that website before the news broke about what went on inside the cocoon of that program? I’m a college football fanatic, and I’d never heard of it in my life.

Look at this early November blurb from the PennLive website. Note the seemingly proud comment about pageviews.

On Friday, The Patriot-News was the first news organization to report that former Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky had been charged with (removed by me)… Since then, the national media have descended on Happy Valley and our own coverage has drawn 6 million page views on PennLive.com.

(Is a sexual abuse column’s impact on pageviews something to mention at all? Pageviews are not news)

Bad News = Links = A Sad Phenomena

As a father of a nine year old boy who has been to many camps, I fought back the urge to drive to Pennsylvania and beat Sandusky senseless. Instead, as a long time link builder who has seen and studied link spikes for many years, the first day I heard about the SecondMile website, I plugged the SecondMile URL into my backlink analysis tools, just for the sake of curiosity.

I knew what was about to happen to that URL, I just wanted some quasi-empirical data. Look at the below table and graph:

Why The Engines Must Differentiate Link Spikes

In its over ten years of existence, the SecondMile site was not exactly a link magnet. But then something newsworthy happened, and in 4 weeks, it increased its inbound links over tenfold. We all know what happened. And sadly, it’s human nature to be attracted to bad news; the worse the better.

Now, in a Web where a social layer of link sharing dominates daily new link flow, the engines are going to have to figure out just what these spikes mean and if they matter – how, when, and why. I don’t envy them.

Not to be cynical, but a similar link spike happened many years ago when there was a mine collapse in Utah. The Utah Mining Association website, which never had more than a handful of links and visitors, suddenly found itself in a hailstorm of links, clicks, and media inquiries. All due to an unfortunate accident.

Online, bad news breeds links. It was the same with all the websites that sprouted after the Deepwater Horizon oil Rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

I don’t want to stay stuck on the bad news side of the link spike fence, so let’s also remember that good news following bad news can sometimes spark new sites that are trying to help. Think of the new sites that launched after Hurricane Katrina or the East Asian Tsunami. New relief sites never seen before sprout up and attract links by the thousands, helping accomplish some good. This is the positive side of link spikes.

What if a sports team that seemingly had no chance to win a championship. suddenly had one of those miracle seasons nobody expected?

Any of you old enough to remember the Amazin’ Mets’ of 1969 know that if that happened today, a new website call AmazinMets.com would have been launched, along with many others, and out of nowhere, we would have an entire new universe of sites and content devoted to a subject that was considered an impossibility 8 months earlier.

Randomness As A Link Building Strategy

I’m being facetious (sort of), but if all you want is links, and you don’t care how, then convince your CEO to fabricate something horrible or incredible about the company, call CNN, and Tweet it. Watch the ensuing frenzy of links come flowing in.

Then, ask yourself if these links should have any impact on any aspect of Web search, news search, blog search, or any other search. The nature of the Web right now seems to gravitate towards sharing and linking to the sensational. As I mentioned earlier, let’s hope the engines account for this.

Two final thoughts…

Part of SecondMile’s slogan contains the words “Providing Children with Help…”.  Those words appear on 380 million websites, but now, with their 612 links, SecondMile.org ranks first for that phrase. This was not in any way intentional or part of any SEO strategy.

It was random and could have happened to any other site with any other slogan that found itself embroiled in controversy. But it’s a perfect example of the faultyness of the randomness of link spikes and unintended organic consequences.

Lastly, did you know hurricanes have already been named for upcoming years? Check out this page at NOAA. I’ll bet you didn’t know that in 2012 the 1st named storm of the season will be “Alberto”.

Take a look at this website. This site is a fine line example of planning for future randomness. None of us can know which storms will become Hurricanes, which Hurricanes will make landfall, and which hurricanes will cause destruction to the extent that websites and organized efforts to help will be needed.

But a forward thinking marketer recognized that sooner or later, one of those named storms is going to bring with it a catastrophe. At least their goal is to help people.

That’s smart planning for future random link spikes.

Let’s also remember that you don’t need a real or manufactured tragedy or sensationalist linkbait to rank well. You don’t have to piggy back on bad news. You can capitalize on current events in many ways. They don’t all have to be slimy.

A webpage can link to another webpage in several ways, from the basic text link like this, http://searchengineland.com, to a graphical link via an image or logo. Widgets are often embedded with links, and the old free-webpage-counter-with-a-sneaky-hidden-link trick is alive and well, if on life support.

Why Have One?

A linking instructions page is usually designed to encourage others to link to you, and to do so in a way that might be helpful from a search ranking perspective. In that regard, I suppose such pages are more hopeful than practical, since most people link to other pages however they want to.

One could argue that “linking to us” pages are redundant, since the Web is links and anyone can link to any page from any other page, any time, anywhere.

Then again, it’s true that once upon a time sites tried so hard to stop other sites from linking to them that it spawned still another site that discussed and linked to examples of the stupidity of such attempts to control links. See dontlink.com.

Bob could use some anchor text right about now

There’s a remarkable variety of linking instructions pages. Some are nearly poetic, while others are downright confusing. Some feel slightly threatening; others, on occasion, moronic – see: http://www.twobigdads.com/tandc.htm. (It actually says, “We reserve the right to withdraw any linking permission without notice.” Well then, how would I know to remove the link?)

Not to harp on the futility of trying to stop people from linking to a website, but why have a website in the first place if you don’t want links?

Why try to force me to link only to your homepage and then require permission (http://www.aegerion.com/terms-of-use.htm) before I can even do that (which means, BTW, that last sentence violated that site’s terms of use if a live link. See Section Three, and call the linking police).

Controlling The Uncontrollable

On a more serious note, it can be challenging for deep content sites to convey their preferences for how others should link to their content. My favorite example of a site that illustrates this challenge is the MedlinePlus site.

MedlinePlus has a Linking to MedlinePlus page that details the many ways another site can link to MedlinePlus content. As good as their implementation is, they still push things a bit, with a “How not to link to MedlinePlus” section that, while well meaning, is an exercise is futility.

Some sites provide HTML code that the linking site can copy and paste into its HTML. This seems logical but is also dangerous, since not everyone uses a universal flavor of HTML like they did in 1996.

Here are more examples of “Linking to Us” instructions pages, good, bad and ugly.

Good — http://www.yourghoststories.com/links-yourghoststories.php

I like the way this “how to link to our site” page says right up front that I can link to them however I want, and doesn’t beat me over the head with caveats and stipulations. They simply provide several linking options in a warm, friendly tone.

Not as good — http://www.symantec.com/about/profile/policies/legal.jsp

Symantec’s “Linking to Symantec’s Web Site” section is 260 words long, and is part of a 2,000+ word Legal Notice page. I’m not sure, but I think I need a lawyer before I link to them. I have to ask a lawyer to see if I need a lawyer. And just out of curiosity, what if I didn’t actually link to their site, instead I just placed a URL that wasn’t clickable? That’s not a link; it’s a citation. Now what?

Run for your life – http://www.univision.com/contentroot/uol/10portada/content/jhtml/NOMETA_tos_am_En.jhtml#pp

You’ll have to wade through a 17,844-word Terms of Use Page to find the “Conditions for Linking to Our Site” section, and at that point, my guess is any thoughts you had about linking to them just vanished.

Lastly, you don’t have to include a “Linking to Us” page on your site. I don’t on either of my sites, but they’ve still managed to attract thousands of links.

One could argue that the result of not giving linking instructions is a more natural backlink profile that will emerge over time. Then again, it’s also likely I’ve missed out on other linking opportunities because I didn’t encourage them more, or provide suggested methods for doing so.

Woody costume courtesy of http://www.justkidcostumes.com

For this column, I’ll focus on the most basic of event-driven link marketing techniques.

With this technique, you get out your calendar, look a few months ahead to see what’s coming, then look for ways to tweak your content in order to capitalize on the natural spike in interest, searches, and editorial coverage the holiday will bring with it.

With Halloween just 5 weeks away, it’s time you took a look at your site through a lens focused on Halloween, to see if there’s some aspect to what you do that would lend itself to new content devoted to Halloween.

As an example of what I mean, take a look a this page of costume ideas on the Disney Family Fun site. (Disclaimer: Disney is a client.)

Disney’s FamilyFun site technically has nothing to do with Halloween, but with their core content focus being on family fun, they do have a logical reason to create content for Halloween.

Here’s a few other examples.

There’s a gift basket for every season and holiday event it seems – just look at this page (not a client).

What exactly do gift baskets have to do with a holiday devoted to 8 year old’s ransacking of the neighborhood looking for skittles? Nothing. But Gourmet Gift Baskets is quite smart to create an opportunity where one might not traditionally think one exists.

And here’s one final example over at the Baby Center blog.

Now that’s adorable stuff. Halloween really has nothing to do with babies or toddlers, but nothing beats an 18 month old dressed as Woody from Toy Story. Hurry though, because the next 5 weeks will go by in a flash, and you need time to not just create content but also promote it.

The quick takeaway here is none of the above sites are about Halloween.

All of these sites would still exist if there was no such thing as Halloween, but…they were strategic and savvy about how to use Halloween as an event motivator to produce content that can inspire links.

This week’s column will hopefully spark some questions, answer a few others, and also point out some weird linking related phenomena, beginning with two examples:

• If this search is correct, Google indexes a little over (Use Dr. Evil voice) 1 billion pages from the Yahoo.com family of domains.
• But, if this search is correct, Yahoo only indexes 521 million of its own pages.

Can it be true that Google indexes more of Yahoo’s content than Yahoo! does, and if so, why and WTF?

On the flipside, Google indexes 4.1 billion pages of Google.com based content, but Yahoo only indexes 92 million pages of Google.com content.

This means Google’s bots are nicer.

Anchor text is my sore spot. Hate it. Overrated as on/off site signal, and always has been, especially in spammy verts with no solid IBLs. People sell anchor text linking services. Some are based in other countries. Why would I think this? Because of this search.

Over 18,000 use the anchor text “Please to click“? Really? Imagine how they’d mangle a keyword. Probably wouldn’t? Wrong. Have a look. I love this. Vigra? That’s just plain funny. Or intentional. Either way, it’s anchor text at it’s worst.

So, Google announced they weren’t going to keep throwing DMOZ a bone (below)

Google says bye bye to DMOZ

Is anyone really shocked?

With Yahoo now practically hiding it’s directory, and Business.com shutting down, what does this say about general all-encompassing Web directories when the big three aren’t considered front page properties? Two words: Vertical. Curated.

Hurricane Irene has raised a ruckus up and down the East coast. You’d think there would be lots of articles about hurricane preparedness, and you’d be correct.

And what does that search tell you about article directories? I’ve got the word “article” in my three word search term, and still, they can’t rank. Shouldn’t an article directory (if it is of any use), be able to rank somewhere when the word article is used in the search string?

But wait. Here’s another search. There they are. So the more spammy the vertical, the more crap Google will serve you? I like it. This seems so obvious as a way to vet where you submit content. Use it.

Good linking!

Stream

First, for the link builder, the obvious. You post a URL in the “Share What’s New” box, below and share it with “Public”, or with one or more of your Circles.

The Google+ Share Box

You’ve now technically “built links”, because those URLs will appear on the timeline of whoever you shared them with.

So what does this do for the URL that was just shared? I believe it depends on who did the sharing, who is in their stream, and any existing link graph Google has for the shared URL.

If it’s a brand new URL, that could lead to a crawl, and if the URL was of quality in the first place, that will lead to natural attraction of links, tweets, pluses, etc., just like any other site/URL would.

What about Re-sharing of URLs? Great question. I think re-sharing of URLs will help surface the content in the SERPs, but it’s too early to tell just how much, and if it will be just for people with Google accounts who are signed in.

What about the text you include with the URL?  Interesting thought. Quasi anchor text? semantic relvance? Both? Neither. What if they couple together Google Bookmarks with G+ shares?  That could be useful, too.

This much is true. Google will have a massive amount of private URL sharing data that they didn’t used to have and which nobody else will have, so we have to expect this will affect SERP placement of those URLs somehow. But maybe not for a while, as we all find our way with Google+ decide how we will use it.

For example, I use Twitter like a news feed of what I want to read, as I only follow people who I know write something worth reading.

On Google+, I behave differently right now, as I’m still excited at the newness of  it. I posted a picture of my 8 year old shooting a water gun at me, which I would never do on Twitter.

But this will change for all of us as we get more comfortable (or bored) within the Google+ environment.

Sparks

The obvious: You want your content (URLs) in sparks.

What remains to be seen is just how much control you will have on making that happen. And Google+ is letting a lot of crap in there right now. I saw a press release for a link building company in India in the Spark I created for link building and, well, have a look:

Incredibly NOT high value content I see in my Spark for Link Building

That’s in my Spark? Seriously? Pour water on it, it’s crap. Enough said.

Profile Links

The "Links" section from my G+ Profile

To the right is the Links section from my Google profile, accessible with Google+.

This really can’t be used for any meaningful link building for clients, but you can promote your own links.

I suppose I could add a list of client URLs, but I’m not that stupid. My clients don’t like being known that way, because they rank high, and because they’d rather keep people from nosing around their link profiles.

I’d suggest you add URLs here with extreme caution and discretion.

The Reading List

The remainder of this post is a reading list that I suggest will help bring some clarity to the fog that’s currently surrounding Google Plus and search rank.

I’m not saying all of these are correct or incorrect. They just provide perspective and detail I found useful.

I know after I had read these I felt much less worried that I was missing something important.

• Google+ 101: A Quick Introduction to Google’s Social Network

Nice post from Wendy Boswell at websearch.about.com that defines the Google+ terms: Circles, Streams, Hangouts, the Google+ toolbar, Profiles, +1′s, and Sparks.

• Today On Google+: Will Circles Work, Google+ And Search & Top Google+ Posts!

• How Google Might Rank User Generated Web Content in Google + and Other Social Networks

• How to Get Your Google+ Plus Posts Indexed in Google | Bill Hartzer

• My content in Sparks – Webmaster Tools Help

• Will the “Google +1 Like” thing affect SERPs? | Digital Point Forums

• How Google+ Affected Social Shares and +1 Adoption Rates | SEOmoz

• Interview With SEO Jill Whalen: Google +, SERP Spam & Much More! | NickLeRoy.com

• Study: Google +1 boosts organic clicks (and SEO)

• Google Plus Posts Showing Up in SERPs: now to rank them – Google – State of Search

• Google Plus Guides » google plus sparks

Yahoo Site Explorer Postscript

I commented over on the AdGooroo blog (which you should be reading, BTW) about Yahoo Site Explorer shutting down. Here’s a quick summary.

“While I’m sad to see YSE go, any of you who have attended my conference sessions at SMX over the years have heard me say that it was only a matter of time before the engines reduced and removed our ability to extract linking info. The link: operator was not an SEO birthright, it was a gift. Now that it’s gone, third party data analysis tools like Link Insight become an even more crucial part of the web marketer’s arsenal.”

I know Bing is going to have linking data, but that’s only for verified sites, meaning the third party arms race for linking data really is underway.

For those of you who didn’t know, I’ve been helping AdGooroo as they make substantial investments in their crawling infrastructure and capacity. I expect they will formally announce a enterprise-grade backlink explorer for Link Insight later this year.

It’s not that I don’t feel social signals have merit. They do. I used a wart removal/Yanni example as a way of making a point and elicit a laugh or two.

I’ll stand by my assessment of social signals impacting search results, which is that they are not ready for prime time, but there’s a more pressing matter I think all of us link builders might want to address. Explaining and giving examples of a wide variety of social signals and then setting expectations for clients on a client by client basis.

If a client is convinced he can social engineer his search rank to page one, then you either know and explain why this is or isn’t possible, and you share that with the client.

Telling them to tweet more often and follow the right people is not a social link ranking strategy. Yet I hear that exact tactic asked about in call after call.

I have told many clients that their best Twitter strategy is to tweet less, follow fewer people, stay within a tight vertical, and change the content they are tweeting about so it isn’t always just a URL self tweet.

I’ve recommended to several clients that they should kill their Twitter accounts altogether and start over, and to others, I’ve told them to launch multiple Twitter accounts for different purposes.

All of these strategies are viable depending on the situation and client. To clarify my point about followers, if you have 15,000 followers but are only following 76 people, and you see your tweets re-tweeted, this is a much different and more powerful signal set than if you have 15,000 followers, are following 17,000, and are tweeting all day long about anything. Do you understand why?

Your greatest asset to your clients is being able to help them see the best use for Twitter, and help them get from where they are to where they need to be.

It’s the same with Facebook. How discriminate are you with your likes, etc? Do you understand each of the possible interactions you can have within the Facebook environment and in the wild? It seems like there’s a new way to do something on Facebook every day.  Are you confident you know what each of these actions accomplish for your client?

Google +1 is actually one of the least confusing social signals and most useful. To use an old school metaphor, I see the social graph working best if it works like an old graphic equalizer, with sliders set differently for each social signal and each searcher/surfer.

A little Twitter for me, a lot for you, but none for my mom. Lots of Facebook for some, less for others, etc. Imagine each slider representing a potential social signal. There are maybe 10 or so today worth analyzing, but that will increase.

In my opinion, the key is that there cannot be a universal social algo. This is where the challenge begins. If there is no universal social algo, there is no universal social strategy.

As a linking strategist, I totally dig social buttons. Making it easier for people to rate, share, save and bookmark URLs is Nirvana for me. See my LinkMoses post Riding The Twitter Link Waves for a case study.

At the same time, I have never been a fan of “wisdom of the crowd” or “grouplink” signals. Go read Brandon Keim’s thought provoking column at WIRED - Sharing Information Corrupts Wisdom of Crowds, where a recent study showed when people can learn what others think, the wisdom of crowds may veer towards ignorance.

Social sharing was fine when it was not a search signal. And someday, maybe 20 years from now, it might make search more than just the social curiosity it is now. What bothers me about the social link graph is not that it’s so easily gamed/spammed. It’s that people can be part of each others social circles yet have very little in common.

Nice Pants Jim…No Really

My friend Jim is a great guy, and I’ve known him a long time. I’ve been in his house, seen his bookshelf and CD/DVD collection, and I know how he dresses and what he drives. And while I enjoy seeing him and catching up on the kids, life, sports, etc., I have no desire to let Jim’s Tweets and Likes and Plusses impact my search results.

Why? Well for one thing, his love for Yanni will be at war with my love for Nine Inch Nails, and isn’t that an interesting battle for the engines to make sense of?

There’s a bit of forced comformity lurking underneath the social link graph, and that is, in my opinion, evil.

This leads me list a few ideas that would give me more confidence in allowing a social circle to affect search results.

Twitter

It is impossible to follow more than 100 people and actually keep up with their tweetstream, unless you are unemployed. You know it’s true.  And if you aren’t unemployed, 90% of those tweets sail right by you because, well, you are working. I know from my own work day that I don’t have time for the noise, even from those 78 people I follow.

The fact that I have 4,000 followers via @ericward amazes me, but it also leads me to believe that rule #1 for Twitter signals must be  if you have anything of value to say or share, then you should have earned way more followers than people you follow. So as a starter, any Twitter user with who follows more people than they have following them is not a useful signal.

Facebook

I could write volumes on the flaws with Facebooks social signals, but here are two simple ones.  A few weeks ago, I had a call with a prospective client who had a “revolutionary diet product”.  I’d never heard of this product in my life, their Facebook page was just a couple months old, and yet it already had 78,000 “Likes”. When I asked how this could be, I was told they had been purchased.  They were paid likes.  I already knew this, but his willingness to admit it was almost refreshing in it’s dishonesty.

Problem 2: I can kind of understand why a product page like Advil has 12,000 Likes, but what if your product happens to be something that might be very helpful but is not something one wants to disclose they use? And I don’t just mean something like Preparation H (731 Likes, bless them all), what about a product for wart removal, or heaven forbid, genital wart removal? Or how about a Facebook page for a treatment facility for substance abuse? How eager are people to let the world know they are drug abusing hemorrhoid sufferers? Go ahead, Like that.

I’m joking, but the salient point here is there’s a psychology to social sharing and human nature that means not all things are as likely to be Liked. So, rule#1 for Facebook signals is there has to be a topic specific Like graph, and in some instances, no Like graph at all.

Google +1

I like being able to click the +1 button in the search results, but I also wonder just how this impacts corporate search marketing behavior. Does a company with 250,000 employees have an unfair advantage because they can send an internal note to their entire company asking them the click the +1 button? Is a competing company with only 10,000 employees at a disadvantage?

Remember, none of these +1′s are legitimate anyway (because they are mandated, not earned) and if we are looking only at social circles, wouldn’t IBM employees be more likely to have social circles that included other IBM employees? What’s the point of +1′ing your own company to your own social circle?

Now that the Google +1 button is lose in the wild, this will change things, hopefully for the better, but there remains another far greater problem with Tweets, Likes, and +1′s.

Old Gold Gets No Social Love

The problem is with older yet still awesome content. No matter how fantastic and evergreen it may be, it’s less likely to be Tweeted and Liked and Plussed, because back at the time it was created there were not as many people in the social web world to do so.

Here’s an example: Danny Sullivan’s incredible Introducing: The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors was Tweeted, Liked, and Plussed over 6,000 times in just 2 days. Compare that to the equally important column Danny wrote on Jun 2, 2008 titled Microsoft Wins Deal For Live Search To Be Default On HP Computers.

That was some really big news at the time. I mean Big News. Yet that column does not have a single Tweet, Like, or Plus. So, rule#1 for for Google +1 is there needs to be a way to reduce any bias against “older” content that didn’t have the same chance to be “Liked”, since the “Like” functionality didn’t exist yet.

Social linking and Liking is a beautiful thing. But it has miles to go before I will have confidence in the wisdom of the crowds and the button of the moment versus the wisdom of the algorithm.

(Note to @yanni:  It’s nothing personal and I’m sorry. My Mother has many of your CDs)

The overwhelming majority of websites have no business whatsoever being on the web at all.

Which sites? Any site with a business model predicated on search engines being their primary driver of traffic. If your business plan sounds something like this “We will launch a site about XYZ, buy a bunch of links, put out a bunch of press releases, outsource our link building, hire a bunch of content creators to push articles with anchor text all over the web, get high rankings, monetize with paid ads, and then wait for the buyout offers.

Fail.

You might make it for a little while, and congrats if you lasted long enough to find an idiot to buy your house of cards website while it still ranked, but the fact of the matter is any web marketing and linking strategy that bases its fortunes on being able to confuse, fool, or deceive algorithms is folly.

I have a unique perspective. In 16 years, I have created linking strategies for some of the most famous web brands of all time, as well as sites you have never heard of. From Amazon to Zillow, from Abercrombie to Communication Arts, from Art Nexus to PBS to TV Guide to National Geographic to Disney to hundreds of mom & pop sites doing just fine in their niches. Many of those linking strategies were created and executed long before Google existed.

When I was creating linking strategies in a world where those links had no impact on search rank, it gave me an incredible insight into what the engines wanted to see when Google came on the scene. Why? I saw my client’s sites all sitting pretty in top positions. That was never my intent, since I had no idea Google was coming on the scene at all.

So, that’s when I started studying links day and night. It was a decade ago. I wanted to know just what it was that I had done that ended up appealing to Google to the extent that my clients were ranking without ranking being my primary goal.

Since I am not a programmer, I had to hire people to help me. This is the first time I have written publicly about how I did this, but it’s important to share it to give you a foundation for where I’m coming from.

I had a friend at the University of Tennessee write me a series of perl scripts that pulled the top 100 results for any given search term from a multitude of different engines, and I had a second script written that would pull back links found pointing at all those sites.

A third script looked for citations (URLs included in text but not contained within <a href> tags. Because I did not sell my scripts, and because I only used them for private client work, and because they ran from an .edu box via telnet (yes, telnet), and because nobody was doing back link analysis yet, I lived in my own private linking data lab for years.

Most of the core things I learned then are still true today, and the most remarkable thing I learned was just how wrong all the link building service companies were, and still are. The fact that this week alone, I have already received more email spam than ever offering article marketing and directory submission and press release distribution services just drives that point home deeper. The last gasps of dying services. They know the end is coming. So long and good riddance.

Back to what I learned.

First, as I have mentioned before, during then 16 years I have performed linking campaigns, I have never once used any of the following so-called link building tactics:

• Mass Press Releases
• Article syndication via article databases
• General Directory submissions
• Blog commenting
• Paid reviews
• Link swaps
• Link networks

Why don’t I use these tactics? Because the data I compiled and studied indicated the sites that ranked highest did not use those tactics, while the sites that did use those tactics often saw a brief spike up the ladder and a permanent retreat.

The links I pursued were from non-spam, legit sites within the same subject matter as my client’s sites. Nowadays, my process continues to be perfected with the launch of Qbot2.0. Take a look at Qbot’s findings, it’s brilliant in its forehead slapping logic.

The Great Big Rub

Everyone has a right to launch a web business and seek their share of web riches. Everyone has a right to use whatever tactics they feel they need to use to compete and succeed. The rub is the millions of sites that launched did so with no unique compelling reasons for other sites to link to them. This spawned a multitude of services claiming to be able to help them overcome this obstacle. But the underlying problem still existed.

There are only so many ways you can produce unique content about golf clubs or steak houses or Prozac. And then you are right back where you were. Your site now has some marginal quality content that is indistinguishable from the 400 other sites that are doing the same thing.

How many different ways are there to describe a sand wedge anyway? Add a video? Why? I can too. You are not addressing the fundamental content problems you face. The search engines know your site is no different or better than the other 400 sites doing the same thing, so all your efforts to try and prove you are better are doomed.

A Couple Of Contrarian Findings

Here are a couple things I’ve learned that on the surface seem to make no sense at all, but then upon further research, make perfect sense.

Let me also state right up front that these are based on my own study of hundreds of thousands of URLs, not some formula that can provide concrete evidence I am right. There isn’t one. (I hope that made Michael Martinez happy:)

Smaller Can Be Better

The sites that have the greatest potential to help your organic search rank are almost always sites that will send you little direct referral traffic. To restate that, a site that sends you no visitors can end up dramatically improving your rank. How? I’ll save that for next column, but here’s a hint:

Why does this site rank #1 for used car prices? Because of a plentiful collection of links from sites like Cape Cod Classics Car Club and other links from smaller, subject-specific legitimate organizations with websites that exist not for SEO reasons, but for sharing information about highly specific topics for a specific and highly interested audience. I’ll bet that kbb.com link on the Cape Cod site is clicked a couple times a month, tops. It isn’t about clicks, it’s about the credibility and intent of the linking site and the credibility of it’s own inbound links.

Get Away From Google

Then more you design your linking strategies to increase your Google SERP traffic, the more risk you create over time if you succeed, or if you fail. Why? Because you have devoted resources, time and money to a single traffic source with no concrete evidence it will work, work for how long, or work at all.

I’m not saying ignore Google, but with Google getting ever more aggressive in how it values signals, you’d better be developing a counterpart linking strategy that does not depend on Google for traffic at all. That’s a hard concept to get your head around in a Google-centric world, but the less you depend on any engine for your success, the greater the likelihood you will succeed.

I’ve asked this question before, but it’s worth asking again: If all the search engines shut down tomorrow, would you survive, and if so, how would you change your linking strategy?

The great contrarian takeaway here is that by worrying less about Google, I’ve ended up ranking higher at Google for the terms I care about most, one of which is custom linking strategies, and of course, link building expert. Have a look. Not once in my life have I pursued links on other sites in any form or fashion that were designed to rank for those terms. But, and here’s the real win, I get less than 15% of my traffic from Google anyway, and I like it that way.

While many SEOs and agencies high five and party when they see their sites higher in the rankings, for me, a perfect traffic scenario would be a site sees its traffic and leads increasing while at the same time sees the percentage of that traffic coming from search engines decreasing.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Stock Image from Shutterstock, used under license.