CDBaby

Sivers, a professional musician, took CDBaby on a unique path that differentiates it from many other businesses – in that he didn’t ever want to run the company at all.

He started CDBaby in 1997 because his friends asked him to post their songs online as he had his own. One favor led to another, and eventually Sivers built his company to the point where it was sold for $22 million in 2008.

Sivers’ unique background and thought process pervaded into his business practices. At one point in the process, Sivers looked at his purchase confirmation e-mail and found the blasé, boring business-speak there didn’t match the core ideologies of his company.

So, Sivers sat down and pumped out an e-mail in twenty minutes (as he describes in his new book Anything You Want) that he found a bit more fun – and a lot more representative of what he believed CDBaby to be as a company:

Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved ‘Bon Voyage!’ to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Sunday, December 11th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby.  We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as “Customer of the Year”.  We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you once again,

Derek Sivers, president, CD Baby

This e-mail, meant only to be a small bit of fun and more importantly – a disattachment from the norm, was so revered and talked about by CDBaby’s customers, that it attracted over 20,000 citations online – as verified by a simple search for ["private CD Baby Jet"] on Google.

Sivers spent 20 minutes writing this simple, text based e-mail – and he attracted 20,000+ citations, many of which included live links.

Link Building Lessons From CDBaby

Sivers already had an established audience with CDBaby, but when exposure met remarkability, the links came in droves. The first thing to learn from CDBaby is the concept of static marketing. Static Marketing is an idea that we should set up “force multipliers” that make every single marketing effort more powerful based on their implementation, especially those that only take a one-time, sunk-cost effort to implement.

The most prominent examples of static marketing implementations are in the form of social share buttons. On this post, you’ll find many Twitter, Facebook and other share buttons which, when implemented as calls to action within blog posts, greatly increase the potential spread of this or any other post. The second they are implemented, they become “force multiplers” for all future content creation from the source.

Social share buttons are one easy example of static marketing, but the concept has many potential applications – such as the e-mail from CDBaby. Once written and implemented, this small piece of e-mail marketing acts as a force multiplier for every purchase made until the website functionality changes.

The remarkability of the e-mail inspired action – so many of their customers went to share the information with their friends online in various forms. And here I am, continuing the cycle of social spread by writing this post.

I suggest creating your own remarkable purchase confirmation e-mail. If you can’t get away with the kind of personality Derek offers in CDBaby’s confirmation, I suggest at least offering up Twitter and Facebook account “follow and like” calls to action – as well as a persuasive ”please link to me” request with HTML to cut-and-paste for ease of use. You won’t get tons of links right away, but the steady dribble of customers turned into fans and brand advocates will make for a lifetime of potential benefit.

For increased link volume using this process, I suggest using an application like Tynt. Tynt makes it so unsophisticated users, when cut and pasting your e-mail into a blog post, will automatically embed a link. Beyond this e-mail confirmation application, it’s also great for web publishers who find their content cut-and-pasted with frequency – especially by less sophisticated users.

Content Types That Promote Linkability

Beyond the brilliant use of static marketing by Sivers and CDBaby, one other unique characteristic of the e-mail stands out as well – the format that promotes the linkability of the content. The Web – and world – is turning into a unique funnel of data about businesses.

It is an increasing reality that social citations count for search, but it is still a pretty unanimous thought that links are still the number one currency of the Web. Most of the time, it is much more beneficial (especially for us as SEO-fueled businesses) for a user to share through a do-follow hyperlink rather than a Tweet, share on Facebook, or word-of-mouth referral to a singular friend.

For businesses that rely heavily on search, it is still in their best interest to push users towards linking rather than those other channels. CDBaby does this beautifully with their e-mail; an e-mail whose brilliance as linkbait is informed by the following characteristics – other than just being “great content”, of course:

• Privatized. This is not immediately discoverable content on CDBaby; it is behind an e-mail wall that one can’t point to through Facebook or Twitter. Since a person can’t simply tweet or share out the location of something remarkable that adds all the description they need, they are forced to create a blog post and share that way, or point to another blog post if they seek one out and trust that author as well.
• Length. Not short enough to be shared on Facebook or on Twitter – and not long enough to lose the readers attention, Sivers’ e-mail pushes the linkerati into a funnel that forces them to create a blog post or be forced to more awkward channels to share their experience. A simple “CDBaby has such a cool confirmation e-mail!” just won’t cut it.
• Perpetual discovery based incentives. Given the “private wall” of e-mail, the link effects are similar to someone saying “new blog post” on Twitter, which, according to Dan Zarella’s research, is one of the 20 words/phrases that garner the most retweets. Every new user that finds this content will believe themselves to be pioneering a new territory – and because of that, they’re more likely to share the information, partially because of that “discovery” incentive behind sharing the information.
• Text based. Because the content is primarily text, the barrier to linking is extremely low. If the behind-the-wall experience was a rich infographic or other flash-based experience, it could be more difficult for many users to replicate that experience or talk about it through any channel.
• Linkerati incentivized at high interest point. Right after purchase, the interest in your product and offering is at a high that can only be exceeded by future pleasure with actual use of your product – which, conversely, could also mean a drop in interest if it’s not up to expectations. Also, this peak of customer interest aligns with access to a computer. The linkerati’s ability to act is important – if your product is physical, they may not be near a computer when the peak moment of satisfaction is reached – when they open it and use it for the first time. Therefore, the customer satisfaction peak, hybridized with intent to link, is at that moment in time – so a confirmation e-mail is a brilliant way to take advantage of it.

These properties are mostly distinct within this unique channel, which reflects on the brilliance of the CDBaby e-mail. But they’re aren’t exclusive as linking properties – they apply across the board. But what also makes them difficult to implement is that matching “great content” which these same properties can often be extremely difficult (or worthwhile) to do.

That makes this hybridization, in this exact implementation, something that is as powerful of a linking tool as a business can possibly hope for. An e-mail newsletter has many of these same properties, but it isn’t as static – meaning that it requires frequent writing and iteration to incentivize a linker that isn’t as beneficial as a purchase confirmation e-mail.

It can still be valuable, though – Jason Calacanis of Mahalo, for example, utilized a privatized e-mail list in 2008 that incited frequent republishing of his e-mails. He didn’t use it for SEO purposes, but based on the reception and the remarkability of his content, you can see how that created a wave of links back to his websites.

Opt-In E-Mails for Link Building – A Powerful, Low-Cost Tool

How you use e-mails to build links is up to you, but the power it has  (as exemplified by the aforementioned CDBaby and Jason Calacanis examples) show that it can be an incredible tool for building links back to your business.

Certain page-level characteristics are immediately identifiable as being a standard characteristic of sites that won’t link to us. This is most frequently big businesses, and sometimes .edu’s and .gov’s when our content isn’t strong enough. By eliminating these immediately identifiable non-linkers when prospecting, we improve our efficiency and therefore, increase the number of links we can obtain per hour and scale our campaigns more efficiently.

If we flip our mode of thinking in this regard, we can also identify websites that frequently link to us more often than most. Just as big, established businesses are the most likely to not link to us, it is those less sophisticated webmasters who are often the most likely to link to us.

This is because they are often unaware of the value of their website, are philanthropic sites or non-commercial minded, or otherwise, just aren’t that “with it” as it comes to understanding the most prominent version of currency on the web, the link.

These websites may have older, near-extinct methodologies of website design and content structuring. These methodologies can frequently be picked up with an intelligent search query. Used appropriately, a savvy link builder can filter through much noise to locate those less sophisticated webmasters who are more probable to link to them.

Locating The Link Opportunities

These add-ons are most effective in large, broad verticals such as online shopping or travel where there exists a large mass of relevant websites to draw links from that are relevant to your site.

In those more segmented verticals, it may be more appropriate to only use those reductive queries to take advantage of every potential linker.

When relevant targets abound, maximizing return of high-ROI targets may be preferable in your strategy – especially when there is pressure to deliver links immediately due to client or internal pressures.

• inanchor:”Site Award” KEYWORD
• inanchor:”Site Awards” KEYWORD
• “Website Award” KEYWORD
• “Site Award” KEYWORD
• “Site Awards” KEYWORD

Websites who quickly accept website awards and/or have accepted enough to actually host a special page on their site or are very casual in nature, and/or can be easily utilized to grab a link from. If the vertical match is there, it is also paticularly easy to think of a piece of egobait of your own to contact these webmasters with to get an easy link or hundred back to your site.

Similarly, you can use the website award given to track all other sites given the same award – if they’re similar of nature (and worthy of another award, of course) – you have easy access to a garden of potential backlinks for your website.

If you’re in the market for linkbait, I would also suggest just searching for [allinanchor:"Site Awards"] – you’ll get a plethora of sites that have received multiple website awards that you can get ideas from.

• “Contact the Webmaster” KEYWORD
• “Site maintained by” KEYWORD
• inanchor:”Guest Book” KEYWORD
• inanchor:”Guestbook” KEYWORD
• “Guestbook” KEYWORD
• “Guest Book” KEYWORD
• “Sign the Guest Book” KEYWORD

The phrasing “Contact the Webmaster” and “Site maintained by” are things that frequently occur in older, less sophisticated websites. It’s a loose, non-tightened way of what could otherwise be phrased as “Contact”. It is these little continual drips that inform us of sites which be more likely to link to you with a sophisticated pitch.

Similarly, guest books are something that can aptly be described as archaic – you may find that some of these sites will have difficult to find contact information or otherwise will be rather old and possibly left abandonend, but when it’s possible to contact them, linking can come rather expediently.

For these kinds of websites, make sure to check WhoIs information, as it’s also unlikely they anonymized their contact information.

• “Number of Visitors To” KEYWORD
• “Visitors to our webpage” KEYWORD
• “Hit counter” KEYWORD
• “You are visitor:” KEYWORD

Counters like this certainly are a sign of aged sites. But they are also still maintained by webmasters out there, somewhere, who has chosen to re-up their hosting and let this old, aged domain remain. Or, they simply aren’t conscious of how much an outdated eyesore these counters really are. Either way, they are prime targets to be contacted for a link.

• inanchor:”Advertising” KEYWORD
• inanchor:”Sponsorship” KEYWORD
• inurl:”Advertising” KEYWORD
• inurl:”Sponsorship” KEYWORD
• “Sponsorships” KEYWORD
• “Sponsor Our Website” KEYWORD

Although more costly than the previous efforts, finding advertising and/or sponsorship opportunities for events through these same kind of efforts can be a great tactic as it comes to scaling campaigns and putting out a large quantity at links – although at a notably higher cost than link begging and other types of “free” links.

On my panel at SMX Advanced, I suggested using price anchoring as a methodology of lowering the cost of these links. This is a superior technique for lowering event sponsorship costs at scale.

Underneath The Code

Another page-level characteristic which correlates well with links back to your website is music on-page. I know we all dislike terrible music on a website, but we as SEOs, should also love them – because they mean that webmaster is pretty likely to link back to us because they aren’t too cognizant of what the web thinks, or what the outside world thinks.

Unfortunately, I haven’t figured out a way to detect these kinds of sites through search – the most obvious way would be to locate a .midi, .mp3 or other audio format in the source code and then return it. If you have any suggestions on how to do this, I’d love to hear it in the comments.

Finally, if you have any other common characteristics of linking websites we can use to segment our searches to find those “high probability linkers”, I’m sure others as well as I, would love to hear those as well.

Losing Value – Losing Links

Every website succumbs to the reductionist nature of the web. Although the number of pages increase, the link graph also has a way of deteriorating – meaning that many of the initial links you receive could end up declining in value or otherwise, outright disappearing.

Your backlink profile, if ignored, will shrink considerably, and that number one ranking – or any ranking at all – could be lost. If that ranking’s future value is taken care of like a child and nurtured into adulthood, it’s even possible you can let it off into the real world – without needing but a phone call or two to maintain the same connection.

What you need to do to maintain your link graph – and/or insure its links appreciate in value – is be rigorous in the evaluation of the domain you’re attempting to get a link from. There is much, much more to the value of a link than the present value of the page. SEO is a long term game, so it only makes sense to future-proof your links.

Doing so can make one link, of seeming equal value to another link now, worth 2x as much in terms of lifetime link value (LLV).

Like the much referenced business methodology customer lifetime value (CLV), lifetime link value is a process – and an ideology – that can separate a highly profitable SEO campaign from one that barely covers your bills for McDonalds.

Determining Lifetime Link Value

Although I don’t suggest you plug approximate values in an equation to determine the LLV of any given link, keeping it in mind as a strong delimiter in determining link value is something every SEO should do.

A link with the a high lifetime link value has the following characteristics:

• It will exist on the page as long as the page exists. That is, it is not a “rented” link or a link that faces temporary restrictions, like a listing as a speaker on the frontpage of a major conference website, or as a sponsor of an upcoming, yearly event.
• Its positioning/stance in the current site architecture makes it unlikely it will ever “fall off” the link graph. Many websites, namely blogs, have a temporal state that poorly aligns with site architecture, meaning that your link will eventually be more than 10 clicks from the homepage. When this happens, and no other external links have been obtained, it is a near certainty that it will eventually be worth but a sliver of value, or completely fall off the link graph.
• It exists on a domain with an upward backlink growth trend. If a webmaster is still actively promoting his or her website, it is a near certainty that link growth continues to trend upward. On the opposite side, if a website is trending downward, it is probable that the webmaster cares less, the topic isn’t as important, and overall, future link value will decline.
• It is not off topic on the domain in question. Manipulative, off-topic links trigger disdain in the users that observe them. Even if historical trends show an upward climb, if your link is off topic and prominent, now, that’s a good sign that the future value of the link will trend downward.

Breaking Down Link Characteristics

Many SEOs don’t apply their own on-page evaluations to off-site link evaluation. This happens because we get lazy, because links are hard to get, and because we rarely put in deep consideration for domains that aren’t our own.

This lack of deep consideration – or even, deeper than standard consideration – can handicap some teams into getting links that aren’t worth much, that won’t continue to move the needle, and will cause long term costs to be much higher than they have to be.

Temporal Link Factors

How do you know if a link will be removed by a webmaster or other omnipotent party? If you acquired the link manipulatively, there’s a pretty good chance they are likely to do that at whim – especially if you use the popular “link renting” practice that will obliterate LLV. If you sponsor an event that’s yearly or have a link placed on content that doesn’t have perpetual value, you may face the same fate.

Perpetual value is the same concept that pervades with “evergreen content“. Evergreen content won’t succumb to temporal factors that will make the webmaster update them and potentially remove your link. A static page on the best plugins for Chrome is way more likely to have a receding LLV as opposed to a link on a page about “How to Tie Your Shoes” – as I think we’ll be tying them the same way for a long time to come, and those Chrome plugins, and Chrome in general, are way more likely to become extinct.

Site Architecture Of The Hosted Link

Many blogs are poorly constructed. They have posts that fall off the link graph and then just as quickly fall off our lives. They do a bad job of internal linking, there are no pages that serve as homepage-hosted HTML sitemaps – and as such, the best link in the world from the strongest domain can just as quickly become one that disappears if no external domains link to it.

So, in blogs, look for those same things you profess with your own blog. First, archiving and/or tags in the sidebar. The best blogs in the world probably won’t have these, but everyone else (the links you’re probably getting most of the time), should.

Many “big” blogs, such as TechCrunch or The New York Times, can’t possibly do this due to the less-than-amazing look this setup provides, the sheer volume of content they create, and also, because maximizing ad-space is a must. They make up for it through strong internal linking practices in their individual posts. But for those casual bloggers and other micro-sites with less-than-adept webmasters, you’re likely spending a lot of time getting a link from a blog with a terrible LLV.

Similarly, increasingly popular Tumblr is horrendous for SEO purposes, because there is no way to archive anything, and internal linking is terrible. It can offer some real traffic which can turn into other links, but for the pure power of a link, you’re better off twiddling around Blogger.

As it comes to getting posts on blogs (or any site), you should strive for a link that will always be two clicks from the homepage. Any more and you run the risk of losing the power of the link if the domain drops in value, your post is pushed back, or nobody else links to the post.

Historical Backlink Growth Trends

If we’re trying to determine where a potential linking domain is going and has gone, there’s no better option than Majestic SEO’s Backlink History tool.

There are several options to select with this tool to help determine the velocity of link growth for your domain. It’s not perfect, but with a keen eye, it points out clear situations where a domain has hit a wall or is declining, as opposed to a domain that’s growing exponentially.

If we look at Empire Promos and Amsterdam Printing*, two competitors in the promotional items space, we can see an example of this in action. Although both domains have positive growth trends going forward and aggregate domain strength, they aren’t equal domains in terms of probable LLV. The current map shows that it’s likely that Amsterdam will outgain Empire in the future – even if the current value, at least as this graph is concerned, is comparable for both.

Off Topic Link Placement

Manipulative, off-topic links are a sure sign of a domain that will begin to recede in the future. Even if the webmaster isn’t aware of it, the presence of these will mark the future steep decline of the domain – because they greatly impair user experience.

Understand that they will very frequently mark the beginning of the end for the website you’re placing them on. Your time would be better off obtaining on-topic links on evergreen pages – with the site architecture and backlink growth trends that offer a Lifetime Link Value that would make any economist drool.

*Disclaimer: Amsterdam is a former client and current acquaintance. No prior affiliation with Empire Products.

The difference between “KEYWORD” inputs and what we actually want as SEOs, can be summarized as follows:

• Input: KEYWORD
• Actual desired result: KEYWORD pages that will link back to my site

These are frequently not the same thing. The reason is that Google doesn’t care that you want a link back to your site – Google cares about returning the results that are most relevant for your search query. Very often, keywords that are relevant for “KEYWORD” are not the same ones that will ever link back to your site.

While we can never really know the psychological tendencies of many webmasters that may or may not cause them to link back to our sites, we can pick up on page-level tendencies that allow us to avoid most sites with fundamental concurrencies, that won’t ever link back to us. This depends on the query and the intention, but there are many patterns that we can lean on to eliminate websites that won’t ever show us the hyperlink light of day.

By sticking to these and using them frequently when link prospecting, we can eliminate a lot of wasted time scanning through domains that aren’t ever a real consideration for acquiring links.

Common Business Website Structures

Each business vertical is different. E-commerce verticals will always have shopping carts of some form, so it makes sense to eliminate those without adding many other queries. The ideal reductive add-on to your queries eliminates as many bad results as possible without also eliminating potential good ones. The more you add, the more likely it is that you are also removing good results from your searches.

• -”shopping cart”
• -”add to cart”
• -cart
• -”privacy policy”
• -”privacy”
• -”terms of use”
• -”terms of service”
• -”FAQ”
• -”frequently asked questions”
• -”legal”
• -”careers”
• -”jobs”
• -”investor relations”
• -”customer service”
• -”free quotes”
• -”free KEYWORD quotes”

Example queries:

• [HD Televisions -"shopping cart" -"add to cart" -"privacy"]
• [Insurance links  -"privacy" -"FAQ" -"frequently asked questions" -"terms of service"]

Outbound Content

Sometimes, you have outbound content such as an infographic or time-sensitive material which simply won’t fit on static pages or educational type resources, and will rarely be linked to there. Or, maybe your content simply isn’t good enough to be linked to by the Internet’s best domains.

Sometimes, modesty is often a very effective linking practice, especially when you can’t completely control the content quality you’re promoting – which can unfortunately occur frequently in an agency-type environment.

• -.edu
• -.gov

Example queries:

• [Writing resources -.edu]
• [California resources -.gov]
• [College blogs -.edu]

A Best Practice For Link Prospecting

There is more to a link prospecting query than just the semantics of a query. There are page-level modifiers which you must use if you want to be your most productive self, and obtain as many links as is possible over time.

To make sure the act of adding these reductive add-ons to your searches don’t add more time to your searches than they reduce, I suggest creating a notepad document with a list of these queries so you can quickly cut and paste them into your search browser. This way, they’ll definitely be beneficial ( and not detrimental) when searching for link prospects.

Adding this to your SEO toolset can add a few more links to your base per month, and on a long enough timeline – when instilled as an ideology on a large enough part of your team – that can add up to a few thousand more links.

Now, that’s simply not the case, and those websites trying to get by solely on the same tactics are assuredly going to get swept away onto the second page of the search results.

For savvy link builders, more advanced tactics must be used to avoid most of the brunt of the reasonable surfer and also, undermine the cognitive dissonance most webmasters have towards their product offerings. These “advanced tactics” are what I consider indistinct links – links that exist and aren’t hidden – but are largely dismissed by the webmasters that place them.

Although not black hat according to traditional measures (like money exchange) many of these techniques may feel somewhat unethical, so use them with caution,  especially if you like sleeping at night.

If anything, use this post as awareness of what’s being done by these savvy SEOs, so you can battle back – and be aware – of what’s being used against you, the white-hat link builder.

URLs With Intent Concealment

This is the only instance, in my opinion, where the “exact match disadvantage” comes with strong benefit. URLs containing commercial keywords can discourage prospective webmasters from linking to them, based on their non-friendly product focus.

Imagine two websites – FreeCarInsuranceQuotes.com & TheHudgensGroup.com – that both offer free car insurance quotes.If I post a comment on your website or link to this in a post with my domain name, which are you more likely to delete? By far, the former – because the commercially taboo intent is disclosed immediately.

We are inherently lazy people – if the intent is covered up by a somewhat camouflaged brand name, its possible many of your links may pass through the editorial cracks that may have otherwise not.

This runs somewhat parallel to my idea of “hyperhumor” – that many links are posted with no intent to ever be clicked. Hyperhumor occurs when links are posted with an anchor’s description a URL that clearly defines what the anchor description is. Some examples are amazing actors and deadbeat actors. These are referential to the noun, but not the content on the URLs, so you will rarely, if ever, click — as long as you can tell what the content contains based on the well-SEOed URL.

Similarly, there are many URLs that webmasters will never follow that they post to their websites, because doing so would take a huge amount of time. So, the potential for many manipulative links to fall through the cracks exists.

If intent is cloaked by the brand ambiguity of the URL, a poker or insurance website may be able to pick up the link juice from a super powerful domain it may have otherwise not been able to.

It makes sense to have a domain name that won’t also hurt user experience or persuade users that it sells toys when it actually sells insurance quotes – but something ambiguous – like a company name after an owner’s surname (TheHudgensGroup.com) allows both to coexist.

In verticals where having a “brand” can be useless (such as one-time purchase verticals that aren’t globally popular) – it may make more sense to go this route when naming your business.

Exact Match Domains With Incongruent Anchor Text

As a counter-balance to the above strategy, those webmasters with exact match domains will frequently drop their websites on strong domains with anchor text that doesn’t match the intent of their website, and as a slyly as possible, in order to pick up a link but not set off the warning bells of the webmasters (or spam filters) that monitor it.

This happens frequently in comments where webmasters will use their taboo URL as their website but post their name instead of commercial anchor text, as many spam bots are apt to do.

I have also seen SEOs use domain abbreviations (such as PGO for Poker Games Online) to get an attribution link, such as in a bio or guest post, where it otherwise might not have passed the sniff test.

Link Saturation To Mask A Taboo Link

By providing content to another webmaster in exchange for a link, it’s possible to blend in a link to a website such as mesothelioma (or many other owned domains) without ever disclosing association. This can be done by splicing in several links to other websites along with your own.

The more that are included, the less likely it is that a blogger or webmaster will follow all of them – making it more likely you can obtain a link to your mesothelioma site without it ever being loaded. It’s also possible that this saturation of links will make it less likely the webmaster will remove your link, even if they notice it, because they don’t feel it will impair on the user’s experience.

The further down the main body content, the more likely the taboo link will remain, as webmaster ADHD kicks in and focus is less likely to be retained. According to the reasonable surfer model, it’s possible that the further down on the page the link sits, the less value it will pass.

By doing this, the PageRank algorithm will of course sever some of the page’s value-passing ability every time another external link is added – but knowing that inclusion of other links are necessary to get a link at all, many SEOs will insert many other links – especially links that place them in good neighborhoods – with thought that the sacrifice of some of their link juice in exchange for getting a link at all – is a more than worthwhile exchange.

In example, I reference you to one of Aaron Wall’s recent posts. Wall’s style of frequently linking, in general, is pretty conducive to not following or paying attention to all the links. I dare you to read one of his more link-saturated posts and follow all of the URLs.

This isn’t to say that Wall uses this strategy – in fact, I’m positive he doesn’t – but it’s these kinds of posts that would allow this kind of technique to function effectively.

Blog Archive Links

I have seen many posts on the strongest blogs in the world where links have clearly been added after the fact – to pornography, poker, and elsewhere – with commercial anchor text. These “blog archive links” are clearly very manipulative, and not for users – and it’s possible (and seemingly likely) that Google might devalue new links on subsequent crawls on these time stamped pages.

Even then, it also seems probable that these links pass some kind of value, and on domains where link juice is like water, in manipulative verticals, these kinds of links can be a potential burgeon to a campaign.

Never purchased, these kinds of links are almost always obtained through business relationships, which again make the idea of “paid links” as the sole ire of our black hat disdain a pretty ludicrous thing to do. Others would argue the opposite, that these kinds of links – the ones obtained through business relationships, are the kind Google would want to count.

Whether either is true is up for debate (or the comment of a Google engineer) – but the fact remains that this practice will continue to be used in taboo verticals – as well as many natural ones.

Anchor Text Using Tilde Operators (~)

The problem with many of the above strategies is that they also lose the ability to use targeted anchor text, as commercial anchor text, more than anything else, is the first thing a competent webmaster does not want to display to their users. To offset this, many SEOs will use tilde operators to maximize the potential semantic closeness of an anchor to their original, targeted anchor text.

Tildes show other terms that Google sees as closest to the original anchor by bolding them in the search results. In example, if we do a tilde search for [~poker], we see that “card games” is in bold. Which term do you think would more likely fly with a webmaster – poker or card games?

By using socially friendly anchors with semantic closeness, SEOs can pass the most keyword value back to their websites, while still obtaining links in spots they otherwise might not have.

Beyond Paid Links

It’s very possible to obtain links in taboo verticals without ever paying a dollar. Unfortunately, obtaining many of these links may have to be reported in confessional at church, even though they will all pass an eye test done by any current Google engineer, or by any Google engineer, ever.

Whether you can live with that – or feel ethically inclined not to – is really up to you.

Because of this, the strategies between local and national SEO tend to segregate. Not as much as say, PPC and SEO, but the fact that local SEO specialists exist (and thrive) shows that there is a distinct ideology at play there that separates it from national strategies.

If your business has a publicly listed physical address, you have some incredible link opportunities that exist outside your own niche. Every link adds up, and it turns out that there’s a cavalcade of potential link opportunities and quality signals based solely on the fact that you have a physical address and are willing to use it.

Local Organic Splicing

Even when you aren’t doing “city keyword” searches, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that Google has begun to blend localized results into your national searches. This means they are finding websites that are most integral for a given sector based on physical addresses on the page (in my estimation), and returning these results for national searches where it seems appropriate.

What this means for you, the national player, is that you are missing out on a potentially large, localized rankings boost for your major keywords by not having a physical address listing on your website.

It’s very possible Google is pulling similar signals as they do with local SEO results to get this done, so it wouldn’t hurt to submit your website locally and get some local citations in all the standard spots. They also seem to offer more significance to those websites with Seattle in the title tag or URL – but be wary, these kinds of inclusions could also lower CTR and hurt you on a national scale.

I recommend the physical address located on the homepage footer – or at least contact page, of your site – but I don’t recommend giving it more prominent significance in your URL or title tag unless it’s extremely relevant to do so. Doing this could hurt your ability to rank and also attract clickthroughs and links on national SERPs.

After all, people in Pokepsie, New York don’t want to see a link with San Diego in the title tag – it could set off warning bells that the content isn’t relevant.

Physical Addresses As A Quality Signal

Something you as an SEO or webmaster should be very aware of, are the elements that Google, or any search engine, would look at to give your website a potential boost in the SERPs. Something I’ve thought about often and made strong effort to include and recommend for any web properties I might SEO, is the inclusion of a physical address.

Ideally, it would seem a physical, confirmed address backed by the BBB.org, Google Local, or something else with the website as the business name would be the ideal situation, but even if your web property shares a physical address with several others, including it is something that I (if I were a search engine, that is) would see as a great sign that the website wasn’t cannon fodder like much of the other replicated garbage all over the Internet.

Perhaps, nationally, this would give you a small “trust” boost, and when weaved in locally with the regional results, it’s possible you could see some real effects. If and/or when Google looks at this as something that validates your domain as something that isn’t spam – that is, if they aren’t already currently.

If you don’t have a physical address, think about getting a P.O. Box in the nearest major city – by doing so, you’ll not only place your website in a prominent location, you’ll also have the strongest possible centroid from which to get links. The further from a city you get, the less likely the webmaster is to link to your “local” business.

Local & Regional Link Opportunities

There are a variety of domains you can get links from simply because you have a local address that can add up to a national ranking in the SERPs. SEER Interactive has a great post on Local Link Opportunities, many of them don’t require you actually be local-focused and they’re a good start towards thinking outside the box to garner some regional links.

Beyond that, there are several creative ways you can attract links for your company with a local, physical address on your website.

First, you need to understand local significance – if you’re listed in Podunk Nowhere, it’s probably not going to offer many opportunities as it comes to attracting links. However, every Podunk has an adjacent big city, or other mid-sized cities you can find opportunities with, and most won’t exclude you from their directory, especially if it requires paid inclusion.

Establish Relevant Location Variables

So, break down your business into its applicable, provable (see: your physical address as listed on your website) location groups.

• Main city
• Adjacent cities
• Nearest big city
• Districts of nearest big city
• County name
• State name

From there, you have the foundational base to go out and pillage the web of its juicy, location-specific links.

Location-Specific Directory/Link Page Searches

To start, you should try to track down every location-specific directory and link page for your given city. These are almost always spam-free as they aren’t as riddled with abusers like many other general directories.

I suggest frequently including the state name in the query, such as “Seattle, Washington business directory”, as sometimes city names themselves will be difficult to find good, refined results for. Hat tip to SEOMoz’s Long List of Link Searches for query creation assistance.

• [KEYWORD LOCATION directory]
• [LOCATION business directory]
• [LOCATION business listings]
• [LOCATION shopping directory]
• [LOCATION directory]
• [intitle:directory "LOCATION"]
• [inurl:directory "LOCATION"]
• [LOCATION * directory]
• [directory * LOCATION]
• ["list of LOCATION sites"]
• ["list * LOCATION"]
• ["list * LOCATION * sites"]
• [LOCATION websites]
• [LOCATION sites]
• ["LOCATION sites"]
• ["LOCATION websites"]
• ["recommended links" LOCATION]
• ["recommended sites" LOCATION]
• ["favorite links" LOCATION]
• ["favorite sites" LOCATION]

Location-Specific Blog Searches

Once you’ve run through that list, the next step is to find bloggers in your area. These bloggers will have one of two foundational structures: They either blog exclusively about the region you’ll be searching for, or they care enough about the location to list that area prominently.

• [LOCATION blog]
• [intitle:blog LOCATION]
• [inurl:blog LOCATION]
• [intitle:tag LOCATION]
• [intitle:post LOCATION]
• ["Local Blog Directory"] (with local results enabled)
• LoadedWeb’s Local Blog Directory

Here, the stereotypical phrase “content is king” shifts somewhat to be a combination of your website/business value and also the proximity you have to their location, rather than simply the value of your website itself. Once you have a local target, there are several different ways you can go about attracting a link:

• Inviting them to your offices for a personal tour
• Supplying free products (costs are lower because shipping is little to nothing)
• Sending personal, customized pitches using your location as a selling point
• Creating a “Best Bloggers in LOCATION” Widget to Offer Them and Others Regionally
• Guest Blogging about business/operations in that Location
• Create a local outreach program/invite them to lunch/coffee to talk/procure a link by building a business relationship

Forum & Comment Links

Although much lower quality, it’s also possible to find several location-specific forums, and also, specific posts discussing your business location. Some of these will also uncover other location-specific blogs as well. These queries are just a few ways you can get started:

• [LOCATION forum]
• ["LOCATION forum"]
• [intitle:forum LOCATION]
• [inurl:forum LOCATION]
• ["add comment" LOCATION]
• ["post comment" LOCATION]
• [LOCATION members]
• [LOCATION join]
• [LOCATION tag]
• [LOCATION group]
• [intitle:group LOCATION]

Remember – Local Links Also Mean Weaker Links (Generally)

Time is money, though, so it’s important that you value links appropriately and don’t waste five hours of your time enticing action from a blogspot blog that has never seen an inbound link. Evaluate each opportunity rigorously, but as always, know that links aren’t easy to get (especially natural ones) so weigh the difficulty of your vertical – and their content offerings – accordingly when deciding whether or not to pursue a link.

As a general rule, the quality of blogs you find will follow proportionately to the size of the location you’re searching – so, it will be much easier to find an authoritative San Francisco, California blog than it will be for Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Similarly, the difficulty you’ll have procuring a link will increase as the value of the blog increases, so judge and approach accordingly.

The most important (and valuable) takeaway to pull from this strategy is a new way “content is king” takes shape. “Strong content” isn’t always the intricacies and depth on page; sometimes, “content” partially becomes the address on your contact form – making procuring links in those taboo verticals (and any other, for that matter) a little bit easier.

For those local focused businesses, using this link building strategy makes ranking easy, and can also go a long way towards building genuine business relationships, as well as  foot traffic, from your link building efforts.

Functionally the black book concept has died, because electronic storage has allowed us to hold thousands of phone numbers in the cloud, whether they be female, male, friend, family, or potential mate. However, the idea of it is something that persists, and is functional even in the Internet marketing realm.

Originally, black books were separate storage documents for phone numbers of people you wanted to contact, but did so sparingly because they were not of immediate need for you, and also, due to the nature of the requests.

If you constantly harassed these people in the black book, either one of two things would happen: you would eventually enter in a relationship with the person, thus breaking the need for them to be in the black book, or you would sever any friendship you had due to the nature (and frequency) of your requests.

Today, these same small-scale relationships exist, but since they are all stored together, the general idea – and mysticism – behind the black book has died.

With SEO and link building, the potential to reignite the concept is there – and it should be taken advantage of. To me, every SEO or link builder should have a black book. For SEOs, this black book might be a repository of link targets – link targets an SEO had previously received a link from with direct, human contact – or instantaneous approval.

Every black book contact list, when generalized, has the following characteristics:

• Contacts whose info you would not readily give to anybody else
• Contacts who you have engaged with previously, to a point where some exchange of value has occurred
• Contacts who you do not frequently engage with
• Contacts who you may want some other value exchange from in the future

For SEO, a list should be created that fits these characteristics. Finding potential mates is hard. Finding potential link targets is hard too, so every “warm” lead should be meticulously noted and sorted into an electronic “black book”.

In the average SEO career, we might build links for hundreds of sites; to not create an inventory of these random sites that will offer us a link (or will be more open to a random e-mail query) is lighting potential ROI on fire , and making our jobs much harder than they have to be.

There are two general kinds of links we can sort into this electronic “black book” – free links and warm link targets.

Free links are those random one-off sources you tend to find throughout your career. Perhaps it is some kind of decent niche directory or local link resource that only requires you fill out a form – but it hasn’t yet been fully manipulated, so it still has value for future websites.

Warm link targets are those targets who you got a link from in the past through some sort of conversation, such as link begging, or business relationships. Once you receive a link from either of these two sources, they must be sorted electronically – or you will inevitably end up forgetting some of them and losing potential linkjuice.

Like real contacts in a black book, just because you got a link (or a phone number) from them once, it does not mean that *every* time you need a link, they’ll comply with your request. Often, it’s quite the opposite. For example, if you met a great girl or guy in Miami, Florida, you wouldn’t contact them to hang out while you’re in San Francisco.

The same concept applies when you have a site that sells poker tables. If a webmaster previously linked to one of your travel-oriented sites on their travel-oriented domain, contacting them about linking to your new poker site would be a waste and also, may evaporate any chance you have to get a link to another travel-related site in the future.

So, to best maximize every resource you have in this black book, I suggest maintaining the following information:

• Contact E-mail (If Applicable)
• Contact Name (If Applicable)
• Linking URL/Domain
• Your Contact E-Mail Used
• Relevant Vertical
• Linkable Asset
• Any helpful notes
• Date of last link received

Contact E-mail and Contact Name is straightforward – if the link target is a “warm lead”, you’ll need this to maximize the chance you get a link. Similarly, you’ll need your contact e-mail used as well – many SEOs use several different e-mails for link begging, so you must be sure to use the same one you used previously.

It’s also recommended that you continue on top of your previous e-mail conversation; this way, you’ll remind them of your previous value exchange. Simply use a search for their e-mail within your proper e-mail account to locate the conversation string, and you’re well on your way to picking up a good link.

If the contact is a warm lead, input the URL where they last linked to you. If this URL is not a person but instead a directory or free link resource that only requires a form, you can use the domain URL if the actual deeplink URL isn’t of much use, or makes things less effective. By inputting all relevant verticals, you make sure you don’t waste your time on travel or casino related sites if you sell shoes, and vice-versa.

Feel free to be as detailed as possible with the “relevant vertical” category – if you truly maintain this throughout your career (and you should) – this list will get pretty long, and the more details you supply, the easier it’ll be to determine the best sites to get links from in the future.

Linkable assets describe what you used to get a link in the past. If you simply begged for a link and had a great site worth linking to, note it as such. If you had a product giveaway or were simply relevant to the directory, mark that down – whatever works best for you. This is another invaluable category as it can help determine what you need to get linked to again – and exactly how feasible it actually is.

Finally, the date of the last time you got a link will be helpful, especially as it pertains to how likely a link target is of still being “warm”. For those “warm” link targets you list that aren’t people at all, the date really isn’t necessary. But for those that you might have contacted two years ago, having this data is a helpful add-on to your black book.

Once you’ve tracked all these categories, it makes it easy to sort by whatever you want to sort by – so you don’t have to waste time working through relevant data in the future.

Although I won’t show you my black book, I can show you how a sample black book might look.

It’s that simple!

This, like a great to-do list or calendar, returns as much back to you as you’re willing to put into it. This is just one step, but it’s a good start. Once you’ve filled out that chart and gotten to work, you’re one step closer to penetrating the secret society of link builders. Now, get back to seducing those link targets!

Websites with low “content link efficacy” are vertically positioned in areas that aren’t socially friendly, such as health insurance or payday loans, and because of this, are often incapable of truly (and naturally) driving lots of links to their site, no matter how impressive and link-worthy their content is.

Websites with high content link efficacy, on the other hand, can occur when sites expect their fair share of links when great effort is put into a piece – because it exists in a space, such as Funny or Die or I Can Has Cheezburger, where users aren’t afraid to use word-of-mouth and also, because the users expect that their friends would also enjoy the content.

In verticals with low content link efficacy, many sites are ranked almost exclusively on the basis of their manipulative link acquisition practices – and very little on the sheer strength of their content.

Google’s Stance On Manipulative Linking

Google publicly recommends that webmasters do not “participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank“. So, given what we know about certain content verticals, and also, that Google is “against” link manipulation for the acquisition of PageRank – something doesn’t add up.

If these verticals were to exist solely on content strength alone, they’d do so based more on random chance and variance more than anything else. Who happened to discover what site? Did Robert Scoble happen to have an explicit interest in pornography that day on his blog, and instead of by quality, picked one with a terrible reputation – or just otherwise, happened to pick the worst of the top 10?

What if a high quality news site decided to link out based on something negative a business did? These kinds of things would lead to razor slim link profiles – elastic SERPs – and a final first results page that damages user experience.

My argument, then, is that Google needs the manipulative web.

In these two environments, one where sites are chosen mostly by variance and other sporadic factors, against the other – one where SEOs are forced into manipulative link practices – it is my thesis that the manipulative environment supplies better search results.

Don’t get me wrong, these results won’t be nearly as good as those driven in the verticals with high content link efficacy – but beggars can’t be choosers. These websites that have the ability to invest in manipulative link practices are still, in some outside way, showing that they have the resources and backend to stimulate link acquisition – even if it’s not in the way we like. Venture capital investment, money to throw at links, business connections – all of these things in some way correlate to a strong website.

In this environment, the websites with the ability to allocate resources to manipulative link acquisition are most often the ones with the best websites. The multiple factors that contribute to this outweigh the random, varied linking that would other occur through strong content creation alone.

In this scenario, perhaps Google “turns the other cheek” to many of these manipulative link acquisition practices, because, for all that they hurt many other verticals, they, here, in the areas of pornography, payday loans, pharmaceuticals and elsewhere – help inform a quality website more than content ever could.

A Problem For Webmasters

The dilemma here, of course, is that this reality would mean that Google would have to say one thing and do another. Their public statement against manipulative link practices would be a partial lie. This makes for an ethical conundrum for many webmasters, leaving those incapable of determining this reality for themselves at a gross disadvantage.

In a portal where they only – failingly – try to acquire content-driven links – they will not compete near close enough to a level needed to rank in these manipulative-driven verticals. These concerns are abound even in the higher efficacy verticals – so to say they play an even bigger part in verticals where “white-hat” acquisition is practically a myth would be for the most part, an understatement.

It’s also possible that Google is unaware of the inability of these verticals to acquire links naturally at a volume capable of accurately sorting the SERPs (unlikely), and still moves steadfast towards an internet completely devoid of manipulative link acquisition practices.

This, unfortunately, would likely leave many of these low content link efficacy verticals in even worse shape, and the people needing their services likely scammed or otherwise, unable to find what they’re looking for.

A final scenario exists where Google imagines these kinds of verticals – manually or algorithmically – just as they are – the “slums” of the SERPs, and largely ignores them. Few Google cop cars drive through (not even the robot cars) – and non-explicitly-black-hat spamming tendencies are deemed as OK – for the benefit of the long-term viability of the SERPs, and otherwise, intelligent time allocation for the webspam team.

In my eyes, I see this as the most likely situation, and one every intelligent webmaster competing in these verticals should be aware of. Clearly, every vertical and SERP is one that webmasters should take a hard, deep look at – and from there, adjust search strategy – and ethical stance – accordingly.