At first, this may seem counter-intuitive to earning links for yourself — however, linking out to influential people while pumping out great content can be one of the best link building tactics out there, and here’s why:

1. Some people find it easier to promote themselves indirectly. By promoting what you write about them, they’re able to avoid feeling embarrassed or conceited about being in the spotlight. They’re essentially promoting you, the writer, which is much easier. (I know that many of you have no problems with direct self-promotion, and for that I sincerely am in awe.) Social pushes equal increased visibility, which always ups the chances for links as long as the content is good.

   

2. Unique content gets noticed in a sea of similar articles. Depending upon your industry, the existing content may already be little more than repeated and spun ideas. I’m not going to read one more post about how to tell if your website was hit by Panda or Penguin last year, but I will read almost every single interview post that crosses my social stream. I’m fascinated by the people in my industry, and I love reading what they have to say when it’s not necessarily written for a specific audience or to sell their services. Again: unique and interesting content equals increased visibility, which increases your chances of garnering links.
3. Interviewing someone forges a relationship that can help you down the road. Whether it’s through a link, a business referral, help on something you are struggling with, an invitation to speak at a conference, the opportunity for a guest post, etc., you’ll be building a valuable connection with someone within your industry when you create content around them based on an interview. Remember all the talk about how the links you really have to work for are the best links? Links that happen well after an interaction can also be great links.

How To Pitch An Interview

Pitch an interview just like you’d pitch guest blogging, broken link building, or anything else that isn’t going to happen without some work and a personal touch. If you’re going to ask to interview someone, make sure you have done enough digging to know specific details about the person.

You should obtain enough information to be able to say something like, “I’d love to ask you some questions about how you started a tech company after graduating with a degree in Comparative Religion! I think there are many people out there struggling with the question of whether they should keep forging ahead with what they went to college for or just chuck it and do something completely unexpected.”

That’s a heck of a lot better than saying, “I think my readers would like to know more about you.” Some people get interviewed constantly as they are big influencers in their field, so if you want to land the interview, you’re going to have to have a unique perspective that interests your subject. Otherwise, expect to be turned down or ignored.

In general, I’d say you should follow these steps when pursuing an interview candidate:

1. Select someone interesting, and (as mentioned above) do some digging in order to write a personalized email pitch for the interview.
2. Let the person know where the interview will be published.
3. Give a deadline for when you’d like to get the questions completed. Make sure it’s very reasonable.
4. Make it clear that you respect how busy your interviewee is. You can let the person know that it’s fine if he doesn’t have time right now, but that you’d be happy to hear from if him ever has time in the future and would like to talk again.
5. Don’t be a pest about it. If the person says she’s too busy, respect that and thank her for her time.

How To Make Your Interviews Stand Out

The key here is to formulate good questions that haven’t been asked a billion times before. A friend of mine recently said that he loved a specific interview someone did with me because it had more to do with me as a person than with what I do for a living. Most people get tired of talking solely about work. If you can figure out a good angle, your content will be more interesting and thus more shareable. Here are my tips:

1. Prepare some initial questions based on your research of that person’s history.
2. Search for “interview [person's name]” and see what’s already been covered — that way, you can avoid asking the same thing the last 10 interviewers have asked.
3. Ask a question or two about popular culture. In all the interviews I’ve conducted, I’ve only had one person say she didn’t listen to music.
4. Include something funny if it fits. Think about why people watch late-night talk shows: they’re funny.

   

5. Include photos of the subject.

How To Pitch A Crowdsourced Piece

Pitching a group project — as opposed to a one-on-one interview — is sometimes easier, as it requires less of a time commitment from each of your respondents. The basic guidelines are the same as those for pitching an individual interview, with one added tip: make sure each person you’re planning to contact is an appropriate fit for the piece.

For example, I was once asked to participate in a group piece about Google Adwords — and, while I do run some campaigns, it’s really only about 5% of what I do. The questions, however, were geared towards people who live and breathe paid ads, which was not me.

To help get the right people on board, consider including a list of the people who’ve agreed to participate in the piece so far — that can be a big selling point if the person you’re contacting is unfamiliar with you.

How To Make Your Crowdsourced Pieces Stand Out

Again, be original! If there are already 10 pieces out there in which a group of industry leaders have commented on a particular news story, don’t make it your mission to write the 11th.

If I’ve just answered questions about the latest Google update and someone contacts me asking to contribute to a piece about the same topic, I’ll probably opt out because I won’t have anything new to say. However, if someone asks for my opinion on what new functionality we’ll start seeing in the major link tools, I’ll gladly participate.

Last, But Not Least — Promotion

You’ll want to consider ways to promote your interview, both before and after you conduct it. Here are just a few of my recommendations for increasing your piece’s overall visibility:

1. Where appropriate, ask the interviewee questions about tools and services they like, and include that information in the interview. Those companies will generally promote what promotes them. If you have the time once the piece is published, send them a quick email or social shout-out to point them to it.

   

2. Once your piece is published and you’ve shared it across your social networks, be sure to contact the person/people you interviewed to let them know. Send them a link to the piece, and thank them for their time! With any luck, they’ll link to the interview in their own social channels
3. Ask for opinions and feedback on social media. If you target someone and ask if they have anything add to your post, it’s possible they’ll respond thus expose their followers to your work. If you just openly ask for advice, you may not get it — but many people will respond when they’re addressed personally.

What are your tips for using interviews as linkbait?

Here’s the most common thing that these guys have in common:

They have a link plan that is absolutely and completely unsustainable for more than a few months at best.

I occasionally get the urge to create a content calendar and get five posts a week up on my agency’s blog, but it just doesn’t happen. Maybe I can swing it for a week or two, but I can’t keep it up. My reasons for wanting to post more have more to do with making our blog better in general though, as I’m not going into it thinking “I need to build 100 links to this site so I’ll rank where I want to.”

These business owners that I’m talking about have one goal in mind, and that’s links (and lots of them.) Yes, still, even though we should all understand that building lots of links very quickly can be a red flag as those links aren’t always top notch.

Take this example idea, paraphrased:

“If I generate an average of 5 links per blog post and I write 10 blog posts a day for 6 months, that’s 1,800 posts and 9,000 links. They can even be really short posts, so I can get them all out there.”

Here’s One Problem

Every post won’t generate the same amount of links. Some may generate zero. Coming up with interesting content for these 1,800 blog posts is going to be incredibly difficult. Promoting 10 blog posts a day, and doing so without becoming an incredibly annoying Tweeter, is going to be very tough.

You may write these 1,800 blog posts and get a total of 10 links, and those could all be scraper trackbacks. Yes, I’m being negative, but being overly optimistic can cause you to lay out a link strategy that is just not going to turn out exactly as you predict.

An Even Bigger Problem

How on Earth are you going to find the time to do the research required to write 10 unique and link-worthy pieces of content every day? If you aren’t doing that then you’re just repeating what someone else has said or you’re talking about nothing that anyone wants to read.

The Biggest Problem

Let’s say that you actually succeed in writing all those posts over the course of 6 months, generating loads of links along the way. How long can you keep that up? After 6 months of that, your business could be in the toilet, anyway, as I can’t imagine you’ve been able to pay attention to much else.

I realize that the above example is outrageous, but it’s not that far off from some proposals that have come to me. Many people still assume that quantity is the key to building links. They forget about the time it takes to build up a community on social media, form relationships that are give and take, and actually generate content that attracts great links.

Let’s now look at three issues commonly faced by webmasters and go through some examples of sustainable link goals.

Getting A New Site Off The Ground

First of all, here’s something you do not ever want to do for a new site: buy links, or buy into a link network. Those types of links are risky, and a new site with no link padding usually cannot afford the risk. It’s tempting, I know, and while I do believe there’s a time for link buys, it’s not now.

Secondly, buying links is also not very sustainable unless you’re made of money. If you don’t expect to have the budget to renew those links in 12 months, you’re probably better off doing something else.

Ask yourself where you want your site to be this time next year, and map out a 3-month, 6-month, and 12-month plan alongside estimated costs. Double those costs and halve the amount of links you think you’ll gain. Double the amount of work it will actually take to get where you want to be.

Yes, I think that’s a negative way to approach it, but you don’t create anything sustainable by running out of steam and sitting around with no ideas, no money, and no manpower for 6 months out of the year.

Let’s say you have just started a site selling unroasted coffee beans. You do some competitive analysis on the sites ranking highly in your niche and find that on average, most have between 500 and 1,000 unique linking domains. You currently have zero. Below is an example plan.

1. Set up your social media signatures

I highly recommend Knowem for this, as they’ll do the work for you for a price, but it’s time well saved when you’re starting out and need to be doing other things. After you have this done (or after you’ve done it yourself), go and actually use the big ones that matter. For me, it’s Twitter, Facebook, and Google +. I’d recommend at least one of those for anyone, but if you’re going to be creating content under your name or brand, I think G+ is critical.

2. Get your site listed in the good directories

I don’t recommend that anyone solely focus on directories, and a lot of them are truly abysmal, but there are good directories out there. Since I wanted a second opinion on which ones are good for most businesses, I asked Debra Mastaler, and her top picks are Joe Ant, Yahoo!, Ezilon, Euroseek, Family Friendly Sites, and BOTW.

3. Craft a content plan

The mind burns with ideas for content creation for unroasted coffee beans, so have a brainstorm and create a content calendar that you can stick to. I like to have a list of evergreen topics and add to it with seasonal or popular topics. Evergreen pieces can take a lot of work, but they can also generate a lot of links, so aim for at least one of those every few months. Try and write something popular/seasonal at least every few weeks.

In this effort, I’d include a mix of maybe 75% content for your own site, and 25% content for use with guest posting. A year ago, I’d have advised doing more guest posting, but I do think that is becoming a riskier and spammier method of link building, sadly, so when you’re just starting out, I think you should be more careful.

4. Figure out how you’re going to get people to see your content

For most people starting out, social media is a great way to do this. Encourage people to subscribe to your blog. Tweet new content whether it’s on your site or elsewhere, but do more than just promote your latest piece… you need to interact and get involved. The more friends you make online, the more people you have who will socialize your content without even being asked.

5. Go ahead and start thinking of non-Google ways to market

Maybe you can do an emailed newsletter once a month or ask people to give you their email addresses so you can email them about product promotions and special coupons. Build up a few great social media profiles and use them regularly so people can find you there. Establish yourself on sites like Quora where people ask questions and you give them answers. See if you can secure a monthly column on a respected site in your niche.

6. Start actively building some links

Broken link building is always a good method. Go and find links to sites like yours that aren’t valid and live links, email the webmasters with your suggested link and you’ll get some great links. I think this is a tedious method, but it’s also a very effective one.

If you see a site where you want to be listed as a resource, contact them. If you see a post about an interesting and related topic but you have a different perspective, contact the webmaster and ask if you could do a followup piece that will link back to your site.

For example, let’s say you find someone talking about how horribly difficult it is to roast your own beans, a piece that’s full of bad experiences. You sell unroasted beans, so write a piece about the benefits.

Switching Gears On A Current Site

Let’s assume you do this for reasons other than that you’re trying to recover from a big problem. Maybe you’re taking over the marketing of a site from someone who did a poor job, or maybe you’re dealing with an established site that’s going to do a soft rebranding. You have a decent foundation to work with. Social media profiles are set up and actively being used. This is actually a pretty easy case.

Write up a new content plan, just like in the above example

You probably have some good contacts to utilize, so reach out and see if you can guest post on some sites. Since you’re more established now, see if you can secure a regular slot on a site that gets good traffic. If you don’t know of anything like this, start investigating sites that are related to your niche, but perhaps not so directly.

In the unroasted coffee beans example, maybe you could find a site about homesteading or urban mini-farms, and ask if you can create a column. Just make sure you can commit to the time it takes to write that often. If you can, it’s a great way to get leads.

Think about what you’ve done over the past year

Think about your plans for the next year. Compare them to make sure they’re realistic in terms of what you actually can accomplish. If you’ve been sending 100 outreach emails for guest posts or text links a month and this netted you 5 links a month, reexamine your approach.

Maybe you’re targeting out-of-reach people, or your emails are getting caught by spam filters. Maybe the emails aren’t personalized enough and you need to spend more time on fewer good prospects rather than casting such a wide net. Maybe you’ve been following the same 200 Twitter users forever and need to branch out and make some new connections so you can find more link opportunities.

Recovering From A Problem

Let’s say that you’ve been penalized or de-indexed and you need to fix things and get moving again.

Cleanup

There are tools to help you identify your worst offenders, so nail them down and pursue removal. If you have 5,000 awful links from spammy free sites, don’t think sustainable action there, just get them all removed as quickly as possible. (And please, note what types of sites these are and don’t go getting links on them again.)

Take Inventory

First and foremost, take stock of the good links that you have. Make sure you keep them and keep those relationships open.

Go through steps 2-6 in the first example

In many ways you’re starting over, but you (hopefully) should have some good existing links.

It’s good to dream big, certainly, and selling yourself short can lead to inaction, which leads to no links. However, I’ve seen so many projects take off like a rocket and then totally taper off, because clients don’t maintain that same drive and excitement. No matter what your plan is, think about these things:

1. How long can I keep doing this?

2. What are the potential reasons that I would have to stop this plan or alter it?

3. What are my backup methods when my current ones stop working or I can no longer use them?

Good luck!

I’m a firm believer in the idea that no one will care as much about your site as you will. I’ve also never been annoyed when a client suggests an idea or gives me feedback on my links. The more we all think about link building, the better.

That being said, whether you’re doing your own link building or you’re trusting someone else to do it, it’s never a bad idea to learn more about the tools available. You never know when one might come in handy.

I’ve divided these up into six main areas: discovery, outreach, analysis, technical, social media, and documentation. I’ll go over where to get the tool, tool prices, the basic information, and how we use it at work. If one is a paid tool, I’ll give you a free alternative, although some free tools (and free accounts for more robust paid tool suites) are limited.

Discovery

Solo SEO’s Link Search Tool: This handy little tool is what I run to when I’m under-caffeinated and have no more creativity left. Enter a keyword and bam, it leads you right to a list of clickable searches for Google, Bing, and Yahoo, complete with handy suggestions like “add site” and “guest blog writer.”

I know that I shouldn’t need to be reminded to include keywords like “guest blog poster” but sometimes that’s just the way it is… and the basics are always good.

 Google Alerts: even though it’s been working at a less-than-stellar rate lately, this is still something that I rely on. Usually, when we have a new client, I’ll use alerts to monitor mentions of their brand just so I can keep getting more information about them. The more we know, the better in our discovery.

I use this to monitor my personal mentions, our brand/URL mentions, clients, interesting topics, bloggers I want to follow, etc. I like that you can use advanced queries here, as well and restrict your notifications in several ways. This is a particularly good way to start a week of linking: set up alerts to send you an email once a week with some more general keywords.

Set up some for “as it happens” and some to hit your inbox daily, and you’ll probably find that you’ll be able to tone it down a bit and fine tune your results so that you’re seeing the listings you truly want to see.

Zite: Zite is my absolute favorite mobile tool, something I use every day on my iPad and iPhone. It’s also available for Android and is definitely a fun app. You can configure it to show you stories according to your interests, so it’s a perfect way to generate ideas for content creation.

Zite can use your Google Reader and Twitter information to better understand how you interact with different bits of content, so it’s always adapting to show you the best stuff out there. You thumb content up or down, and the more you do this, the more well-honed your shown articles. I’ve found some amazing new bloggers here, and it’s something I rely heavily on when I’m trying to come up with a good topic for new content.

Million Short: This is a fantastic “discovery” engine that removes the top listings. Sounds crazy, right? It is, in a way that keeps my team from stepping all over the same sites in their discovery and lets them find some serious gems. You can also include and exclude sites, search by country, and set favorite sites to always show up near the top. Bottom line: this engine is awesome.

Google and Bing: of course, we still use these for discovery (like everyone else), and certain results seem better for specific industries from one to another. What our guys do is switch it up, mixing image searches in, too. Sometimes, I’ll even send a silly “don’t use Google today. Use Bing images only” email, just to remind them that they may find something unexpectedly cool and useful by not following the same path all the time.

Dogpile: Dogpile is a meta-search engine that pulls the best results from Google, Yahoo, and Yandex and displays them. You’ll see which engine each result came from (and if it came from more than one, they’ll all be listed). So, it can be very useful if you’re just starting to look around and aren’t quite sure which engine you prefer.

Outreach Tools

Buzzstream: They have a nice selection of free link building tools; but, I especially like the blogroll contact builder. If you do use blogrolls to find other good sites to approach (whether it’s to ask for a link, buy a link, submit a guest post, etc.), then this tool is quite handy as you can enter in the URLs of some sites and get a downloadable list of their blogrolls.

Note: I know this is the Outreach section, but their Link Building Query Generator is also very nice. Once you enter your information (which consists of keywords, your URL, competitor info, etc.), you’ll be given a list of queries alongside links to those queries in both Google and Bing.

**Note: Citation Labs: You can input a collection of URLs, and this tool will find the contact email addresses for you, but it is a paid tool. I’ve been lucky enough to do a test run before though, and I loved it, too.

Link Analysis

Quick note: I’m in love with free tools almost always, but when it comes to analysis, I am not afraid to pay for more robust options. My top three choices are all paid, but you can check them all out for free, and I list a limited free option below.

Majestic and their API: This is our first time using an API, and I’m thrilled. We have some internal tools that we’ve built, and we pull in API data and store it. It’s $399 a month, but that includes access to all of Majestic’s tools, which are top notch. The Backlink History is amazing and has been very useful when clients try and tell me that they absolutely know that a certain competitor isn’t doing much link building. However, for what we do at work, the API’s the main thing, and it’s brilliant. Majestic uses their own data, which I like.

Link Research Tools: I do the $269 Expert plan (monthly), and this is where I go to start all of my link audits. This is where I go when I want to dig into a profile and compare it against others, too. The reports are fantastic. (Note: They also have a nice Contact Finder.)

Ahrefs: This is another tool I use (agency plan is $179 a month), and I love the speed, so it’s quite useful in doing an audit or getting a quick picture of what’s going on in a profile. These guys also use their own data, so it’s nice to get a comparison for a domain from them and from Majestic.

Open Site Explorer free edition: Considering the fact that most of my office’s need for tools is related to my own work (usually analysis), I gave up the paid version of SEO Moz’s suite (although I did love it), but I highly recommend checking them out through this free edition. Their interface is very user-friendly, and their monthly prices are a bit cheaper than other options.

With the free account you can’t see much data or see social shares, unfortunately, but it’s enough of a taste.

 Technical

Rex Swain’s HTTP Header Check: I bet I’ve mentioned this tool in ten articles in the past year. I can’t live without it, and it’s the tool I’ve been using longer than any of the others. You should always check to make sure that a 301 redirect is in place for one version of a site (non-www or www.)

As I mentioned in a previous column, 301 problems are one of the most common issues I see with sites, and one of the easiest to fix. If I’m building links to a site, I check to make sure I’m building to the one that’s targeted as the main site. Otherwise, all my links have to go through a 301 redirect themselves.

Screaming Frog: This is a downloadable application that crawls a site and identifies loads of potentially problematic technical issues, ranging from duplicate title tags to internal 404s. I’m a firm believer in building links in conjunction with other forms of optimization, and Screaming Frog can easily identify problems that might make my job harder, and my efforts less effective.

Social Media

Icerocket: This lets you do real-time social searches; so, if you want to see what’s being said about a brand or topic, this is a great place to go. I usually head straight to the Big Buzz section so I can see which social platform to further dig into.

Crowdbooster: Previously free, this tool now begins at a charge of $8 per month, but if you heavily rely on social media, you can choose a more expensive version that gives you email/phone support. The data export functionality is pretty fantastic if you like to wade through information on your own time. You can also use this to schedule tweets. What I like best about this is the notification of Influential Followers. If you’re trying to really get your message across, knowing who these people are is a huge help.

Followerwonk: I use this tool to search for keywords mentioned in Twitter bios. If you’re starting a social campaign on Twitter and you have no real idea of who to follow and engage with yet, this can be a tremendous targeting tool for you.

Documentation

Open Office: Yes, I know that loads of people build incredibly helpful SEO tools that use Excel, but I cannot give up Open Office. I love the idea behind open source software, and I really haven’t run into any major problems using any of it. I’m also lucky to have clients who want to see an itemized list of our work, and this is a quick and easy way to show them what we do each month. I do occasionally look longingly at different reporting options, but for now, this works for us.

Evernote: I love Evernote so much… I’m about to cry just writing about it. Seriously, I cannot live without this one. If I had to choose one application to use, it would be Evernote. It synchs to my phone and iPad so everything matches up, and if I’m out running errands and a client emails to make sure that he did send me his latest work order, I can spend 30 seconds checking and answering him, thanks to Evernote. I have Notebooks for all sorts of things, but for link building, I organize them as follows:

• Overall agency (for anything from human resources to ideas for brainstorming)
• Content
• In-house IT work and internal tool ideas
• Current Clients
• Former Clients
• Proposals
• Budgets

If you’re a client and you email me, any relevant information that impacts how we work will immediately be put into your file, up at the top, along with the date.

If I am waiting for takeout and have some ideas for my upcoming blog posts, they go here. When we have a brainstorming session at work, it goes here. And yes, I know I’m spending too much time on Evernote for this article, but it really is where I keep everything organized. It’s also a very handy backup for when your hard drive dies and you haven’t been properly backing it up like your husband told you to, fifty times.

Last But Not Least

I truly think that every site needs to use an analytics tool, and my preference is Google Analytics. There are other good ones out there, of course, but it’s key to understanding your site.

In addition, I would highly recommend using both Google and Bing Webmaster Tools, as these are invaluable ways to see how those engines see your site. You’ll definitely realize it was worth your time when something crazy happens and you’re panicking about what went wrong and how to fix it, trust me.

The beauty of tools is in how you use them personally, of course. Some people don’t need to scrape the email addresses of contacts or use an API. That doesn’t mean that they can’t find something awesome about a tool that offers those, though. I’ve also found that almost everyone who owns a set of tools will be willing to speak to you and answer questions, and in most cases, they’re happy to give you a free trial or demo the functionality. Don’t be afraid to ask for that, as you might get turned on to something you won’t be able to live without next month.

Link builders are certainly not miracle workers, but much of the time, links are still seen as being the way to the top of the SERPs. It’s extremely common for people to say “I know I just need links. Everything else is fine.” Well guess what? It’s not always fine, and many times, there are issues that need to be fixed on-site, ones that can make link building work so much better.

Now, let’s just dive in to three common site issues that matter for link building and see what you can check, why it matters, and which free (yes free!) tool you can use for this purpose.

1.  Links Coming To 404 (Not Found) Pages On Your Site

These are commonly used by others for broken link building purposes. Why give them the chance? If you have links coming to pages that are not found currently, you aren’t getting the benefit of those links. Maybe they’re not great ones, but maybe they are. Would you want to get a link from CNN that went to a “page not found?” I wouldn’t.

What Are Your Options?

• If the content has simply been moved, 301 redirect the old page to the new page. This does usually get done of course, but for a large site, some of the pages that aren’t viewed as being critical ones don’t always get noticed enough to get redirected properly. Some sites will have a 301 to the home page for any 404s, and while I’ve done that in the past, it’s kind of annoying when I encounter it elsewhere.
• If the content no longer exists on your site but very similar content still does (like you did sell green widgets and now you only sell black ones) you could 301 redirect the old URL to the one that offers the most similar content.
• If the content no longer exists, there’s nothing else like it, and the user needs to know that; for the sake of user-friendliness, many would advise you to just let it 404 and show a “Page Not Found” error. If that is the case, considering we’re talking about quick and easy link fixes, I would create a custom 404 page (that, of course, contains a link to your homepage at the very least) and leave it at that.
• If you’re getting 404 errors for other reasons (not through existing links on other sites), then how you handle them is up to you. Some people create a list of the most common typos and misspellings and have a 301 in place specifically for those cases.
• Google’s Webmaster Tools is useful for finding these 404s.  For your site in WMT, under Health there is a Crawl Errors section. Click on it, and view the Not Found errors (if you have any.) This will provide you with a list of your 404s along with the date they were detected. You can click on a 404 error link, and a box will appear that lets you see where the URL is linked from. Many times, from what I’ve seen, these errors will be coming from your own site or site map; but if not, check out the originating site. If they are trying to link to another page and just got it wrong, contact them to let them fix it. If you notice that a few great sites are sending links to 404s, that’s a good case for a 301 for those pages on your site.

An Example: I used to write for a friend’s marketing blog years ago, and when she retired it, we wrapped up all of my posts and put them into a downloadble PDF which used to be housed on my site. It no longer is, as I think the information in it is not currently relevant, but there are some semi-decent links pointing to it. I’ve allowed that link to simply throw a 404 error that says the page cannot be found. For the purpose of usability, I think that is the right call because the content isn’t there, I have no plans to put it up there or replace it, and that’s that.

For the purpose of link building, though? I could simply (and probably will) 301 that old URL to my agency blog because that’s the closest thing, but I “should” send those links to a custom 404 page (that is done through a 301 of the old URL still) that has a link to my home page and my agency blog so that people clicking on that link will realize that the PDF is not on the site any longer. At least that way, I’m preserving a bit of the link benefits from those sites.

2.  No Overall 301 (Permanently Moved) Redirect For Non-WWW & WWW

There’s no universal preference over the non-www or the www version of a site, but you do need to pick one and set up a 301 redirect from the non-desired one to the desired one. You can do this in Google’s Webmaster Tools as well, but considering they aren’t the only search engine out there, I would not think that doing so is enough.

Rex Swain’s HTTP Header Check is my go-to tool for this. I think that I’ve actually been using this free tool for a decade now!

Enter the www version of your URL and uncheck the Auto-Follow Location box. It should return a 200 code generally. Now, enter the  non-www version. It should return a 301 code. The reverse is, of course, true if you’re using the non-www version as your preferred version.

If both the non-www and the www versions return 200 codes, you should pick one and fix it immediately.

What happens when you do not 301 redirect one version is that the search engines can index the site as both versions. “If you don’t specify a preferred domain, we may treat the www and non-www versions of the domain as separate references to separate pages.” comes straight from Google support.

This can cause issues with duplicate content, but it also serves to (unevenly) split the link equity. In conjunction with this, build links to the preferred version. A 301 will send some of the link equity through, but it’s not the same as having the link hit the preferred URL.

If you’re intentionally building links to the non-www version of your site and it 301s to the www version, every link you build has to go through that 301, so your overall link benefits are diluted. Why take that chance when the fix is so easy?

3.  Not Linking From The Homepage To Your Most Important Pages

I’m not sure why internal link structure isn’t talked about more, considering its SEO and usability value. First of all, if someone hits your homepage and is looking around, the linked-to pages are obviously going to be the ones they find. Some people go the opposite route and link to everything from the homepage, which is just as problematic.

One good way to boost the importance of an internal page that doesn’t have a ton of great links coming to it is to link to it from the homepage, which will pass PageRank.

If you link to 1000 pages from the homepage, each page will get 1/1000 of the benefit. If you link to the most important 10, they’ll each get 1/10 of the benefit.

If you rely on a structure where the homepage links to Subpage A which then links to Subpage C which then links to your critical page (Subpage D), you’ve just succeeded in diluting this benefit because each page is getting a percentage of the homepage’s PageRank.

Now, I’m sure that each site owner/webmaster/client could tell you which are the most important pages of a site, just like they can always name who they think their competitors are. However, I’d advise looking at your analytics to round out your ideas, as you might be surprised.

This can get a bit tricky though, as there may be loads of different things to consider before you decide to place  a link to a buried page on your homepage. Maybe moving it to a page linked to from the homepage is enough, if it’s good and previously required five clicks to find from the homepage. I’ve never seen a truly critical page be that buried though, but stranger things have happened.

In Google Analytics you can look under Overview/All Pages, and grab a nice long period of time for the report. This will list your pages alongside their pageviews and loads of other information. Keep in mind that you do really need to use common sense here.

If you see that your Contact Us and About Us pages get very few pageviews, that does not mean that you should remove links to them from your homepage. It would be very odd to have to dig all over a site to find that kind of basic information, so don’t replace anything like that with a page that you want to have more visibility, but you can perhaps add to the navigation in some way. If you can add a critical page, do it, especially if that page doesn’t have a lot of good links coming in.

I’m not promising miracles here, of course, but as I’ve said, link building is not the magic bullet. These are easy fixes. Some of them depend upon a variety of factors that have to do with unique business situations (mainly the internal linking decisions), but take some time to make sure you’re doing things that support all those great links you’re building.

Many times, we’re also one of a handful of link companies working on the same campaign. Are any of us communicating regularly and sharing information? No, we aren’t, and that needs to change.

Part of this responsibility lies with the client, to provide us with that information, but part of it resides with our company as well, for advocating for it. I definitely believe that too much information can clutter your brain needlessly; but much of the time, links are treated as a totally separate entity because they are offsite.

No developer needs to give us coding permissions and we can do our job well enough without having access to analytics data. However, let’s take a look at how we could work a marketing campaign if we all put our heads together. Since this is a Link Week column, let’s assume that you’re building links.

Pay Per Click Ads

I do run a medium-sized PPC account for a client, and I’ve previously worked on dozens of them, so I’ve seen firsthand how effective they can be when they’re properly tuned. There seem to be two main lines of thought with what to market with paid ads:

1. Cover all the top spots for your brand and desired keywords, period. No matter what your organic rankings are, buy ads for those keywords.
2. Build links for keywords you aren’t buying ads for and pay for keywords that aren’t giving you top organic rankings.

Whether or not your query is a local one should be something you take into account here. For one thing, when queries get localized, organic listings are pushed further down the page, well below the fold. See the local pest control query below:

You can’t even see the first organic result (which is a Wikipedia entry) and spot 2 is occupied by a local pest control service that isn’t anywhere in my paid listings or my local ones. That’s a number 2 spot, one usually coveted, but I’d have to scroll through an entire page of potentially relevant results before I would see it.

If you’re looking for a pest control service, it’s probably because you need one now, and if you’re being shown loads of relevant local results in the paid and local sections, why keep going?

The local Terminix ad, at paid spot 3, shows a Google map and has a phone number. If I’ve just seen a giant centipede slithering across my ceiling, that’s who I’m calling right now, because if I keep scrolling, it may drop on top of me. Yes, that’s happened.

Here’s where I would say link building is fantastic, but maybe due to the way local queries occur and results are shown, we should be buying ad space in order to capture leads. I’d potentially back off on trying to build links for [pest control] and focus more on link building for the brand or for long-tailed queries. In other words, I’d choose my battles with links.

Now let’s take a non-local query and say that you wanted to buy pest control supplies. See the results below:

That number-one organic spot looks good to me, and I’d click on it. It looks like what I need. The title is good, the snippet is relevant, etc. The three paid results don’t look that relevant to me, and I’d certainly not click on one that misspelled my city’s name. This is a case where I’d not buy an ad, most likely, but would definitely keep building links to try and keep that spot in the SERPs.

Basically, it could come down to a case-by-case basis. The key is to see how different, important keyphrases display for you, then keeping an eye on your analytics and make sure you’re tracking conversions.

(I actually wrote about using PPC for link building a few years ago for this column if you’d like more detail about how PPC can be a great asset to a campaign when you’re building links.)

Social Media

Obviously, you can use social visibility in order to promote your content in order to generate links, but links built in this way are not always easy to measure, as it’s not a direct process much of the time.

Below are a few quick tips to make social and links work well together:

1. When you have new content, let your social media team know about it and make sure they’re publicizing it. If you don’t have a team (or even a person), then do it yourself. Unless your site is on everyone’s radar 24/7, you need to let people know that you have something new.

2. Make sure your content is easily socialized by using social buttons on each piece of content. As with most things, if it’s not easy, people won’t do it.

3. Don’t just half-ass social media. Many people think that it’s an easy job, and maybe parts of it are easy if you’re a generally outgoing person, but there’s a lot of nuance to it. You can’t simply tweet links to your content and expect people to lap it up. You need to interact, tweet other content that isn’t yours, and actually engage with people.

Social media has also opened up a world of discovery for guest posts, as you can quickly engage with bloggers on sites you’d like to post on instead of emailing them and hoping your pitch got through.

Don’t have a social media team? Free or low-cost tools make it fun and accessible for you. See my favorite three idiot-proof ones listed below:

Crowdbooster  helps you look over the analytics of your Twitter account and can alert you to followers that are influential. Not everyone who’s listed as influential will immediately be tweeting your content of course, and many times, it’s just fine to engage with people without huge numbers of followers. If your content is not relevant to one of your influential followers, it may not get spread around anyway, but the less influential followers who find it to be relevant can add up.

Followerwonk lets you search Twitter biographies by keyword and can help you find new people to follow who are in your niche. You can also compare users and run analysis on both whom you’re following and your own followers. Using the [pest control] example again, if you did a search for Twitter users who have this in their profile, you’d see something like this:

Icerocket  has a variety of ways to search through various social media platforms and blogs.You can also set your search to auto refresh (and save your searches) which is very helpful if you are doing a lot of discovery. I usually just go straight to the Big Buzz section, which pulls in relevant social information from Twitter, Facebook, blogs, video, and images.

Even if you don’t plan to use Icerocket to connect with anyone just yet, it’s great for getting ideas for content, and the home page can quickly tell you what’s popular across all the channels.

Technical SEO

One of my biggest pet peeves is with webmasters who don’t use a 301 redirect to send the non-www version of their site to the www version, or vice versa. I don’t care which one you pick, just do it, please. Without a 301 on one of these, two versions of your site can get indexed. It’s such an easy problem to prevent.

While we’re talking about 301 redirects, keep an eye on pages with inbound links if you need to move or remove them, as you can at least preserve some linky benefits by putting in a 301 for the new page. Otherwise, all those links coming to a 404 page are just going to become someone else’s broken link fodder.

And, that leads us to 404 errors, which no one seems to agree on how to handle. It’s common to find links going to 404 sites and using that as broken link building leads, and that’s a great way to get good links, but you don’t want anyone else doing that to you, do you?

Figure out how you want to handle 404 errors and be consistent. If you use Google Webmaster Tools, you can find your 404 errors in the Health/Crawl Errors section. Clicking on the 404′d URL brings up a box that gives you more information so you can click on the Linked From area and see if any outside sites are linking and getting a 404.

Also, while I admit to being overly impatient, things like page load time can definitely affect link building. If you’re sending an outreach email asking for a link and the page you propose having them link to takes 20 seconds to load, that busy webmaster may give up and you’ve just lost a potentially great link opportunity.

My favorite technical tool that’s as idiot-proof as the social media tools I mentioned above (yet still amazingly robust) is Screaming Frog, which is a downloadable crawler that can identify loads of potential problems that you can fix. If you’ve never run it on your site, download it and do so. If you’re not familiar with the information it gives you, take a bit of time and wade through it on their online user guide.

Considering the host of problems caused by improper use of a robots.txt file, make sure you run yours through a validator like this one.

Obviously, there are many other parts of a marketing campaign to consider, as you could add conversion tracking, offline branding, etc. These are simply the three most common other components that I’ve personally dealt with (and have experience in) for current and former clients.

The key point to remember is that working in isolation in your own niche can definitely have benefits, but sometimes more communication leads to bigger and better things.

Getting a fuller picture can open you all up to how to do your own area better, and as I’m sure you know, there are many business owners wearing all these hats. Not everyone has a social media staff or an IT team. Most people do realize that they need links though, and thinking more about how to pull from other areas can be incredibly beneficial.

It should be clear by now that your site can be harmed by poor quality links, whether you bought them or got them for free, or heck, didn’t even intentionally get them. I previously stated (in several places) that I thought negative SEO was more of a scare tactic than a reality but I’ve since changed my mind after witnessing it firsthand a few times.

As much as some people like to think that links aren’t as important as link builders make them out to be, they’re still one of the easiest ways to cause harm to a site even if they’re no longer the easiest way to rank one.

Google Adjusts Webmaster Guidelines; Panic Ensues

With Google’s updated Webmaster Guidelines for link schemes  I’m starting to think that paid links aren’t actually going away anytime soon as some are predicting.

Any optimization is an effort to manipulate the quality of Google’s search results, correct? I mean, why else would you bother? You want your site to have better visibility, and you aren’t going to leave that up to Google. These “link schemes” worry me because it’s not just paid links that are being fussed about now, it’s manipulative links, poor quality links, crappy directory links. It’s all links, basically.

If this is true, will people start to buy more links? I think they might. And yes, this is my version of “Predictions for 2013″ in an informal manner. And yes again, I don’t have huge issues with paid links, but I’m not suggesting that anyone should go that route; I am merely explaining why I think they might.

The Problem With Free

Lots of us used to think that any link was a good link provided it was free, but that isn’t the case anymore. I’ve looked at a few sites that were warned and penalized, sites that have cleaned up all their paid links (or never actually had any paid links), asked for reconsideration, and been denied because they still show unnatural links.

The common theme here is that these remaining “unnatural” links aren’t paid links. They just happen to be on sites that have little to no value. Maybe they once did, but they no longer do.

The Need To Control

Think about this: if you’re no longer going to get away with placing low-value links, you’ll either agree that content is king and work that angle or you’ll try and control the whole process on your own. Controlling any marketing process tends to cost money.

With people now charging to take an existing link down, I can’t see the payment bit of things simmering down completely, as webmasters now stand to make money off placing links, keeping them up, and removing them when they can make money. If there’s any money to be made, webmasters will usually find a way to charge.

And this: when sites have done everything the right way yet still have problems with every Google update, what does that tell us? Some sites may be sensitive, but when it’s your business on the line and you’re trying to do things the right way but it’s not paying off, what are you going to do? Sit and wait and hope it will all work out in the end, or pay for action?

Please note that by saying that, I’m not advocating that anyone buys links. I’m simply bringing up potential issues as Google attempts to subvert a process that continually evolves. I’ve talked to many site owners who say that they want to do things the “right” way but they don’t really think that they can, as they will keep losing ground to competitors who don’t have a problem with overt violations.

What New Ways Of Manipulation Will This Bring?

I’ve looked at link profiles that are full of good paid links and they are ten times better than some profiles filled with nothing but free ones. If the theory holds that we’re moving towards a more semantic web, then anchor text won’t matter as much which means that people will find other things to manipulate and instead of just buying links, they’ll potentially be buying authors. They’ll be buying content surrounding links they already have. They will develop new ways of rising about competitors by buying negative sentiments where their competitors have links.

Google’s constant attempts to crack down serve only to spawn new and harder-to-catch ways to win. It sounds harsh but I know that no matter what methods they develop of controlling manipulation in one form, people will find ways to manipulate something else, until that gets smacked too, and they start over again.

People like to think that any paid link will stand out, but you probably encounter paid links every day and you have no idea that they haven’t been editorially given. As Danny Sullivan pointed out recently, you can buy press releases that contain links but Google doesn’t yet penalize these. He goes on to say that they apparently don’t carry any weight, just like a paid no-followed link, but my point is that you cannot always identify a paid link without doing some digging.

There are definitely some stupid link buyers out there of course, but there are some incredibly clever ones as well.

At the very least, 2013 should be a very interesting year for link building.

Puppetpenguin image, used under license from Creative Commons.

Pricing starts at $79 a month and goes as high as $499 a month for more advanced plans. All plans offer a nice discount if you pay for a year upfront.

Now that the basics are out of the way I have to say that I absolutely love the Ahrefs tool. It’s fast and the graphical representations are very easy to understand (even for a novice I imagine.) In this suite you’ll find a Site Explorer, Keywords Analysis, Backlinks Report, Domain Comparison, Batch Analysis, and Competition Analysis tools.

For our purposes here, I’ll be going through the Site Explorer, Backlinks Report, and Competition Analysis sections.

1.  Site Explorer

The Site Explorer gives you an overview of a domain. You can find technical site information and social signal info here as well. Once you’ve run a report you can access it again in the History area, which is right beside the box where you enter the URL. You get the following information on the Overview tab:

• Referring Pages
• Total Backlinks
• Referring IPs
• Referring Subnets
• Referring Domains (broken down into .gov, .edu, .com, .net, and .org)
• Backlinks Types (broken down into text, dofollow, nofollow, sitewide, not sitewide, redirect, image, frame, form, .gov, and .edu)

Each of the above metrics has a clickable number so that you can see more details. There is also plenty of information about your anchors here, represented in bar charts. For a chart-happy person, this overview tab is fantastic.

Take a look at just one of the reports you’re given:

Up top on the Overview navigation bar, you can view the following:

• External
• New/Lost
• Anchors
• Pages
• Referring Domains
• Linked Domains
• Site Issues
• Raw Export

As I’ve mentioned before in a review, having the raw data to export is critical for me with any backlinks tool.

Let’s take a look at the Site Issues tab for a minute because this is the kind of thing I’d usually consult a separate tool for. You get a list of your errors like HTTP Timeouts, a list of warnings (your title text is too short, you’re missing descriptions, 302 issues, etc.) and a list of notices (permanent redirects, overly long URLS.)

Considering the amount of times I’ve seen site problems affect a site’s performance online (it’s not always links, remember) I think this type of information is necessary in a link tool.

The Pages tab is also nice because of the social information you’re given. Beside each page’s URL, you can also access organic keywords for the page. However, in testing this section, I didn’t always get social data, which was a bit disappointing.

Still, when it’s working, you get information like this:

The Anchors tab allows you to see a breakdown of the number of referring domains, backlinks, and percentage for each anchor. You can click on the + button beside the anchor and it brings you to a list of the referring domains for it. You can also filter the anchors by how many words are in the anchor.

The New/Lost tab graphically shows you how many links you’ve lost and gained. If you click on a date on the calendar, you’ll see a list of the links that you lost and/or gained. However, as is the case with any system, sometimes you’ll see something that needs to be double-checked.

In my case, a link was shown to be lost but I double-checked and sure enough, it was actually still there, so don’t freak out about lost links. There could be various reasons why a link is reported as lost. It’s very cool to be able to see your new links by date as well.

2.  Backlinks Report

The Backlinks Report is also graphics-heavy and very easy to understand at a glance. You’re brought to an overview screen initially so you can see your subdomains, referring domains, anchors, target pages, and TLDs broken down nicely here, and some of the sections list out the top values which have corresponding links to other reports, so the potential for almost getting lost in analysis is high if you’re a data junkie.

Let’s click on the Backlinks tab and go through that. Each of your links is listed out with an Ahrefs Rank (their proprietary metric), social information for Google Plus/Facebook/Twitter, target page, anchor used, the type of link, and when the link was last updated in their system.

Again, much of this information has links that can lead you to more detailed reports. Your list of links is listed by Ahrefs Rank from highest to lowest but the whole report is very sortable depending upon how you want to view it. It’s also exportable.

Here’s what you’ll see, and note the filtering capacity up top:

While we’re on the subject of Ahrefs Rank, let’s point out what that metric is. It’s kind of like Google’s PR (or any other tool set’s proprietary metric for evaluating pages) but you can read more about it on their FAQs page, which also lists some other great information.

What I really like here is seeing the social data for the sites linking to my site. Obviously, you can have some great older links that have no social love going on because when those links were placed, we weren’t Twitter-happy for example (like the Sphinn link in my above example), but I do think this is very valuable information for your newer links.

The Pages view is nice and lists all your site’s pages along with the Ahrefs rank, social information, number of backlinks, how many nofollowed links, number of linking domains, IPs, and subnets.

If you click on a page you see more information about the links coming to it, including the anchor, types of links, and when the system last updated the information. I love this for finding social mentions of pages because in digging through those, there were some that I had not seen for Google Plus.

The Domains tab lists your referring domains and is set to list them alphabetically by default, but you can change how they’re sorted. In using this, I would always sort by another metric whether it’s Ahrefs or the number of backlinks but to be honest, seeing your domains listed alphabetically may cause you to notice some that you hadn’t always paid as much attention to. You can click on a domain and then be directed to a link report for it, so if you’re interested in that, this is a good section for you.

The IPs and Subnets sections may not be ones that everyone uses, but when you’re dealing with a massive link account, this is fantastic information.

3.  Competition Analysis

This section is currently in Beta but it’s too interesting to pass up. You enter a keyword and a URL and choose which version of Google you want to run the tool on, whether it’s .com or one of about 20 country-specific versions.

For example, I ran a test on the keyword “link building” for my linkfishmedia.com site, in Google.com. Here’s what I got:

This shows the URLs ranking for that term along with valuable data about them, such as the number of referring domains to those pages, the number of referring domains to the root domain, and social information. You also get a small graph that charts their backlinks.

After the top 10 are listed, you’ll see the information for the URL that you entered so you can compare it to the top 10. You then get a great little section of charts that sum up your competition compared to you.

This tool took the longest of any to run, but again, it’s in beta, and it’s still faster than some tools. As mentioned before about social data, I couldn’t always load that information. Google Page Rank wasn’t working at one point either.

Pros

1. The graphical representations that you see on each dashboard are fantastic and are a quick way to get a good overview. If you’re a person who likes to see a lot of visual data, you’re going to love this.
2. It’s fast. If I’m doing an on-the-fly check for a client who’s just called, I need speed.
3. It’s intuitive and well laid-out, with almost every piece of data linking to more information. You could literally loop around in the data for hours. It’s so well laid out that even someone who has never used a link tool should be able to figure out what to do pretty quickly.
4. I could not find a single feature that I wanted in a tool that was not present here already.

Cons

My only issue with this tool was that I did not always get social data the first time I ran a report, and at one point I couldn’t pull any Google Page Rank information either.

Summary

In case you couldn’t tell, I love this tool. I was not asked to review it (sometimes that happens) but instead chose to simply because I use it and think it’s that good. They have live support in case you need it but as I said, it’s incredibly intuitive. I think this tool is poised to become a massive player in the market.

Using Majestic SEO‘s data, they allow you to view link data of up to ten competitors at once, let you track keyword rankings over time, set up automatic alerts, and provide you with historic data that goes back to 2007. They also offer a link building submission service which is not a part of this review. They offer a guided setup and have several tutorials on how to best use the system, and they have a blog.

Pricing

Serpi.co has a few levels for pricing (and they offer a free 30 day trial) ranging from a basic $99/month plan (that lets you have three+ campaigns and run 25 backlink reports) to an agency plan that is $499/month (and lets you have 25 campaigns and run 100 backlink reports.)

They also offer a backlink only plan (in case you don’t want to track anything) for $199/month that allows you to run 250 backlink reports.

The Dashboard

Serpi.co has a very clean dashboard as you can see below:

Campaigns

To get started, you set up a campaign with its name, the URL, and you choose a vertical. No vertical really applied to my campaign so I chose Computers. You can add keywords and competitors to track then.

For our purposes, I’m checking the LinkFishMedia.com domain (my agency) and that of the SEO-Chicks.com (of which I’m a founding member) and SearchEngineLand.com (this site, obviously).

You get a very, very cool snapshot of how you’re doing compared to the competitors, based on the number of backlinks, unique domains, and unique IPs linking to each site, alongside Trust Flow and Citation Flow metrics (both Majestic metrics.) First though, I’ll go through the pages that you’ll encounter when setting up a campaign, and then we’ll get to the Campaign snapshot itself.

Now, here’s a piece of advice… if you do use this tool, you do need to enter keywords and competitors into the campaign. I didn’t at first (just being difficult) and I didn’t really see anything impressive. However, once I entered that data, I quickly changed my mind.

Keyword Manager

The Keyword Manager page is a part of the Campaigns section and is where you enter the keywords you want to monitor, and these can be updated or deleted at any time. You can add them manually or import a list.

You can also add tags for each keyword to keep them organized. Once you’ve entered the keywords you’ll see Search Volume data for each, rank in Google and in Bing, and the ability to sort by change in rank from the previous day.

Here’s what this screen looks like:

If you click on one of your keywords from this screen, you’ll be taken to the Rank History page which is very cool. It gives you the previous month of rankings in a chart, for both Google and Bing, and you can change the dates to customize the time period.

Here’s what the Rank History page looks like:

Also from the Keyword Manager page, you can create tags to organize your keywords. When you add a new tag, you’re routed to the Keyword Tag Manager page.

Keyword Tag Manager

This page lists your keywords and their associated tags. If you click on a keyword, you’ll again hit the Rank History page.

The Keyword Tag Manager page looks like this:

Competitor Manager Report

Here’s where you enter the competitors that you want to track. You can add the ones you know or find them through the system. Here’s what the page looks like:

If you want to find them through the system, you’ll see their Competition Finder page.

Competition Finder

This runs a Google search that pulls in the first 30 results for your keywords, of which you can enter up to ten. You can import a list or enter them manually. There’s also the capacity to get keyword suggestions. Once you have your competitors, you can select them and add them to your project.

The Snapshot

Once you’ve set up keywords and competitors and have your snapshot, you literally have a giant array of options for how to drill down into the data or view it. In the Backlink Insight area, you can see the following data:

In the Backlink Types, you can see the following:

You can choose the report scope to be for URL or Root Domain and choose the Fresh or Historic Index. You can also download the data as a .csv, which is always handy.

Once you’ve set everything up, there’s a section at the top where you can see changes, once you’ve had the information in there for a bit. You can see New Link Prospects (well, I can’t because it’s not an open section to me for this trial and it’s not functionality that I am reviewing or in any way endorsing that you try) and Rankings Changed.

For the Rankings Changed section, it splits them up into those that increased and those that decreased.

The way this is all set up would make it easy for someone to quickly get a look at different bits of information. For all of the different views that you can click on, you can also view them for All (you and your listed competitors), Common (those you have in common), Me (you), or Competition (just your competitors.)

You can filter the results as well, depending upon the view (for example, when you’re looking at anchors, you can filter them by those that contain three or more words only; for the linking domains, you can filter by the source domain and whether it should match or not match text that you enter.)

Let’s now see about the back links.

Ad Hoc Backlinks

Again, once you run a report, you’re given the snapshot, which I do like. However, you don’t immediately get an actual list of your backlinks. You can see metrics, and that’s great, but I don’t want to have to click all over the place to be able to download a list of my links with the information that I want.

You can click around and find what you need and then download that, but I prefer having all the information right there, ready to download. In fact, for what I am interested in, I can’t find a way to download all that information at once. Apparently, this is a feature they will be adding in the next few weeks (and might potentially be ready at press time.)

The breakdowns are really nice, as you can click on Anchor Text, for example, and see your anchors along with how many links you have for each, how many domains for each, and your BL:RD ratio (which is your Backlink to Referring Domain Ratio.) I’d love to see the ability to click on the anchor and then see a list of the links containing that anchor. You can filter these results too, if you like.

The TLD Distribution is very handy so you can quickly tell how many links you have from the various domain extensions.

The Backlink Types area is also quite nice, especially if you’re visually inclined, and you can drill down to see all the different types of links that you have, along with some good metrics.

Overall Pros

It’s Majestic data first of all, which is top notch. I like the ability to add other people as collaborators, as I think that could be very beneficial for multiple people working on a large campaign.

If you don’t need to do your own analysis through downloading the information into Excel and you just want to get some quick ideas of the backlink profile, this could definitely be a decent tool for you.

For example, I love the breakdowns that make it very easy to quickly get an idea of how many blogs are linking to you,  and I love how you can view data for your site, your competitors and you, just them, etc.

Overall Cons

Here’s what I don’t like summed up again… for one thing, if you run a backlink report, you have to download it as you won’t be able to access it later.

That functionality is one of my primary reasons for using Link Research Tools, as you can access old reports at any time. If I’m using a tool to run reports for competitors and I run five of them, I want to be able to access that data without having to download it if I’m only interested in something specific.

Secondly, the ability to quickly run a report and grab all the data so that I can download it and do what I want with it is critical for me. It’s not in this tool as far as I can tell. I suppose that if you’re not interested in doing your own sorting and analysis, this might be acceptable, but for me, it would be a deal breaker not to have it. As mentioned above, this feature should be added later.

Basically though, I think that this is an excellent system with lots of potential, as you’re able to access lots of different types of data that is broken down into easy to understand bits. I don’t consider it to be as user-friendly as some tools that I’ve tested and use though, and I think that it would be much more useful to add the capacity to grab a list of links with all the relevant info for download, as I’ve mentioned.

One reason that I’ve not written much about link audits is that it’s a process that’s very fluid for me. I love trying out new tools and there are always algorithm updates that favor something more than something else.

One month I’ll be digging into money anchors for a client, the next month I might be looking for bad link neighborhoods.

I let a few things influence how I start the process:

1. Has the site been penalized, deindexed, or seen a decrease in rankings and/or traffic?
2. Has a previously unknown competitor emerged and we want to see where they stand compared to us?
3. Are we trying to determine which area we’re the weakest in?
4. Are we trying to figure out which links to cleanup?
5. Do we just want a general overview so that we can create a link plan for moving forward?

Where Do You Start?

Sometimes, a client has information about what’s going on and can help me figure out what to look for. Unfortunately, we don’t always have the luxury of having access to an analytics package or Webmaster Tools so my only real gauge for a site is its rankings at times, although I’m not a fan of using rankings to determine how well a site is performing online.

If I know that traffic dropped off steadily on a certain date that corresponds with a major update, it’s much easier for me to adapt my methods to analyzing specific areas affected by that update. Sometimes, however, there’s no clue for what to look for.

For example, when the first round of Google Webmaster Tools unnatural links warnings came out, there wasn’t enough information, and we were all just panicking. People were speculating on the causes and we tried to find certain similarities amongst sites that received these warnings in online forums.

During that time, I did my quickest audits ever after those days, even on sites that had not yet received a warning, simply because I wanted to know what was going on and where all our clients stood. Since I had no real idea what to look for, I’ll go through the process I used in this instance.

While I use a variety of tools, for the initial list of back links, I usually use Link Research Tools, Open Site Explorer, or Ahrefs.

We just want to get a list of the current back links, so if you’re already using something else, just grab a list that contains the following minimum bits of information:

• URL linking to you
• Page linked to on your site
• Anchor text used
• Whether the link is followed or nofollowed

With Link Research Tools you get some great metrics that are very useful as well, as they give you an idea of the power of a link. Other tools give you similar metrics so whatever your choice of tool, make sure you understand what those numbers mean. Depending upon what you’re looking for, those can be extremely helpful and can save you loads of time.

Let’s look at a few ways of doing this.

Are There Any Unnatural Links?

Site has received an unnatural links warnings or client simply wants to clean up his link profile. Here, we’ll be looking to identify any potentially poor links. While currently it’s up in the air whether or not bad links can actually harm your site, let’s just assume that for whatever reason, the client wants to find poor links and pursue removal.

Now that we have a list of our links, let’s sort them by Trust ascending.

Warning: many of the links you see listed as low Trust are not harmful or low quality links.

Some are really good links, in my opinion, but from what I’ve found, using this metric is the quickest way to identify the links that may be low quality. You just have to remember that this tool, like all others, needs to be used with some thought in mind, so don’t assume that just because a link is listed as having no trust, it’s a bad link.

Many legitimate comment links, for example, can show up with low quality metrics but that doesn’t mean they’re bad links. I used to rely more on the Power*Trust ascending. This metric values the quality of domain based on its strength and trustworthiness, and while I like it a lot, I also make it a habit to manually check links and see whether or not they’re good ones.

Many of the links that show very low numbers for this metric are actually links that I like, links that send traffic to my site. If you don’t feel comfortable eyeballing a link and determining whether it’s a good one or not, I wouldn’t use this metric.

They just introduced a new link detox tool, and I must say that I love it, as the links it identifies as “toxic” correspond (for the most part) to the ones I would have found using a manual analysis.

However, you have to keep in mind that these are identified using certain metrics that do not always give you the true picture, so again, I absolutely think that you have to manually examine your links.

You’ll get a report that looks like this:

You can click on the “Show me these links” bit and see what links are listed. Now, some people believe that you should remove potentially harmful links and some don’t. I personally think it needs to be examined on a case by case basis, as the time it takes to remove bad links is time better spent building better links.

However, if you are overrun with crap links and your rankings/traffic have crashed, you may not have much choice, so this is a good way to get started on fixing your problem. Just please, please, please remember that you cannot use metrics alone to determine the worth of a link.

Utilize Competitive Analysis

First of all, there are various reasons why you may see a new competitor emerge, and they don’t always involve either your links or theirs. Perhaps they have better content that’s doing amazingly well socially and you haven’t updated your site in a year.

Ahrefs.com has a Competition Analysis tool that’s pretty handy, but it pulls competitors based on current rankings for a keyword that you enter, so you can’t (yet) use it to compare your own site with a new competitor.

Considering how SERPs fluctuate, this is still very useful for getting an idea of the social signals for top listings. Open Site Explorer also gives you some great social data as you can see below:

To be honest, I could write paragraphs of how I’d use various tools to do competitive analysis but that’s a waste of time, as I’ve never done two batches where I employed the exact same methods.

Bottom line: grab every bit of data you can for your competitors and identify where you’re being beaten, but don’t let that alone dictate your future strategy.

If you find that you have 25 percent of the links that a competitor does and none of the social love, that’s a pretty good indication that you do need to spend some time building more links and producing content that will generate good social signals.

However, if you find that a competitor has 75 percent money keywords as anchors and they’re beating you, considering recent Google updates said to move away from such anchor manipulation, you’d obviously not formulate a plan of attack that involved cranking out only money anchors for the foreseeable future, I hope.

Find Out Where Your Site Stands

Next, you just want an overview of where you stand with your own site. This is pretty straightforward I think. Grab a list of your links from your tool of choice and dig for the following minimum information:

• Anchor text distribution
  • (brand, URL, money, noise, long-tailed, and anything else you want to look for…these are my go-to breakdowns though)
• Home page links
• Deep page links
• Nofollowed links
• Image links

Knowing what you have currently is critical to figuring out where to go from here. It’s shortsighted to formulate a strategy without taking into account where you’re lacking or where you’ve been overdoing it.

For example, if you analyze your anchors and find that you have 90 percent money keywords and 1 percent brand keywords, you wouldn’t want to continue to plow forward with building tons more money anchors.

If you only have links to your homepage, you need to start building links to your subpages. Also, once you’re comfortable analyzing your own site, doing competitive analysis is much easier, and I do recommend doing that as some industries have different norms than others.

Now, you can (and probably should) dig into things on a more granular level, in my opinion. You can look into how many sitewides you have, do a Class C block analysis, look at your breakdown of TLDs, look at the hosting location of the sites linking to you, etc. Most tools will give you their own version of quality score metrics as well. You can get into page-specifc data if you need to.

Basically, you can get as much information as you can handle but make sure that you do understand all of it before you use it to craft a strategy that may end up hurting you.

A Few More Bits, Bobs & Caveats

I have found that Majestic SEO’s Backlink History is an invaluable tool for checking link growth over time. You have to register to be able to view more than one domain, but it’s definitely worth it. It’s great for identifying link spikes, which can be problematic because they can indicate link networks or spam; but to be fair, they can also indicate a press release going out or some other legitimate marketing effort.

This is one of the first things I look at when a client asks me what the heck a site is doing when it’s surpassed them. Whether or not it “should” happen, sites can still build a lot of links very quickly and rise in the rankings. They may not stay there long, but it does still happen.

If you find that a site which has risen above you quickly has recently built a ton of links, don’t immediately think you need to do the same, as you might see them drop off again next week.

If you don’t get the results you’re expecting in one tool, try another one, as these tools have different databases. For example, for one site I looked at, here’s the following data:

• 1643 links with 142 linking domains in Open Site Explorer
• 2369 links with 176 linking domains in Ahrefs

Each tool that I’ve tried also presents the data in a different way from the rest of the guys, so if you’re more interested in seeing something very basic like the actual list of links with a few metrics but you don’t really want to see a bunch of pie charts, you may prefer Open Site Explorer.

If you love those pie charts, both Ahrefs and Link Research Tools uses them. Actually, Ahrefs may win the prize for using the best graphical representations, and this kind of data can save you a lot of time.

Another major thing I look for in an audit is proper (or improper) use of 301 redirects. If one version of the site (like the non-www) doesn’t 301 to the other version (the www in this case), that needs to be addressed.

If you’ve never audited your own site, try it and get familiar with the data. I do think that if you’re a novice, you should consult with someone better trained in order to analyze your data and formulate a safe strategy. Almost anyone can access data, but not everyone is equipped to interpret it.

In closing, if you remember nothing else, remember that metrics alone should not be used to make decisions. You’re going to have to do some hard work and manual labor and really dig into your links if you want to truly get an accurate picture.

That’s great news for people like me who specialize in link building but the intense supply and demand nature of links coupled with the ease of promoting yourself through social media have led to a frightening increase in people who build bad links and really have no idea what they’re doing.

As link building is considered an offpage tactic, to actually sell yourself as a link builder, you don’t have to do very much. People are desperate for help.

However, it’s better to build no links than it is to embark upon a link building campaign that is full of nothing but spam that you will pay for twice: once when you put it up there, once when you have to remove it. If you’re shopping for link builders, make sure that the one you go with knows most of the following.

1.  Why Links Matter

There’s no way to describe that quickly here but if you don’t know why links are important, you shouldn’t be building them alone. Links are how users and search engine spiders move around the internet and they give clues to what the linked-to content is about.

2.  HTML Code For Text & Image Links

For a good reference you can visit http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_links.asp but generally, it’s pretty darned easy stuff:

3.  How To Read A Robots.txt File

These can be tricky and you’ll se a lot of robots files that are coded incorrectly, so if you’re unsure of how to read one, there are a few good validators that are online. (I usually gravitate towards http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml.)

Robots files are always named robots.txt and are always found at the root, which means you can always access them at yoursite.com/robots.txt. If one doesn’t exist, well, you just won’t see one. That’s not a problem, but if one is there, make sure it’s valid.

Here’s the code you want to really watch out for:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

That tells the search engines to go away when they show up. People commonly use this when they don’t have a development/test environment so that they can code live but not have the site get indexed. That’s ok if it’s how you want to work, but remember to remove that exclusion when you do want the engines to index you.

If your site has recently disappeared, check the robots.txt immediately. You can also block engines using the method listed below.

4.  How To Check For Robots Blocking Outside Of The Robots.txt File

There are some intricacies involved with using this method so it’s a good idea to read what Google has to say about blocking robots here.

If your site has just disappeared and you have checked the robots.txt file and it’s all fine and dandy, check to see if this line is in your code:

5.  How To Use WordPress

As one of the most common blogging platforms, you should familiarize yourself with it. It’s quite user-friendly in my opinion but there are tons of tutorials out there. However, like with many things, it’s something you can learn best by actually setting up a site and using it.

If you don’t want to use WordPress, that’s fine – just learn how to set up a basic site on a popular platform. Here’s why I think this is so important for link building: once you are intimately involved in the innards of a site, you do start to think more critically about SEO, content creation, and usability. Those are all aspects of marketing that aren’t always involved with link building, but they should be.

6.  How To Do A Link Audit

Don’t wait to audit your links until you get a warning letter from Google. Check and see what’s there right now. There are some great free tools that will give you a list of your back links so use them. You won’t always get all the functionality that you need from free tools and free versions of tools so if you’re doing a decent amount of link building, you should probably invest in at least one major paid link tool.

Grab your data and start to analyze it whether you can export it or you have to copy and paste it. You need to know how to look at your profile as a whole, break it down into different parts (like percentages of sitewides, money keywords, etc.) and actually look at the sites in the report and evaluate whether or not that link is a good one.

7.  Google’s Webmaster Guidelines

Located here they’re something you should be familiar with, especially if you plan to violate them.

8.  How To Do A Basic Link Check In Various Tools

Don’t limit yourself to one. Some databases are refreshed more often than others, some give you more information that you might ever need, some give you less, etc.

9.  How To Analyze Anchor Text

You need to be able to grab your information and sort the anchors into categories like brand, URL, money keywords, and noise at a minimum.

10.  How To Do Competitive Analysis

I truly don’t think that there’s a better post about this than one written by Jane Copland. Whether you always perform competitive analysis or not, you need to know how to critically analyze your competitors and figure out why they’re doing better than you when they are. Sometimes people only do this when things go wrong, so I suggest you do it when things are going well so you aren’t trying to think critically when you’re in panic mode.

11.  How To Negotiate A Link

Whether it’s through an emailed link request, a phone call, a guest post, a connection on social media, etc. you need to know how to deal with people. Just people this is all online doesn’t mean that you can ignore basic manners and politeness. If you want something specific, lay it out and don’t take 10 emails to say so. If you don’t get what you want, either speak or or shut up and deal with it.

12.  How To Keep Up With Algorithm Updates

If you’re involved in SEO and pay attention online, it’s pretty obvious when a big algorithm update happens. However, if you’re not that involved, SEOMoz has a good list and the Google Webmaster Central Blog does an excellent job of explaining changes. If you notice something odd, just search for “algorithm change” and if there’s anything notable, you’ll see it.

13.  How To Use Google Alerts

I don’t really see why people wouldn’t take advantage of this truly amazing (and free) tool. You can set up alerts for your brand, your name, your URL, your competitors, your important keywords…anything you can think of.

You can choose how often to get alerts, what types of results to monitor, and whether you want all results or just what Google determines to be the best results. The email from your alert makes it very easy to click through to the result, so if you’re trying to keep informed when something that you’re interested in is indexed, this is a fantastic, easy, and free way to do it.

14.  How To Use Some Form Of Web Analytics

I use Google Analytics on some sites, but there are other good packages out there. Don’t simply rely on rank checks alone to indicate how well the site is performing.

15.  How To Use Google’s Webmaster Tools

While I wouldn’t say that everyone needs to use Google Analytics, if you get even a small percentage of your traffic from Google, you need to use Webmaster Tools. It’s my first stop when something’s wrong. They alert you to problems with your site, allow you to run crawl checks, see your new links, look at your queries, and do about a ton of other things.

16.  What Makes A Link A Bad/Spammy Link

Considering the amount of times I’ve pointed out what I think are bad links to people, I don’t think that this is anything we all agree on. However, if a link exists on a page for no easily detectable reason other than that it was purchased or slapped on there through a network, it’s probably a bad link.

There are many awkward link placements that are totally legitimate of course, but if you see a link that doesn’t seem to belong, it’s most likely not a good link. In terms of a spammy link, those are links on sites that are just utter crap. A link for a shoe company that’s on a blogroll comprised of 99 links to everything from payday loans to the best hotel in Baltimore is a spammy link.

17. How To Tell If Code Is Invalid

There are a lot of different validators but a great resource is always http://validator.w3.org/. Bad code can potentially render properly (enough) in a browser but that doesn’t mean that things will work as they should. If you don’t know how to code and you can’t just identify bad code by looking at it, make friends with a validator.

18.  How To Check Redirects & Why They Matter

I always head to Rex Swain’s HTTP header check for this one If you’re building links to a site that runs on both a non-www and a www version with no 301 from one to the other, you’re splitting your link juice. If you’ve asked the tech guys to put in a 301 for a page that’s no longer where it once was, you need to be able to double-check to make sure it was done properly.

19.  How To Remove A Page That Has Lots Of Inbound Links

People have different opinions about this but I’d either 301 redirect the old page to the most relevant current page or to the home page. I wouldn’t remove it completely without handling it with a 301, as a 404 error just wastes that link juice.

20.  Recent Link Smack Downs

If you’re building links and you’re unaware of the fact that big brands can get penalized, you need to be paying more attention. Remember JC Penney’s troubles? If not, go look it up. The same goes for the recent deindexing of a few major blog networks. You need to keep yourself informed about all the guys who get into trouble because knowledge is (hopefully) power.

21.  Alternative Engines To Google

There’s Bing and Yahoo of course, but there are also some really cool meta search engines that are well worth exploring. Dogpile is one of my favorites, as is MillionShort. Don’t limit your discovery to one engine. You can find some jewels if you look somewhere else, and that includes directories.

22.  Crazy Methods For Discovery

 This is one of my favorite things to do…just sit down and brainstorm some off the wall ideas. My son recently said, out of the blue in the car, “taco death pool.”

That’s what I mean by crazy discovery. I can safely say that I’ve never seen most of the sites that show up for that search in Google. If a search brings you something you’ve never seen before, that’s a good thing.

23.  How To Use Social Media For Discovery

Icerocket is my favorite tool for this but there are others, and you can just go the old-school route of doing a search in Twitter of course. This is a particularly good way to keep your eye on bloggers who might write about content that pertains to your own site so that maybe you can snag a nice guest post slot.

Followerwonk is also a great tool that lets you search keywords in Twitter bios. Not only can you find bloggers talking about content that’s relevant to you, you can see what topics might be trending so that you can craft content around those as well.

24.  How To Guest Post

You need to know how to find sites that accept guest post, you need to know how to write one, and you need to know how to promote the ones you write. My Blog Guest is a guest posting system where people looking for guest posts or looking TO guest post can connect.

You can also just simply add “guest post” or something similar to your keyword search when you’re doing discovery. Most guest posters are allowed a link in either the content or the bio, which is where the link benefit lies. Considering how spammed up this practice is becoming, make sure you’re savvy about how to actually find good placements and make the right pitch.

25.  How To Analyze A Site In 5 minutes

While you need to understand what all the metrics mean, you need to be able to judge a site just by looking at it. There is an overwhelming amount of information that you can get for a site from various tools and plugins, and this information can be extremely useful for various purposes.

However, let’s say all your tools and plugins aren’t working for some reason. You need to be able to manually check the important metrics and see if a site is a good fit for a link to you. Is the site indexed in Google? Is the content written by humans? Would you trust this site?

26.  How To Find Contact Information If It’s Not Listed

You can try a Whois search, looking for the webmaster on Twitter, or use Rapportive. I’ve even found email addresses in the source code. Sometimes bloggers don’t list their email addresses on their site but they may provide contact information elsewhere, such as on sites where they’ve guest posted.

27.  How To Check For Social Signals

On older posts and sites (way back before Twitter!) you aren’t going to find lots of social signals in terms of tweets, likes, and shares but you should still see comments.

On new content, you may see more tweets, shares, and likes than you do comments, as lots of people discuss blog posts on platforms other than the actual blog posts themselves a lot of the time. Bottom line: new content should look like it’s being seen and enjoyed by people. Danny Sullivan wrote a great piece about social shares as the new link building. Definitely worth a read.

28.  TBPR (Toolbar PageRank) Is Different From Actual PR (PageRank)

What Google shows you on the toolbar is not frequently updated information. If you’re judging a site based on what you see on the TBPR, you’re doing it wrong.

29. What Link Juice Is

Link juice is basically link popularity passed from one page to another. Nofollow is intended to stop its flow. It’s a much more intricate concept than the example I’m about to give but in a nutshell, it works something like this (note this is not an exact/ real formulal, but used for illustration):

Page A has 10 link juice points to give. There are 5 links to other sites on this page, so each of those pages receives 2 points of link juice.

Page B has 10 link juice points to give. There are 10 links to other sites on the page, with 5 of them being nofollowed. The 5 links that aren’t nofollowed should still send 2 points of link juice. The pages linked to from the nofollowed links shouldn’t get any link juice.

30.  What Page Rank Sculpting Is

Using the idea mentioned about link juice that I discussed above, page rank sculpting is the practice of trying to funnel link juice into certain pages in order to make them perform better and restrict it from others in order to prevent them from getting any benefit from your links.

31.  How To Optimize Internal Links

Recently there has been more talk of this since most of the discussion of over optimization has been taking place regarding links coming into your site from another site, not your own internal links.

Since the goal of internal links is to help a user navigate a site, you should understand that proper keywords in internal links should be present if they make sense to a user. There’s an excellent article about site structure and internal links here.

32.  Ways Of Identifying A No Followed Link

Yes, there are plugins that can highlight them but you know what? You can also just look at the code. If a link has a rel=”nofollow” on it, it’s nofollowed.

33.  How To Do Keyword Research

There are a bazillion free and paid tools that do this but here are a few that I use regularly:

• Google Adwords Keyword Tool
• Wordstream
• SEOBook
• Wordtracker

34.  How To Write Well & Not Just Well Enough

While I am definitely a grammar/spelling freak, I still truly believe that badly written content (whether it’s a blog post, an email, a review, or whatever) makes you look like you don’t truly care enough to take the time to do something well.

Some people have fantastic ideas and points to make but it’s hard to wade through something that is badly written. Spellcheck exists for a reason. I also realize that some people write just to get content out there. Trust me when I say that it shows. However, if you’re not a naturally gifted writer, practice, read some fantastic writers, and you’ll get better. Just believe that it’s important.

35.  How To Find Your Influencers

I view this in two ways: finding those whom I can influence and finding those who influence me. I’ve been doing this for a long, long time but there are many people who’ve been doing it longer and who do it better, and those are the ones I keep my eye on so I can keep learning.

Crowdbooster is really useful for this as they have an Influential Followers tab. This lists then people who follow you on Twitter, along with their number of followers. If you want to get the attention of someone who has a massive reach, this is a good way to do it.

However, remember that influence isn’t always directly correlated to number of followers. Don’t ignore people who interact with you just because they don’t have a billion followers. Many people are much, much more influential than their Twitter metrics would suggest. I know several people that I speak to regularly on Twitter, and none of them have more than 1000 followers. I get more feedback from them than I do from a lot of other people, and they’re the ones I’ll go to when I need something because they’re the ones who’ve interacted with me.

36.  How To Tell If A Link Is Giving You Traffic

This is dead simple but I mention it because of a recent conversation that I had with someone who was concerned about removing potentially harmful links. I asked if they gave him traffic and he said “how can I tell?” If you’re running Google Analytics it’s easy to find your referrals under Traffic Sources.

If you’re considering removing a link and you find that it sends you a lot of traffic, see if it’s converting traffic. If not and you still want to remove it, go right ahead and try. If a link sends you converting traffic, I’d leave it alone.

37.  How To Find Dead Links To Your Site

 If you have some great links coming in to dead pages and you haven’t 301 redirected them, you’re losing some great link juice most likely. It’s also a bad user experience. Check to see if you have any 404 errors on your site. If so, put those pages into a link check tool to find out who’s linking to them. The W3C Link Checker tool is one that I use frequently to look at broken links, redirects, and other issues. It’s also free.

If you find that you have links coming into pages that aren’t found, put in a 301 or contact the webmaster of the sites linking to you and point out where they could link to. Honestly, that’s my preferred option because when you don’t go through a 301, you don’t lose link juice.

However, if you were going to switch from url.com/thispage.html to url.com/thatpage.com and you had 500 links pointing to it, a 301 is a heck of a lot better use of your time than sending 500 emails and checking to see whether the webmaster complied with your request.

38.  How To Find Mentions That Don’t Yet Link To You

One very easy way to do this, moving forward, is to set up Google alerts for your name, site, URL, etc. If something pops up and there’s no link, ask for one if you like.

Many people will mention you and link to your social media accounts, especially Twitter, but if that happens and you’d rather have a direct link to your site, thank the person who mentioned you and ask if you could have a link to your site instead. This is a tricky one as some people might find it rude to be asked to do something when they’re doing you a favor by mentioning you, but still, it’s best to know how to use this tactic judiciously.

39.  What A Bad Link Neighborhood Is

We’ve dealt with a lot of clients who say that they don’t want links on sites that link to certain niches. That notion aside, the bad link neighborhood effect is what happens when you have your great link on a site but it’s surrounded by other spammy ones, usually just a bunch of links that aren’t related to each other and are only there because they’re been purchased. These links can cause the site itself to be valued less in Google’s eyes.

A bad link neighborhood can also be a network that’s been devalued or deindexed. Think of it as the same idea as if you wanted to open a kid’s clothing store and you had to decide where to rent a business space. You wouldn’t want to be next to a strip club most likely but if you found a space in a section that had a McDonalds and a kids’ bookstore, you’d probably think that was ideal.

Google says to “avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.” This kind of thinking goes both ways as you can see. You don’t want to link to bad neighborhoods and you don’t want links from them either.

40.  What Link Spikes Are & Why They Can Be Worrisome

For one thing, they can indicate network links all being activated at the same time. They can indicate a negative SEO attack. They can also be 100% legitimate (think press releases, new television ad, etc.) but still, you need to understand how to get more information about them when they happen.

This looks a bit odd, no? One quick tip: any time someone approaches me and says “I think some of my past links are hurting me now” I immediately go and do a backlink history check in Majestic. The weird spikes in 2008 make me think that maybe something suspicious was going on (networks maybe?)

This could be natural, but after seeing it, I have a good idea of the questions I’ll need to ask this person.

41.  How To Be Suspicious Of A Site Or A Link

If  a site has content that does not at all seem to match up with the URL (let’s say the URL is homemortgage.com and the content is all about pet care) then something is definitely amiss here. If you start to see a lot of new links coming in and you’ve done nothing to get them, you need to go and check them out.

With all that’s happened recently with Google, links, negative SEO, and link warnings, you can never be too careful.

42. You Need To Actually Read The Content Of A Site

In other words, don’t just rely on its metrics when evaluating it. Wow, this is a big one. I think that sometimes we all have blinders on when we’re cranking out work, and we tend to be so focused on easy ways to analyze a site quickly that we forget to slow down and actually see if the content makes sense.

I’ve seen links come in that look fantastic at first. The site seems totally relevant to the niche, the link looks perfect, the social signals are good and look like they’ll keep improving, but when I read the article, it reads like it was written by a robot. That kind of site might be ok for awhile but it’s probably not a good long-term potential for traffic.

43. What Markov Content Is

Markov content is content that has been randomly generated to pass as proper text until it’s closely inspected. At its best, it just looks like someone might not be a native speaker of the language in which it is written, but something about it will just be “off” when you try to make sense of it.

Beware of this when you’re evaluating a site that you want a link from, just as mentioned above.

44.  How To Check For DuplicateContent

Copyscape is free and you can quickly tell if someone is duplicating your content elsewhere. They also have a premium version that lets you check to make sure that post you’re about to publish is original content. Since scraped sites have been known to outrank those hosting the original content, knowing how to check for this is critical when the site you’re building links for starts to lose rankings and traffic.

45.  How To Figure Out If Links Are The Problem Or Something Else Is

Due to the recent panic about unnatural link warnings, links are being blamed more than ever when things go wrong. They can definitely be the cause of your problems but it’s very wise to learn how to see if they are and check out all the other potential culprits.

46. How To Use Advanced Search Operators

If you do manual discovery these can be a massive time-saver, helping you remove a lot of unwanted results. Theres’s a good cheat sheet here.

47.  What rel=author Is & How To Implement It

This sounded so simple when I first read about it but making it work really wasn’t nearly as easy as I expected. Verve Search has a great guide about how to implement it as does Rick DeJarnette here on SEL. If you write a lot, you need to get this set up.

It’s like a personal version of the big brand effect wherein you can build up a trusted name and (hopefully) enjoy more visibility on the Web. If one of your pieces shows up in the SERPs, you’ll get a More By X Author link so that all the other articles for which you are a verified author can be displayed.

48.  Why Sitewides & Footer Links Might Not Be A Good Idea

Usually footer links are sitewides but occasionally you see them on their own. A sitewide link is one that’s on every page of a site. This used to be a way to get lots of links years ago, and it’s still occasionally a valid way to build links. A blogroll tends to be sitewide and if it’s on a relevant blog and it makes sense, that is perfectly legitimate in my opinion.

However, when you scroll to the bottom of a page and there’s a massive paragraph filled with links, those aren’t good sitewides. Sitewides form a pattern which the engines can easily detect and devalue, so they aren’t anything that I’d usually pursue unless one made sense. Generally speaking, links that aren’t in the actual content of a page aren’t always the best ones.

49. How To Determine Whether You Have A Lot Of Sitewides

I bring this up mainly because many people I’ve spoken to had no clue how to check to see if they had sitewide links. If you run a link check it should be very obvious, as you’ll see a list of pages all on the same domain.

Some people still like sitewides but many link builders don’t actively seek them out anymore, as many people suspect that they’ve been discounted, and some suspect that they can actually hurt your site. I think that some are very legitimate but don’t think that algorithms are always sophisticated enough to be able to detect legitimacy.

50. What Deep Linking Is

Deep linking is the practice of building links to internal pages and not just your homepage. If you only have links to your homepage, that seems as if you have no other decent information on the site. That’s not a good signal to send.

51. What rel=canonical Is

You can read all the details but basically, this is used to specify the preferred version of a page when there is similar content elsewhere.

52.  How To View Source Code

In Chrome, you can right click and click on View Source and you can do the same in Firefox. Those are the two main browsers that I use so if you don’t have that functionality, just dig around until you can figure out how to see the code. You’d be surprised at how many people have no idea how to look at the code.

If you’re trying to figure out if a link is nofollowed, you need to know how to see the code so you can check that by hand and not rely on plugins. The same goes for viewing the code to see if robots are being blocked (listed above at #4) and identifying reasons why your link may not be working properly. From what I’ve seen, a very common link code error is with not closing tags properly.

53.  How & When To Submit A Reinclusion Request

If you’ve been penalized and you’ve cleaned things up, it’s time to submit a reconsideration request. If you have been penalized and you haven’t cleaned things up, don’t bother submitting one in hopes that Google won’t take a close look to double-check your honesty.

You can submit one here but remember, if you haven’t actually cleaned up any mess, it’s not a good idea to submit this. If you’ve been hurt by an algorithmic update but not actually penalized or warned, you may just have to make some changes and wait for the next update in order to get back into favor.