Last week Debra Mastaler posted the most illuminating DMOZ article I have ever read. In DMOZ: A Solid Directory Or The Great Pumpkin Of Search?, she got through to the right people and asked some hard questions.

Many SEO folks consider DMOZ  irrelevant. After years of angst and sleepless nights waiting for a link that never came, they gave up and got sites ranked using other methods, and by doing so, a secondary SEO truth emerged: a DMOZ link isn’t needed to rank.

None of this can be argued. If the subject is links and rank, then DMOZ does not matter. But separate from DMOZ and SEO is a larger issue, and it’s that DMOZ, as much as I have blasted it (I was an editor there for many years) – it is the only directory of its type in the world, and no matter what state of repair or disrepair it is in today, it represents something important and salvageable.

If you understand the true vastness of the web, you understand that no commercial entity will ever be able to catalog it properly. The web isn’t just the web anymore. Websites aren’t the only thing to be classified. And defining a website is in itself a dicey issue. Is a Twitter user page a website?  Sort of.  If you’re Ashton Kutcher, it sure is. But not all Twitter users pages’ need to be in DMOZ. And what about sites that simply cannot be classified all nice and neat into a specific category? Don’t some sites deserve multiple links? Yes, as these 1,307 links from DMOZ.org to various PBS.org content illustrate (disclaimer: I think I may have seeded half of them). So the very things you are trying to organize and classify (websites and webpages) are only a few of the many challenges.

Complete web classification doesn’t work as a business model because the math does not work. Look no further than the Yahoo directory for proof. No matter how many paid site reviewers you have, there is simply too much web for them to review, and more revenue to be made by doing other things. The DMOZ model uses volunteers, and thus far, we have seen how it’s working out. Parts of DMOZ are outstanding, other parts abandoned like ghost towns. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s human nature. The emergence of other forms of expression, like social voting sites or bookmarking sites, has taken away some of the immediate need to visit DMOZ, but has not diminished what DMOZ is and what it can be.

A possible solution

What I’m about to propose is what I see as a simple, yet elegant solution to the biggest problems DMOZ faces. I have not done in-depth research on the feasibility of my solution, nor do I pretend for a moment to know all of the reasons why it can’t work. I choose to focus on why it can.  It seems so incredibly simple to me, we just need to get the ball rolling.

In my mind, for DMOZ to flourish, it only needs two things:

1. Enough people to maintain all the categories
2. Those people must have an understanding of content classification and quality

I think we’d all agree that if there were a few thousand more of the above two types of people above, the biggest DMOZ problems would go away. Sure, there would be other problems, but if you have manpower, you are on your way.

The big question

Getting to the heart of the matter, where in the heck is DMOZ going to find thousands of volunteer reviewers with the exact two types of skills listed above?

What if we started right here?  Look at this map. All over the world, right now, are thousands of graduate students of all ages and skills studying for Master’s degrees in Library and Information Science. Start here in the U.S. and invite the ALA (American Library Association) to become involved in the process. I can assure you that thousands of librarians are already at work organizing and classifying the web. Tirelessly. They are a layer of “content quality control” who have been at it for years. The graduate students will soon be joining them in the work world. These folks have a passion for identifying the good, organizing it, classifying it, providing links to it.

Like DMOZ.

Imagine if Bob Keating, Editor In Chief of DMOZ, got together with the ALA, and through a joint venture invited the Dean of every graduate program in Library and Information Science to send invitations to every single graduate student in Library Science to participate in the DMOZ/ODP. That sounds hard, but it could happen in three phone calls and a few emails. Don’t let it get bogged down in bureaucracy and paperwork. Streamline the ODP editor application form. Let the fact that the students made it into Library School (which means good grades, a good GRE score, and attention to detail) be all the proof ODP needs that they are qualified. Because they are. The ODP application is redundant for them. Invite each of them them to take over ANY currently unclaimed category and edit it. Or, get them to help with categories that are already edited but overwhelmed.

This can even be done as part of a practicum or “virtual internship”, or just for a bit of real world experience. For those who participate, the ALA can send them a ALA/ODP certificate to add to the resume.

I’ve thought about this way more than I’ve put down here, and I’m sure there are reasons it might not work. But what I dare DMOZ and the ALA to do is tell us all why it can work, and then go for it. Many years ago, I left library school to start my link building business. My mentors were Jose-Marie Griffiths and Carol Tenopir. The LIS curriculum back then (1993-94) was not web centric yet, but they were trying.

Then, two kids at Stanford ended up being the web’s first librarians, by accident. Now, all these years later, anyone who has heard or read my Revenge of the Librarians sermon knows this could work. It’s just a matter of getting out of the way of it.

No website is without linking related flaws. Whether it’s on-site or off, I can’t say that I’ve ever encountered a “perfect” website from a linking perspective.  Some link building mistakes are unintentional and inconsequential, others are catastrophic. See When Link Rehabilitation Is A Viable Option.

The idiom “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it“  is in full view all over the web. We’ve all seen sites making mistakes. My own site is a case study in poor link optimization. I’ve made mistakes many times over the years. I’ve killed off pages with Pagerank. I’ve orphaned pages accidentally. I have no xml sitemap. I don’t do the rich snippets thing, I’m missing alt text.

One of my older articles that was out of date was sitting with a juicy link from Harvard Business School, and I didn’t know it, nor did I notice a Title tag replicated on several articles where I had lazily neglected to edit them. My business is global, but I do have two local locations, but I haven’t optimized for local either. My site is a classic example of a shoe maker going shoeless.

I rarely fix these flaws even when I find them because, well, my site ranks exactly where I want it to for the exact terms I care about at the three largest engines. I’m afraid to fix my ugly duckling web site. Why? Because perfect can become the enemy of  good, and if  good is a #1 ranking, then the heck with perfect.

Do you agree? If I ever notice a drop in rank for terms that I value, I know what the mistakes are, and I know how to fix them. Others are not so lucky, and sit atop a time bomb of linking mistakes that are going to blow up, sooner or later.

Being your own worst enemy

The self inflicted linking wounds are the saddest, because most of them could and can be avoided.  See Aggressively Seeking Links: How Much Is Too Much? One site called in a panic wondering why 50% of their organic click traffic vanished, and it turned out the marketing folks were not aware the I.T. folks had deployed a new content delivery system that changed every URL on their site, literally overnight, without a 301 plan. That actually happened.

We used the 404 referrer log to reverse engineer a link recapture plan, but it took months and was a miserable time for them, all of which could have been avoided. Other self inflicted wounds center around search rank, and include going too deeply into the link buying end of the pool, duplicate sites, 301 roll ups. There are many of these. I believe almost every person doing those things knows going in that it could be a mistake, which makes the resulting nightmare self-inflicted.

Linking damage control

But there are those who are genuinely unaware they have made mistakes, and equally unaware that those mistakes are hurting them. I’m seeing a growing wave of concern bordering on paranoia about linking related mistakes. I’m getting new clients who don’t even want me to build links, they want a linking damage control strategy because they previously paid for (and took) bad SEO advice. Now they want to see if damage has been done, and if so, undo that damage. Fair enough. Those are the scenarios where we link builders can help make repairs.

On the other hand, there are those that want help not because they made an honest mistake, and not because of some moral linking epiphany, but because their rank took a nosedive and they know why, and now they want someone to plead their case to the powers that be.

Sometimes we can help, sometimes we can’t

More than once I’ve pronounced a domain DOA, and recommended a full fresh start rather than an Superfund style toxic link clean up. See When Your Link Portfolio Is Devalued. Then again, if you are running a site and have truly been the victim of an overly aggressive SEM advisor/firm that you trusted and now wish you hadn’t, then depending on the damage done, there could very well be hope.

True story, one site I helped clean up had paid links across several verticals related to their niche. That niche? Knitting. Seriously. Well, knit me a black hat. The irony is they didn’t have go black at all to get what they were after.  They had content, brand, history. They had what they needed to dominate their space without touching the paid side of the street. But the temptation was either too great, or they didn’t know what they were doing was risky.

Take some proactive steps

Since most sites have been through a few vendors by now, it can be hard to know exactly what’s out there that could be doing you harm. Think of an old house that’s been added on to several times over the years. That wiring in the basement is a code violation today, but was considered perfectly safe when it was first done.

If your site is among those that’s either seen an unusual change in position, or been touched by multiple SEO/SEM vendors or consultants, you may want to take a closer look at the inbound links pointing at your site.  You’ll need to look deeper than what a link: search will give you, and deeper than the 1,000 links Yahoo site explorer will show you.

And don’t panic if you discover that years ago, before your time, someone engaged in a paid link fest for your site. Those links probably aren’t affecting you at all in either direction. If you’ll sleep better getting the opinion of a linking expert, hire one for an “inbound link health checkup”. These shouldn’t be expensive if your expert has a clue and knows what to look for.  Remember, though, one man’s dirty link is often another man’s clean link, and once you start poking at a beehive, bees come out.  See Spotting Unnatural Linking Patterns.

Whether those bees will sting you or not is another question.

The Wikipedia entry for “Elephant in the room” reads that it is an English idiom for an obvious truth that is being ignored or goes unaddressed. It is based on the idea that an elephant in a room would be impossible to overlook; thus, people in the room who pretend the elephant is not there might be concerning themselves with relatively small and even irrelevant matters, compared to the looming big one. To build upon that, one must also understand the meaning of the term “white elephant“.

Does link building have any white elephants? Is there an entire herd? Let’s agree that this is an opinion piece, and nothing is sacred. I’ll go first.

The most obvious link building white elephant is paid links. They are bad, right? Yes. Bad, bad, bad. Nobody talks about doing it, yet it seems like everybody does it, and it still works although it isn’t supposed to (and it really shouldn’t). But the bots can’t spot them all, and competitors are doing it, so everybody does it and doesn’t discuss it, except at the trade show bar after midnight in slurred shamed admissions to cute trade show booth reps in tight company t-shirts.

Next white elephant? The Pagerank toolbar. Nobody believes it. It’s always behind. It isn’t the true score Google uses, and it is meaningless.  Really? Then remove it from your browser. Go ahead. I dare you. I think we all stare at the Pagerank toolbar as pages load, like it’s a one-armed bandit about to stop spinning. Joker, JOKER, J O K E R!!!  Pagerank 7. Buy one? No. Buy Two! One with anchor text, one without.

Up next, the Directory white elephant. It’s a white elephant in reverse. Hundreds of companies still sell useless directory submission services.  How can this be happening? I know how. Link builders with clients have numbers to make to keep those clients. What’s the fastest way to meeting them? Vetted authority targets? Hardly. Link-o-Bingo.com? Bingo . I hope these directories are sending thank you notes to Google every Christmas. No toolbar, no business model.

The last elephant in the room? SEO Information Overload. Good lord, I’ve pruned my Twitter follow list but no matter what I do I can’t get below 75 people who I feel I absolutely must follow. If each of them tweet a link to just one article, blog post, or news item each day, that’s 75 things I have to read to keep current, 425 per week, 1,700 per month. And that’s just Twitter. Factor in the feeds, blogs, blogs with feeds, feeds with blogs, podcasts, vodcasts, videos, discussion posts, email and actual paid work, and there is simply way too much SEO information being produced. We pay lip service to it even as we make it worse, saying “yeah, way too much”, on our own SEO blogs, but we remain in a permanent state of anxiety over it, and like trying to live on three hours of sleep, we crash and burn by the end of the week.  I used to try and solve this by emailing myself the truly read-worthy stuff, thinking it will be handy in my inbox, in a special folder I made for it. I never opened that folder once.  I think I should launch a service where all I do is take the top 5% of everything I read each week and put links to them into your inbox, with my comments for what to do about it. Seriously. What would you pay to have an expert prune the weeds away for you so all you have to read is the flowers? If it’s enough to make it worth it, I’ll do it.

Related note

The “white elephant” term also applies to link building. A white elephant is a spectacular thing which is more trouble than it is worth, or has outlived its usefulness to the person who has it (Yahoo directory anyone?). While the item may be useful to others, its current owner would usually be glad to be rid of it.

Those are what I currently see for elephants in the  link building room, some of which are also very white. I know there are more.

People will tell you it’s no longer possible to obtain links by asking for them via email. Spend even a little time reading the SEO/SEM blogs, forums, comments, etc., and you’ll find a reasonable and well-meaning  post, something like this beauty I read over at the UK version of TechCrunch.

“The days of asking a site to link to you politely are long gone”

Darn.  I wish someone had told me. I could have saved several clients some money and spent more time with my family.

The reality is the exact opposite. While it is pointless to seek links (via email or any other method) for crappy content from other sites with equally crappy content,  link building via email does in fact work perfectly – but only under one perfectly obvious and sadly overlooked circumstance: when the link seeker represents meritorious content and the link granter is looking for that type of meritorious content to link to. It’s so painfully obvious to me, that I fight the urge to laugh out loud when I read quotes like the one above.

In fact, not only does link building via email still work, it still works for both traffic and rank.  I’ll spare you a link drop here and explain by real-life example.

My son has a hearing impairment and through serendipity, I recently ended up working with a company in a related field. This company creates diagnostic tools and devices, and had launched a new web site devoted to that topic. This new site has a tremendous amount of content that physicians, audiologists, SLPs, and the parents of a hearing impaired child will find helpful. As their linking strategist, over the course of six weeks, I conducted industry research and link analysis, and I identified 28 truly outstanding sites devoted to pediatric hearing loss which also offer a resources and/or links section. I contacted each those 28 sites individually via email and introduce my client’s new web content.  I did exactly what the article linked to above says I should not do.

I politely ask for link consideration.

The result is a 100% success rate. I’ll repeat that.  All 28 sites devoted to pediatric hearing loss did in fact link to my client’s site devoted to that exact topic.

It makes sense, doesn’t it? And only someone who either a) has never done any link building, or b) worked for really bad sites, would make the statement that link building via email does not work.

My client’s new site now ranks at Google and Bing at an extremely high position for the specific multi-word phrase they most coveted. For you anchor text fans, note I did not once ask for any anchor text at all. If you’ve read my articles before, you know I find it rude to ask high merit content authors for anchor text when it’s obvious and apparent they do not give it. When you go vertical enough on both sides of the link building equation, anchor text is not needed.

This is the point where the hard core SEOs shoot at me. They say it’s not hard to rank for highly vertical multi-word phrases when you are working on behalf of really outstanding content.

My response is always the same: exactly.

That’s the point. If content is truly worthy, your goal does not have to be to make a site rank first anyway. That’s up to the content and the engines. The goal is to help the site seek out the exact links their content deserves and can earn.

High rank is a side effect of meritorious content that becomes well linked.

It was, is, and always will be about content merit and topical resource citation. You can write whatever you want about link building. I’ll always be here, or here, telling it like it is, like it was, and like it hopefully will be in the future, from the perspective of someone who actually does it.

I recently read Is Most Of SEO Just A Boondoggle? and the subsequent comments and attacks on the author Jill Whalen, and it’s become my own tipping point. Enough is enough. Every word of that column was right on the money. It’s just rare (and welcomed) for a well known expert to state in a high profile venue like SEL what many of us privately know to be true.

Those of us who have been doing what we do the longest are faced with a choice every time we write about our own industry. Do we ignore the elephant(s) in the room, or bring attention to not only the elephants, but the huge dumps they leave on the carpet?

Through years of experience, success and failure, trial and error, some of us in the SEM industry know exactly when a tool, tactic, or piece of advice is total bullshit.  Yet after all these years, we still have companies making a nice living selling tools, tactics, or advice which is just that: total BS. Why? Mostly because those of us who know how to spot the BS have simply ignored it and quietly gone about our own business. No need to make waves. Jill made waves. And I congratulate her for it, and I’m going to try and do some wave making myself, here in my neck of the woods, the neck known as link building.

Link building has so many “boondoggle” services it’s ridiculous. I couldn’t cover them all in a single column here if I had to. I could mention a couple, like press release distribution for link building (pointless), or so-called top tier directories, (which I can count on one hand and none o them really matter either). Sorry Yahoo, you kinda sorta matter, but I’ve got client sites ranked 1st at Google that aren’t listed in Yahoo period.

Any readers who don’t believe me, put up $1,000, and I’ll pay you $5,000 if I can’t show you at least one site I helped build links for that now ranks #1 for its key phrase, and that same site is not listed in either Yahoo or DMOZ for that matter. Take the bet. I’m giving you five-to-one odds, and my kid will need braces soon.

Even these brief comments will have repercussions. I expect attacks. If you operate a directory not named Yahoo! and make money from it, of course it will piss you off if I tell the truth about it being useless. If you sell link building services based on press releases, same deal. You don’t want your clients reading this and asking you hard questions. That’s another reason most of us have kept quiet. Outing a useless service or tool (and believe me link building tools are a boondoggle bonanza) means the person who created the tool could lose their livelihood. Nobody should have that happen, right?

But times change. I have a different agenda now, and motivations that compel me. I wont take up space here every week or two just to go on an attack, but remember Link Moses? I am him, and he’s back for a limited engagement over at Link Building Best Practices. See LinkMoses Resurrected – Thirty Link Building Rants and Commandments.

Back to Is Most Of SEO Just A Boondoggle? Among the tactics questioned were PageRank sculpting, Meta tags, sitemaps, H1 tags, keyword rich URLs, and URL submission to engines.

On the link building side, boondoggles include anchor text, press releases, directories, articles, paid links, and link bait. And I’m just getting started…

Postscript from author: After reading comments below, I realize this is what I should have written to clarify my point.  It is my mistake that I didn’t do so in the first place.

When someone says SEO tactics are pointless, it is true.  When someone else says they are useful, that too is true. Every single SEO, SEM, link building, content publicity or other attention seeking tactic is either useless or useful.  It is not the tactic itself that makes it so, it is the site for which that tactic is employed.  Even something as seemingly pointless today as a meta keyword tag will have value in certain instances, like  a searchable company intranet. XML sitemaps could be useful for a fee based membership site that can’t be crawled the usual way.  So, the reality is I should have just wrote the above, rather than piling on.  Now, here’s the other reality.  Since every single tactic is useless or useful depending on the site, what I do (and what I wish more people would do) is help clients understand which tactics make sense for their particular site and scenario, and why.  I know I could sell bundles of silly services to my clients and make money because they trust me, and will buy them.  But I can’t do that, and I don’t think anyone else should either.

Thank you for letting me clarify.

Eric Ward

During a recent conference call, I made one of those bold statements that was half for effect, and half in hopes of quieting an “online strategist” that was also on the call. In my deepest voice, I proclaimed:

“In the same way the engines can evaluate the links pointing at your site and rank you in the top ten, they can also evaluate the links pointing at your site and determine you are link spamming and not rank your site anywhere”

I was challenged on that statement, but I stood by it.

The online strategist who challenged it said the engines couldn’t and shouldn’t penalize a site since a site does not have 100% control over who links to it. What if the “link spamming” was being done by a third party as part of a link sabotage effort?

Anyone can join a link network without proving who they are or what site they work for. Anyone can fire up social spam software and pretend to be from a competitor site. What if someone less than ethical owned a network of 500 weak content sites that collectively contain 25,000 pages of content and then accepted a fee to insert links to some other site on all 25,000 pages? No engine can divine intent, thus no engine can fairly penalize for what looks like an unnatural linking pattern.

Following this, I continued…

So if someone working for Nike.com pretends they are working for Reebok.com (and are stupid) and execute a bunch of link spam tactics, Reebok.com’s rankings could be affected without Reebok having done anything wrong. But not to Nike and Reebok. This could never happen to a large brand site with hundreds of thousands of links because any link spamming effort would be a mere drop in the ocean.

It could work on smaller niche sites, like one regional accounting firm website against another regional accounting firm website, where each site only has a few hundred links to begin with, and thus, a few thousand new links from an obvious link network would be easier to spot. And given this, isn’t it unlikely any search engine could penalize or lower a site’s rank based on this, since there are millions of small, niche sites and hundreds of millions of links to account for?

Exactly. Maybe. No, not at all. It’s not that simple.

My belief is that lowered rankings are wrongly interpreted as a penalty when what’s really happening is a devaluation of an inbound link portfolio. I conduct link portfolio evaluation and improvement as part of my client work, and if you think back a few years to when directory links were devalued, that’s all you need to understand the devaluation process.  What once had value no longer does. It’s not a penalty, it’s the process of an engine getting smarter.

If 90% of your inbound link portfolio was low hanging link targets anyone can get, you shouldn’t be surprised. The irony is that sites that suffer through a devaluation are almost always the same sites that were overly dependent on non-merit based link building tactics in the first place. Easy come, easy go. The solution is pretty simple. Stop going after the easy stuff and go get merit based links. Of course, that’s easier said than done without some help.

Back to the question at hand. Aside from devaluation, can an engine evaluate the links pointing at your site and determine you are link spamming and not rank your site anywhere?

I say yes.

Certain types of inbound link profiles could never happen without active participation by the site’s owners.

Help me out. Am I right, wrong, or somewhere in-between?

If there’s one link development tactic that has been used to death, it has to be “see who’s linking to your competition and get them to link to you”. There are tools galore to help you do this, software you buy and install on your desktop, or web based apps. It’s a fairly simple technique and it has merit, but I hardly ever hear anyone talking about the dangers of relying on this tactic, and the fundamental weakness in the link profile you end up creating when you follow this approach.

Me too or me three?

One of the dangers of the competitor backlink approach is that if your target sites are already linking to a competitor, then even if you succeed in obtaining a link from those same targets, you are always playing catch-up. Yes, it’s nice to discover a really juicy target you didn’t know existed until you found it by looking at competitor X’s backlinks. And it’s is a good feeling when you successfully lobby for and obtain a link from those same venues. Do that all day every day and if your content is worthy, you will certainly create a nice set of inbound links.

When I was a tyke, my Mom used the term “Keeping up with the Joneses“, which Wikipedia describes as “…referring to the comparison to one’s neighbor as a benchmark for social caste or the accumulation of material goods”.

Now apply this term to the process of link building and it perfectly describes competitor backlink analysis. And no matter how good you are at it, this technique can only take you so far. In the long run, your content has to show the ability to attract links of merit, equal to but also in addition to those your competitors already have. The reasons why should be obvious. The engines need those “signals of difference” to order the search result.  If every site has the exact same set of inbound links, how the heck do you rank them?

Just me

And how do you find those venues/targets that will provide your site with those signals of difference? Well hey, us content publicists/link developers normally get paid for that kind of information (hint).  And I’m the first to say the targets that will produce “signals of difference” for site A will be different than for site B, and even though I can identify them, that info is totally useless unless or until your content can earn those links in the first place.

The most impactful links are always the toughest gets.

One tactic I can share is the negative advanced search operator tactic. If you want to seek out target sites that aren’t already linking to a competitor, just tell Google to ignore those that already are.  This can be done a number of ways, the simplest of which is by using the “-” sign in your query. For example, while my site at ericward.com has thousands of links, when I do the searches link building -ericward.com and link building -site:ericward.com, I find 120 million pages that do not mention or link to me.

I’d better get busy.

You’ve probably heard the term “Federated Search“.  It’s the term used to describe the process of simultaneously searching multiple search engines or online databases from a single search box.

Federated search is unfortunately an awkward term. It sounds like something from the Civil War. Federated search is closely related to meta-search. If you’ve ever used dogpile.com, then you’ve experienced federated/meta-search search. Dogpile is a meta-search engine, meaning that it gets results from multiple search engines and directories and then presents them combined to the user. Dogpile currently combines results from Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, About, MIVA, LookSmart, Topix, Kosmix, Fandango, Blinkx, and Truveo. Other meta-search engines you may have heard of include Clusty, SurfWax, Search.com, Mamma.com, and Ithaki for Kids.

The federated search idea grew in response to growing number of online databases and web resources that make up what is known as the “Deep Web”, or invisible Web, a term coined by Michael K. Bergman back in 2001. SEL’s Chris Sherman and the brilliant Gary Price wrote a terrific book about it that same year. There’s also a terrific blog over at federatedsearchblog.com for those of you interested in learning more.

With traditional search engines like Google, you will only find pages/sources that have already been indexed by that engine’s crawler, meaning the millions of documents from the deep web will not be found. Federated and meta-search is a technique to resolve this issue and make deep web content searchable and findable. One of the best aspects of federated search is the single search box. From one search box, you get to search numerous underlying data sources. This helps the searcher because he/she does not need knowledge of each individual search interface or even knowledge of the existence of the individual data sources being searched. There are hundreds of meta-search and federated search tools available, in a wide variety of subjects, with new ones appearing all the time. Case in point: ScienceResearch.com. ScienceResearch.com provides a single point of access to more than 400 high-quality, publicly searchable science and technology collections.

Federated/meta-searching consists of taking the search term entered in the single search box and:

1. Broadcasting that term to a group of databases or other web resources with the appropriate syntax for each database.
2. Merging the results collected from each source.
3. Formatting the results on a single results page (with duplicates removed).
4. (Optionally) providing a method for sorting the merged results.

Note: Some meta-search tools screen scrape the actual database results and do not directly allow the user to enter the information source application. Others de-dupe the results, but the goal is simple and the same: save time and produce more complete (and thus more accurate) results.

Federated search for link building

Link builders and public relations pros can leverage the power of federated and meta-search is several ways. The best way to illustrate this is by example. Let’s use ScienceResearch.com.

ScienceResearch.com itself is not new. What’s new is that it now searches over 400 sources in real-time. If you work in a science related profession, chances are you already use ScienceResearch.com, or one day will. Do you see where I’m headed yet? If not, have a look here: http://www.scienceresearch.com/scienceresearch/suggest-a-collection.html

At this point, your link building and public relations tachometer should be red-lining. Let’s pretend you are in charge of link building and content publicity for PBS.org. Have a look at the current ScienceResearch results for PBS.org.  The last line in each search result shows the originating source from where the PBS content was found. This is where federated linking shows itself. By making sure the PBS.org content is submitted and indexed by the sources used by ScienceResearch.com, we assure ourselves that links to that content will appear in the ScienceResearch.com results.

And that’s the beauty of Federated Linking. You benefit from the genius of others. You go along for the ride.

The strategic process to federated linking is three-fold. First, you have to research and identify and federated or meta-search engines in your niche that are right for your content. Second, you look for the inclusion/submission policy and protocol, like this; and third, you submit or request inclusion for your content.

I know what you’re thinking. This is all fine if your site is science related, but what do you do if your content is a bit less “academically rigorous”? As mentioned earlier, there are meta-search engines in many subjects. If, for example, you are in charge of linking for allrecipes.com, a site with over 40,000 recipes, you might want to make sure your site is included at EZYrecipes.com, which simultaneously searches over 25 of the best recipe sites.

And bingo! There they are.

That’s federated linking.

Big news last week: Twitter Search to dive deeper, rank results. Twitter’s @Santosh Jayaram has indicated Twitter Search, which currently searches only Twitter post text, will begin crawling links and indexing the content of pages posted in tweets. To help with search result ranking, Twitter is creating a “reputation” ranking system that among other things divines the reputation of each “tweeter.” Read more on how this might work in this great piece from Loren Baker and Danny Sullivan’s How We Search With The Twitter “Help Engine”. Then peruse the comments to these and other articles on this subject. The underlying theme to the comment flow is concern over Twitter link drop spam, as well as questions about how such a “Twitter algorithm” might work.

Since I am in the unique position of having…

A) Never worked for a search engine (although I did install SWISH in 1993 without major injury) B) Oceans of experience with links and how they are built, attracted, baited, and shared, and C) A Twitter account @ericward, I feel compelled to slip back into LinkMoses mode for a moment, so please indulge me. If Twitter’s reputation algorithm is to be taken seriously, it will have to consider and ignore many signals, many of which are quite different than you might expect.

What Matters, and What Doesn’t

Doesn’t matter: Follower count. First and most obviously, the number of followers anyone has is meaningless. There are many fee based services already that will get you thousands of followers automatically. So please Twitter, do not give any weight to a URL tweeted by a person with 806,000 followers, just because they have 860,000 followers. @AshtonKutcher may like a web site and tweet a link to his 1.7 million followers, but just how useful is that site from a content quality standpoint? Might not be at all. Yes, that tweet will spark a frenzy of clicks by half a million people to whatever site is tweeted, but this is a separate issue. As a lone signal, follower count is meaningless.

Does matter: Co-follower rate. If everyone from Harvard class of 2005 is on Twitter, and if every one of them follow each other and have only a couple non-Harvard classmate followers, that’s essentially a quasi-private closed Twitter loop, and while the tweets from Mimsy and Tad may be fascinating, they are useless from a reputation perspective. Caveat: I see potential for value from high co-follower numbers within certain fields. For example, if there are 3,789 audiologists on Twitter, and 75% of them follow each other, the tweets from them represent a high trust signal. Go ahead, scoff. They matter.

Doesn’t matter: When you started Tweeting. Just because you were a savvy early adopter and have been tweeting since day one, your tweets don’t automatically have extra reputational value. They may be crap. Likewise, there are tens of thousands of professionals who aren’t on Twitter yet but will be a year from now. If Warren Buffett starts tweeting, I could care less if the Buff-ster’s a newbie, I’m following. And I’m not alone. Although http://twitter.com/W_Buffett has been registered since February 20th with an “opening soon” message and nothing more, “he” already has more than 4,200 followers. Go figure.

Does matter: Who your followers follow, and what they tweet about. Probably more important than who you follow is who your followers follow, and what they tweet. It’s circular logic similar to the PageRankish notion that what links to what links to what links to what is important, but it’s a useful signal. If you have 2,000 followers, and all of them tweeted viagra and casino links in the past week, guess what?

Doesn’t matter: frequency of Tweets/updates. Less is more with most forms of online communication. Twitter’s 140 character limit alone proves this. And with tweet freaks, the more often someone tweets the more likely it is those tweets will sail right down and off your update page, never seen nor clicked. Like they never happened. But they did happen, and Twitter’s algorithm will see/crawl those links, even if your followers didn’t. So be judicious as to what you tweet, and how often. And remember there are time-delayed auto tweeting tools to factor into this mess. Those aren’t automatically evil. A smart PR firm might time delay a tweet so as to coordinate it with other announcements. That doesn’t make it spam, but it doesn’t make it gold either.

This is just a start, but think about all the other data Twitter can study that might be indicators of link spam. For example, do you follow known spammers? What about percentage of your tweets that are original, as opposed to retweets? Or frequency of link drops to the same URLs. Number of Twitter IDs on a single IP address. URL in your profile. Link profile of that URL.

I commented on a blog recently that Twitter posts can definitely be signals for Google. But they are no different than any other online medium. The signal strength will be driven by trust the search engine places in each individual Twitterer. It will now matter for those who hope to have signal influence at Google via Twitter to be cautious with follows and tweets. What nobody has mentioned yet is that Twitter pages and tweets are all still just URLs, like any other URL. That means over time a backlink profile will emerge, and combined with a follow/follower profile and a few other signals, Twitter trust might just be easier to measure than anyone thinks.

Parting note: A shout out to BuzzStream. Any of you link builders who haven’t already checked out BuzzStream should head over and have a look. I’ve been impressed enough to become an advisor to them. It’s in beta and already made my jaw drop. For years in my head I have envisioned the perfect link building management app, and in BuzzStream’s first feature set I see evidence it can be exactly what I’ve imagined. Sign up fast, because I have a feeling the demand might be about to get crazy.

URL shortening services have become quite popular lately, primarily due to the restricted length of “tweets” on Twitter. Danny Sullivan compared several of these services in URL Shorteners: Which Shortening Service Should You Use? and talked about the SEO implications of using these services, especially when it comes to passing along link love.

But not much has been written (yet) about the potential for spam and unintended consequences that can arise with shortened URLs. Matt McGee, in his post Twazzup: New All-In-One Twitter Search Engine, noted that Twitter searching can often produce unexpected results, especially when shortened URLs are involved. He posits that custom URL shortening services seem like an invitation for spamming via custom short URLs. Check this Twitter search for U2, and you’ll see if my own attempt to appear for searches for U2 worked. I took a short URL, added the letters u2 in it, linking back to my own personal web site, like this, http://snipurl.com/u2g0p0u, and was done. It took less than ten seconds. So far, it looks like Twitter does not include the characters within any tweeted URL when looking for the search term in all tweets.

Even if they did, this type of tweet link isn’t truly evil, as it could easily happen unintentionally if the default shortened URL by chance had the characters U2 in it. All this would do is include one off-topic entry into a Twitter search for the band U2. And not many U2 fans are looking for linking services anyway.

On the other hand, there are far more nefarious things people can and are already doing with links created via URL shorteners. People use URL shorteners to disguise links in their Twitter posts (and elsewhere), so for example their post about a breaking news story at CNN.com with a shortened URL link to the story is actually a link to a casino site. Now, add in the ability to customize shortened URLs, like snipurl allows on the fly, and we have a whole new world of Twitter (and other venue) spam possibilities.

I’m white hat, and even I was able to figure out how to do the U2 trick above. Imagine when heavy duty spammers add in other features, like redirects at the destination URLs, changed and leased for a fee to whoever is willing to pay. Then that shortened URL spam continues to have value over time, leading to a whole other spam tactic, pushing deceptive shortened URLs any and everywhere. Bookmarking them, stumbling them, retweeting them near and far. I can envision a shortened custom URL land rush just like we had for domain names.

What about user trust?

I’ll spare everyone the shortened URL doomsday scenario, but from a linking standpoint, I can see clearly that the best approach to shortened links will be to roll your own, in-house, using your own top level domain so as to give the clicker confidence in the destination.

For example, let’s say I want to direct people to this article

More Anchor text Best Practices – http://www.ericward.com/bestpractices/2008/04/update1-anchor-text-best-practices.html

Well that’s a nasty URL. It would take up most of a tweet, and might even break in half in an email message (indeed, most URL shortening services started to solve the email-breakage problem with long URLs). So instead, what if I give you these URLs.

http://ericward.com/ghY65.html

http://snipurl.com/g0qyu

http://bit.ly/12ea8U

Which of the above would you be most confident in clicking?

The first. Why? Because the shortened URL has my name/domain in it, and that’s a visual reinforcement/comfort for the clicker.

I did this one with a basic 301, which is just a workaround. Long term, site-wide for any site producing significant new content at long URLs, the best solution will be to create your own domain branded version of a URL shortener. Some services offer this already, I’m sure. If not, opportunity knocks, and there’s my closer. Look for them all to offer fee based custom domain URL shortener services sooner rather than later. And while I haven’t looked, I have to believe there’s software you can put on your own server to do this already. As my example above shows, I need it myself.

Of course, until and unless the engines do a better job of passing juice via shortened URL links than they have with 301’s, this is all nothing but a click confidence traffic fix. Search rank? I’ll believe it when I see it.