iAcquire was cited as the agency behind Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corporation’s link buy request emails. For more on that see our story named What Can We Learn From The Latest Brand To Be Called Out For Paid Links?

A site command search for [site:www.iacquire.com] returns no results. Here is a screen shot:

iAcquire’s robots.txt file and source code has no signs of them manually requesting to be deindexed from Google. So this seems to either be a weird bug or an intentional penalty delivered to the agency by Google.

It also appears that the parties discovered in this investigation are all delisted from Google.

We reached out to Google for a comment but at the time of publishing this story, we have not heard back. If and when Google does reply, we will update the story.

Mike King, the Director of Inbound Marketing at iAcquire, responded to a tweet I sent him asking if Google delisted iAcquire. He said, iAcquire “sure was” delisted by Google. He then went on to explain that there was “no network” for Google to ban so they had a “hissy fit” and decided to ban the agency.

Here is his tweet:

@rustybrick sure was. There’s no network for them to kill so that’s them throwing their hissy fit.

— MyCool King (@iPullRank) May 25, 2012

I am not aware of another agency that was banned by Google for this practice. There were link networks and link brokers that have been banned but I don’t believe there was ever an agency that was banned for this practice.

We will update the story when we learn more.

Postscript From Danny Sullivan (May 25, 4:15pm ET)

As noted in the comments below, this is probably not the first time an agency has been banned because Google believes that it has bought or sold links — if that’s why iAcquire was indeed banned. We still don’t have an official word from Google on this, but it seems the most likely explanation.

However, it’s also likely the iAcquire was banned not for buying links but because Google believes it actually does control a paid link network or operates at least in significant part as a paid link company, despite iAcquire’s denials.

From my story yesterday, iAcquire said:

To be clear, we are not a link network. Every link we build is based on the very same principles touted throughout the industry. Our links are contextual and relevant through outreach performed by 40 actual in-house people that sit in our Arizona office and everything is pushed through strenuous quality assurance….

We are not a paid link company.

This leads to an important graphic from Josh Davis that connects iAcquire with companies that apparently are buying links (click to enlarge it):

The graphic, from Davis’s article here, explains why Davis believes the link request he originally received from a company called InternetReach.org is either owned by, controlled by or works in close association with iAcquire.

The companies in the graphic are mostly the same as the companies that DBBC listed in a letter it sent out yesterday to Google and DBBC’s SEO agencies, in hopes of getting the paid links removed.

InternetReach.org (where the original link request is said to have come from), MediaFinders.net and iOutReach.org all have the same San Francisco address listed on their contact pages, as does LinkBuilding.net (it’s LinkBuilder.net in the chart above, but that’s clearly a typo — Davis uses LinkBuilding.net in his story). MediaFinders.net and iOutReach both use virtually the same site template.

LinkBuilding.net has a Better Business Bureau logo on its site leading to a BBB listing for iAcquire, for its office in Arizona. That’s the connection between all four of the companies above to iAcquire. Certainly anyone might have added a BBB listing to iAcquire as some type of set-up, but this seems more farfetched than the idea that iAcquire has some assocition with LinkBuilding.net.

The story from Davis outlines other connections, such as things he was told when he called the number in the link request, that further seem to tie these companies back to iAcquire. By the way, InternetReach.org, LinkBuilding.net and DigitalPros.org all appear to have also been banned by Google.

In addition, there’s evidence that iAcquire acquired the paid link operations of Conductor, when it sold that operation last year, including three iAcquire employees having gone directly from Conductor to iAcquire, according to their LinkedIn profiles (see here, here and here).

I asked Joe Griffin, cofounder and partner with iAcquire, if the companies involved were part of iAcquire, subsidiaries or contractors and if iAcquire had purchased Conductor’s paid link service. I was told, similar to yesterday, that because of confidentiality reasons, iAcquire couldn’t comment on any of this.

As for an official comment on apparently being banned, Griffin emailed me:

iAcquire doesn’t take the position that Google is throwing a hissy fit. Mike mentioned that on Twitter to Barry, and perhaps he is right, but that’s not our position on the matter. Google has a job to do. This was a harsh lesson, but our position is to grow from this, make the required changes, get back in Google, and continue to offer world class WHITE hat services to our customers (financial compensation will not be considered in the outreach process).

We’ve also received an email from someone who said they were an iAcquire client and asked the company about the current situation. This is the email they say iAcquire sent back:

Thank you for the email.  Rest assured that we have always followed best practice and as we don’t have a network and our publishers and clients won’t be impacted.

Going forward we will be ending the ability to compensate for new links. That said, our non-compensated link services are VERY good. This is a good opportunity for us all to evolve our practices and a powerful lesson for our agency, your agency, our clients, your clients.

Our outreach technology continues to be the best in our industry and we have been working on all white-hat options aggressively for the past year. While I understand your concern we have been evolving and have been performing incredible work.

Let’s use this opportunity to serve the greater goals we all have. We know how to deliver amazing white hat off-page SEO solutions – this pushes us all to focus on the right things.  Feel free to contact me anytime if you have any questions.

I’m set to talk with Griffin further on Tuesday, after the long holiday weekend here in the US, and I expect he’ll have more to share on the situation then.

Josh Davis drew attention to the DBCC situation in his post today, documenting how after receiving three link requests from the same person, he finally followed up, only to be pitched on placing a link from one of his articles to the DBCC site in return for $30 per month.

What’s Dun & Bradstreet — the nearly 200-year-old Fortune 500 company that brokers information about people and companies for business decisions — doing buying links? It’s not. DBCC was spun-off from D&B in 2010 and is a privately-held company, providing credit solutions to small businesses, with a license to use the D&B brand.

That DBCC isn’t a Fortune 500 company takes some of the “wow” factor out of the story. In addition, we’ve already had stories about big companies ranging from JC Penney to Overstock to even Google itself getting caught for paid links. That makes what DBCC was doing seem even less newsworthy to some. After all, doesn’t everyone do this now? What’s really new or unique here?

I supposed there is nothing particularly new, but clearly there’s a bunch of reminders that are useful to have out there.

Client Beware

Judy Hacket, the chief marketing officer of DBCC, sounded pretty horrified when I talked with her today about the situation. Her department was scrambling to discover how exactly it ended up with these links being purchased.

Davis connects the link request in his story back to iAcquire. Hacket wouldn’t say if DBCC is working with that firm, citing possible confidentiality clauses in contacts. She did say, however, “we have absolutely no agreement with iAcquire or anyone else allowing them to use any grey hat or black hat practices.”

Hacket was also adamant that DBCC had no desire to violate any of Google’s guidelines.

“We would never endorse something like this,” she said.

Of course, we’ve heard this type of denial / shock before. Recall what JC Penney said last year, after the New York Times profiled it for using paid links:

J.C. Penney did not authorize, and we were not involved with or aware of, the posting of the links that you sent to us, as it is against our natural search policies.

Curious to learn more, I asked JC Penney what those policies were after the New York Times story came out. A JCP spokesperson emailed me back:

We are not going to provide our policies, but obviously, they would include staying within Google’s guidelines.

Well, obviously! Except they didn’t, otherwise JC Penney wouldn’t have been banned. When JCP said it didn’t authorize or was involved with paid links, it meant that its SEO firm did all that. As I was told further in my email exchange:

SearchDex ran our SEO program. We do not pay for links as they go against Google’s guidelines. SearchDex was terminated because as our SEO provider they should have known. This was a clear failure on their part.

It was also a clear failure on JCP’s part, for not understanding what its SEO company was doing. The same is true for DBCC. Indeed, I’ve been joking that for some time, whenever some large brand gets dinged for paid links, it’s handy to have an SEO firm they can pin the blame on.

The reality is that for the large companies or brand names, this type of behavior seems to get a 90 day slap, then they’re back in Google’s good graces. It’s difficult for Google to permanently remove an important company that people expect to find. That means as a client, or as an important brand, keep these lessons in mind:

• Do you fully understand how your SEO company will obtain links for you?
• If you don’t want paid links, have you made that crystal-clear?
• If you approve of buying paid links, are you prepared for a potential short-term PR black eye?
• If you approve of buying paid links, is that worth a potential short-term Google penalty?

If you’re not a major brand or an essential resource that Google has to list, there’s really only one question you need to ask. Are you prepared to lose all your traffic from Google? That’s because for the non-essential people, being caught for paid links can be a death sentence, not a temporarily set-back.

SEO Company Beware

As for the SEO company buying links, you’d better be prepared for your client to toss you to the wolves, if a paid link campaign comes to light. Also do be prepared for that campaign to come to light, unless you’re incredibly careful with whom you are soliciting.

In this case, the SEO company pitched someone whose “About” page explains that he writes about marketing. That should have been a warning that this person is probably somewhat savvy about paid links, so some disguised pitch for one wasn’t wise.

I get these types of pitches myself. So does Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web spam team. If I’d gotten this type of email sent to me on behalf of a major brand, I might very well have written about it myself and concerns about “outing” be damned. I’d view it as a protective service to the general human population. It’s like watching someone drive backwards on the freeway. They’re a danger to everyone.

As for iAcquire itself, it won’t comment on the case, citing client confidentiality. It won’t acknowledge that it was involved in any way, nor confirm if it has worked with DBCC. But the company did give me this statement:

We work with many of the largest brands in the world. It’s very common that we run into large brands everyday buying links from blog networks and large paid link marketplaces, and our mission as a business is to direct brand strategy towards whiter hat link building approaches.

That movement often takes time and effort – and, in the real world in working with big brands with pre-established objectives it frequently is a multi-step process, and requires a lot of education at both the SEO manager, online marketing marketing manager and CMO-levels. We are literally driving the education process every day.

To be clear, we are not a link network. Every link we build is based on the very same principles touted throughout the industry. Our links are contextual and relevant through outreach performed by 40 actual in-house people that sit in our Arizona office and everything is pushed through strenuous quality assurance.

Our business is to push brands to white hat strategy, but we frequently acquire new customers that are still on that path, and we support these companies toward that white hat direction. We have been investing significantly into our content marketing, social media, and digital PR channels to more rapidly make those changes internally and for these brands.

Regarding the article written about our company, we can’t talk about specific strategy for specific customers or potential customers – due to confidentiality agreements. Financial compensation for links does not represent the strategic direction of our company. iAcquire’s services are holistic and include a great deal of content marketing, digital PR and social media promotion, and on-page SEO consulting.

We’ve never had a problem with Google’s algorithm and our clients – and, we understand that it is important for us to continue to drive the market towards techniques that best represent the guidelines established by search engines. iAcquire continues to evolve its service lines, and recently brought in Mike King to help drive that direction to ensure we are considering search engine guidelines and industry best practices. In addition, he continues to promote these best practices at various conferences worldwide.

Wait, is iAcquire suggesting that DBCC — assuming it eventually emerges as a client — was one of those companies needing to be nudged into the white hat world? Cofounder Joe Griffin effectively said no, when he emailed this follow-up statement:

We aren’t talking about D&BCC (when we mention that we transition people from grey to white in the second sentence) – we can’t talk about specifics of clients or potential clients – we are prevented from doing so.

The enterprise world has a lot of nuances, and we believe we have more than anyone helped to correct SEO brand strategy as it relates to off-page SEO and specifically as it relates to killing black hat link networks.

At the end of the day we run into a lot of different goals, and different approaches, and we try to bring all clients to a fully white hat solution. Our team is heavily focused on high quality editorial content and creative development to attract links. We do a TON of link reclamation as well.

We brought Mike on board specifically to continue to build upon this direction. Mike is one of the best in the business in educating SEOs about how to properly implement off-page SEO strategy – he’s helping us here as well.

We are not a paid link company. We deliver holistic off-page SEO to small and large companies – and are the leading charge in proper off-page SEO education.

By Mike, Griffin is referring to Michael King, who I’d say has built a good reputation for himself in some SEO circles over the past year in his writings and speaking. He’s spoken at our own SMX events and is slated to again next month. He’s sharp, has lots of insight, and he seemed a win for iAcquire when they hired him about two months ago.

Suffice to say, I was pretty surprised that he appeared mixed up with all this. He’s seemed very white hat. I think it’s great if he’s going to help iAcquire and/or its clients move to white hat activities, but I’d say the sooner the better, if iAcquire really doesn’t want to be known as a paid link company.

Right now, however, if that link request is effectively coming out of iAcquire’s work, it might not be a paid link company, but it sure seems as if it has been buying links. That’s tough to square talk of following search engine guidelines.

Google, Oh Google

Meanwhile, there’s Google. This time last year, it was counting the news about JC Penney as a win in the war against paid links. A year later, has anything changed? Was it really that much a deterrent?

I honestly don’t know. I’ve heard some say that many SEOs buy links. That’s it’s just what you have to do. I don’t have any good survey data to back those types of statements up or knock them down.

Fair to say, however, today’s news didn’t surprise many. Even if it it had been D&B itself, I’m not sure if the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal would have cared to run stories, as they did last year with JC Penney and Overstock.

I do know that Google has got to come up with something better than counting links. I keep expecting that social will be a larger signal, and my previous story below explains more about why this makes sense:

• When Everyone Gets The Vote: Social Shares As The New Link Building

In the meantime, we’re stuck with the increasingly creaking, rotting link signal. But for anyone who thinks that’s an excuse for anything goes, look again to what I said the Client Beware section above. Are you really big enough to take a chance on being dropped from Google?

There are plenty of people who bought links who did get caught in the Penguin Update. Some of them are learning to their horror that the only chance of coming back will be to start completely over.

Finally, I did ask Google if it had any comment on the DBBC situation. Nothing specific, just this general warning:

Our guidance on paid links remains the same as ever: paying for links that pass PageRank violates our guidelines, and Google takes appropriate action in response.

If you don’t know what PageRank is, well, read our guide: What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters.

Publisher Beware; Link Broker For Shame

For those being approached about selling links, this is a reminder that Google really doesn’t like you to do that and has penalized sites for doing so since 2007. If you’re approached out of the blue with a link request, unless you block that link by using something like the nofollow attribute, you’re placing your site at jeopardy.

Don’t expect the link request to alert you to any of these things. The request that went out on behalf of DBCC was a classic example of non-disclosure. It lacks warnings about possible Google penalties. It even required that there be no visible disclosure, which might very well violate US Federal Trade Commission guidelines. From the request:

Link must not be marked as Paid in the visible content or source code (Common designations include: Partner, Links, Paid Links, Ads or Sponsored Links)

The link can’t have any disclosures, we want it to appear natural.

The whole thing reminds me of the type of spammy requests I get all the time. While people in the SEO space may want to debate whether it’s fair or required or commonplace to buy links or not, I don’t see much room for debate that you shouldn’t try to foist a paid link on someone without full disclosure.

As I wrote before, in my Conversation With An Idiot Link Broker article from 2008

There are plenty of people who disagree over the paid link issue, plus whether Google actually penalizes sites that hard for it. That disagreement is no excuse for unethical behavior. And there is unethical behavior in search marketing, and this is a perfect example of it. No risk was disclosed. When asked repeatedly about risk issues, they were denied….

You want to buy links or be a link broker? Then be upfront that this is an activity that Google does not like and that the faint hearted shouldn’t apply. Only after you’ve scared the heck out of them should you start talking about the ways that you’ll try to reduce the risk, if they choose to carry on.

Personally, I’m somewhat amazed, or really, disheartened, over some of the comments Davis is taking over his post. As I said, some dismiss the paid links as old news. Some are angry, viewing his post as some unnecessary “outing” of paid links.

No one seems bothered that some SEO firm was potentially getting a third-party web site into trouble with Google. That’s the most disturbing aspect of all of this. That’s not new, either, but it ought to be stamped out.

Postscript: DBCC has now sent a letter out to its SEO agencies saying in part:

Without our knowledge or approval, certain parties have reached out to other parties to link to our website (the “Unauthorized Links”) for no valid reason….

Please be informed that we are not affiliated with nor do we have any relationship with these companies.

We ask that you remove any Unauthorized Links immediately unless you believe the content is relevant and provides value to your users. Under no circumstances will we authorized payment or pay for any Unauthorized Links.

You can see the full letter below:

DBBC says a copy was also sent to Google, and it’s part of what DBBC is doing to try and rectify the situation. The list of companies it named in the letter are:

• InternetReach.org
• DigitalPros.org
• MediaFinders.net
• iOutReach.org
• LinkBuilder.net
• SolarPros.com
• Conductor

DBCC said it also sent a copy of the letter to the published contact addresses of those listed. The list matches those that Josh Davis listed in his original post on the paid link situation, companies he connects with iAcquire.

iAcquire was not listed in the DBBC letter. However, iAcquire has now been banned from Google since this story came out, probably because Google believes it either works in association with some of the companies named above or that it controls them.

iAcquire Banned From Google After Link Buying Allegations is our story has more about that, plus has a postscript where I explain the connections more.

Related Stories

• Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google
• Time For Google To Give Up The Fight Against Paid Links?
• Conversation With An Idiot Link Broker
• New York Times Exposes J.C. Penney Link Scheme That Causes Plummeting Rankings in Google
• 90 Days Later, J.C. Penney Regains Its Google Rankings
• Google’s Action Against Paid Links Continues: Overstock & Forbes Latest Casualties; Conductor Exits Brokering Business
• Google’s Chrome Page No Longer Ranks For “Browser” After Sponsored Post Penalty
• Google Chrome’s Paid Link Penalty Now Lifted
• Home Depot To Correct Misleading Link Request
• Google Launches “Penguin Update” Targeting Webspam In Search Results
• Two Weeks In, Google Talks Penguin Update, Ways To Recover & Negative SEO

Let’s take an overall look at Link Prospector plus a couple of cool tips I found when using it and finish with a review of pros and cons.

General Overview

Link Prospector is a link building research tool designed to find and return lists of potential partner sites. Built for speed, the tool can return a huge amount of data link builders can sift through to find link building opportunities. The tool has a clean and simple interface and has the ability to export what it finds.

There are two help videos on the site as well. Before you launch the tool you will need a complete list of keywords and an idea of the type of sites you want to prospect for.

Getting Started Running The Tool

After selecting a name for my campaign, I picked the type of sites I wanted the tool to search for. There are 14 categories to choose from:

I wanted to find pages to host link embedded content and find new directories so I set my search for:  Directories, Reviews, Topical Blogs and Guest Posting.  Each campaign took about 20-30 minutes to generate.

When it was done, my panel looked like this:

As you can see, the tool returned over 2100 URL prospects for me to review under Guest Posting, each page hosts the term “memory foam mattress” and “guest posting” or similar terms. With each test returning at least 2000 results, Link Prospector gives you a lot of link building possibilities to sift through.

You can use the Excluded Domains feature and eliminate certain URL’s from being returned if you feel there is no chance to secure links from these sites or feel they won’t provide any competitive review advantage.

Keywords

Once you pick the type of sites you want to prospect for, the next step is adding the keyword.

For each report generated, I selected up to five keywords and had the option to narrow my search field through additional perimeters such as geographical regions and date range:

In this test (which is Test #2) I looked for UK specific sites hosting the word ”payday” and its variations and asked the tool to search on the first 1000 results. In hindsight, asking the tool to go that deep on a term like “payday” wasn’t an effective use of time, the results were poor past the 150 mark.

This is not a reflection of the tool but of the SERPS for that particular term. In general, after running all my tests I found asking the tool to return 100 – 200 results yielded the best pages.

Cool tip:  I discovered using the tilde character (~) in front of a single term would increase the amount and variety of data returned. I recommend you use this advance search operator with your primary keyword when running terms. In some cases, it returned pages and sites I had never heard of which means there’s a good chance your competitors haven’t either.

When your reports are ready (it takes about 30 minutes for each to run) you are taken to a list of prospects. By default, they are sorted by LTS (Link Target Score) which is a metric created by Link Prospector to help discover pages that give you a “higher likelihood of being a converting prospect”.

You can also sort the pages by PageRank and TLD’s:

Next to each result is a number in parenthesis (I’ve circled it in red in the image above), this represents the number of pages on the domain hosting my keywords.

You can click on the number and drill down to see each page:

Being able to see the pages hosting your terms is extremely helpful; it allows you to see how the sites are using and promoting content. The campaign manager also allows you to export your data to an Excel file which can be saved to your computer and used or downloaded into Buzzstream.

This drill-down option is why I don’t like to exclude domains in the research stage. Even knowing I won’t get a link from a site returned in the report doesn’t mean there is a marketing angle to ignore, because someone already got a link from them or the page wouldn’t be listed!

This does add to your review time so again, if you know for a fact there is nothing to be gained from certain sites, exclude them and save yourself some time.

Cool tip:  In every search I ran, Link Prospector returned YouTube pages hosting my keywords. With video being a huge part of Universal Search results on both Bing and Google, having an instant library of topical videos is helpful.

Bookmark the videos returned and start running a competitive analysis on them. Who’s linking to them? Who’s commenting on them? Where else are they being shown? Here is where searching on the top 150 results can be helpful, you’ll get the cream of the crop video’s in one handy location.

Education & Help

There is a seven minute video on the homepage of Link Prospector that takes you through each step of the tool. There is also a four minute video on the keyword selection page that is a must watch before listing your terms.

You have to listen closely to pick up the tips but basically, Link Prospector recommends you list single keywords in additional to multi-keyword strings for maximum results.

Pick your keywords well and the tool will bring back a lot of good results.  If after watching the video you still have questions, Garrett recommends emailing him directly for support:  garrett AT citationlabs.com.

Pros & Cons

When it comes to link building, there are many ways to acquire links. No matter what you do or which vertical you’re in, in order to rank well you need quality pages hosting your links.

That’s where using a tool like Link Prospector can help, it will research and analyze a large amount of data before listing potential link partners. It cuts your search time down considerably.

While it cuts your search time down, it does little for your review time and you need to know up front you’ll spend a lot of time picking through the results for sites to link with. If you run a lot of terms and go deep, you’ll have a tremendous amount of content to wade through, just look how many prospects came back in my sample tests.

Results past the 150 mark were so-so to lousy, I wouldn’t go deeper but it’s up to you. Again, Link Prospector is not at fault for what is being returned, it brings back what it finds when searching. If the engines have garbage results, so does the tool. If a webpage uses a term conversationally and out of context, it doesn’t “understand” that and returns the page anyway.

You’ll have the same results if you search by hand, it will just take hours longer and won’t come in a neat and exportable package. Here is where using the best keywords and the tilde (~) will help tremendously by returning a wider array of results. Sadly, I had to stumble on this little tidbit to try it out, it was not included in the main help video.

The main help video, which is over seven minutes long and done in one shot, should come with a timed tabled of contents and a transcription accessible from every page and point in the campaign. For now it doesn’t, so if you want to review the main help video while working, you have to log out to see it or pull up a second tab and start over.

The site lacks a FAQ section (this would help with specific points) or a section explaining advanced search operators. It also lacks a detailed explanation for the LTS (Link Target Score), there is one but I had to email Garrett for the information.

Understanding what LTS is and knowing how to use it would be a big help when reviewing results. Even though LTS analyzes pages based on criteria set by Link Prospector, having this information and knowing how sites are scored would go a long way to helping qualify pages during the review process.

Link Prospector is a good research tool for the serious link builder, you will definitely find a lot of potential link partners when using it. Take advantage of the free trial before you begin, it will help you get used to the large amounts of data the tool produces and help you plan a way to use it. I recommend you play both videos several times before launching your first campaign and have Garrett’s email handy as you work.

I conducted some random tests and did notice some of these free web directories not coming up in Google. Later in the day, Terry Van Horne began running larger tests on 500+ web directories and noticed as much as 16% or more are no longer showing up in Google. Based on his initial numbers, there are over a 100 web directories that are not indexed by Google.

I do not know if these directories were ever listed in Google or removed recently due to one of the recent Google updates; i.e. Penguin, Panda refresh, blog link network elimination and unnatural link warnings.

I did ask Google for a comment on this specific case and Google declined.

Have you noticed a recent massive delisting of web directories from Google’s index?

I have been fielding a lot of calls from sites big and small that believe they got hit by Penguin, Google’s “over-optimization” algorithm. Or maybe it was Panda? Who knows? Traffic is down and everybody is freaking out.

I have a particular soft spot in my heart for the small, local businesses that have been hit, in many cases because they bought into someone’s spammy linkbuilding scheme.

I have had a few discussions with other SEOs who are attempting to take down clients’ spammy looking links, and while that might be effective, the ROI on finding and getting all of those links deleted seems iffy at best.

This mindset gets at the heart of why the site had a problem with these wacky animal updates to begin with – linkbuilding is not a substitute for a marketing plan.

With that in mind, I thought I’d offer up all you localistas out there some tried and true local marketing tips that just so happen to also help generate links, hopefully without infuriating any Google algo-beasts:

1.  Sponsor My Kid’s Baseball Team

There’s not much for us parents to do while watching our little Jeters learn the fine art of hitting off a tee, so getting your name on their jerseys for cheap might be a good way to build awareness.

It also might get you a link or two from the league’s website which is what we call a “citation” in the local SEO biz.  Here’s an example. It also gives you an excuse to connect with all of the parents on Facebook if you’re into that kind of thing which brings me to my next idea…

2.  Doing Something Socially Good In Your Community

How about a fundraiser for cancer that gets you a link from one of the top newspaper sites in the area? Or maybe a charity golf tournament?

3.  Join Your Local Business Association

Sure, it’s a good networking opportunity, but chances are, you will also get some nice links/citations out of the deal. Check out the Pleasanton Downtown Association’s Business Directory (which is not very well optimized btw – Hey PDA, give me a call!).

Another upside of joining these types of groups is that they help market you.

4.  Run A Contest

The state of today’s media is that pictures of dogs with funny ties is news – see proof to the right. Well, so are pie eating contests.

If you need something to wash the pie down, how about a local brew crawl (promoted by the Pleasanton Downtown Association, btw)?

5.  Make A Video

One of the great things about the Web is that it’s super easy and cheap to make and distribute your own videos.

Find a local artiste who is looking to build their rep and have them whip out something for you that can get some attention (and links) like Presidential Car Wash.

I could go on, but hopefully by now you get the picture. For SEO to succeed over time, you have to invest in marketing your business.

If you stop thinking of SEO as some alien witch-crafty thing and start thinking of it as a natural compliment to your marketing plan (assuming you have a marketing plan that is) – you’ll find that the only Penguins and Pandas you need to worry about are the ones your kid is spending way too much money on on Farmville (excuse me if my farm is more exotic than yours).

Majestic SEO’s new metrics are named Flow Metrics and are grouped into two categories; trust flow and citation flow.

• Citation Flow is a number of predicting how influential a URL might be based on how many sites link to it.
• Trust Flow is a number predicting how trustworthy a page is based on how trustworthy sites tend to link to trustworthy neighbors.

What Do Flow Metrics Look Like?

Let’s compare Search Engine Land to Search Engine Roundtable to Google:

Keep in mind, the values for citation and trust flow are between 0 and 100, where Google is a 99 on both, Search Engine Land has a citation flow of 75 and trust flow of 64 and Search Engine Roundtable has a citation flow of 69 and trust flow of 43.

Let’s visualize how this looks on a chart. Majestic SEO explains that links with high Citation flow end up more to the right and links with more Trust flow end up higher on the chart.

Search Engine Land:

Search Engine Roundtable:

Google:

I asked Branko Rihtman (aka @neyne) what he thinks of the new metrics and he was very pleased. He said it is a huge improvement over Majestic SEO’s AC rank metric and says these new metrics “correlates to PageRrank much better than anything” else. Overall Branko feels “it provides a much better measurement of perceived quality.”

For more details, see Majestic SEO’s blog.

I don’t want to make light of an issue that is impacting livelihoods, but at the same time, there is a certain aspect the this current “unnatural links” meme that is just silly.

I think I realized we’d reached the tipping point when a client asked me why the links he had pointing to his main site from the 25 other sites he owned was unnatural, since after all, he owned all the sites and wouldn’t he thus naturally interlink them? And you know, even if they aren’t about the same subject matter, he had a valid point.

Removing those unnatural links isn't always easy

Isn’t ‘Unnatural’ In The Eye Of The Beholder?

Think about how many products there are manufactured by Proctor & Gamble. On grocery store shelves, every single one of those products, in the fine print on the packaging somewhere, it says Proctor & Gamble. And indeed, this is logical, and “natural”.

But on the Web, the rules change, and it’s all because of the signals that links throw off. Any given link can send off multiple signals depending on where it’s located, how often it appears, what it says, who it points to, how long it’s been there and on and on.

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then unnatural links are in the eye of the algo.

Further complicating matters is the definition of “unnatural” as it pertains to off-site versus on-site.

If you sell Titanium Ball Bearings, I would naturally assume these words, as clickable links, ought to appear on your own site. It would be hard for them not to. But if those words appear as a clickable link on 275 blog rolls, something is not kosher. I’d go so far as to say if the words Titanium Ball Bearings appeared on 15 different blog rolls, something is fishy.

I’m going list some of the more obvious unnatural links, and include a few of the less obvious unnatural links. I hope you will comment below and add your own definitions well as examples.

As a preface, if there had never been a Google, never been a links based algorithm, and if the terms anchor text had never entered into SEO lexicon, my hunch is 75% of the links on the Web would say “click here”, 10% would say “read more”, and 14% would be company names and/or URLs.  The remaining 1% would say “buy Viagra”.

Since Google does exist, we will never know. I do know that the average Web user who does not work in a Web marketing related field hasn’t a clue what the signals are that impact search rank, meaning that this is all a very SEO centric subject.

15 Types Of Unnatural Links

Because I do not believe in absolutes (except that one), each of these below could have exceptions, and I can argue those exceptions all day, but in general, these below mean trouble. What are your thoughts?

1.  You have a link to your Atlanta based tanning salon site from an Alaska based Halibut fishing charter site. This is the classic unnatural link. When there is no plausible connection in subject matter or location between two websites, I think we can agree it didn’t happen by accident. And if anchor text is involved, it’s even worse.

The example I just provided does actually exist, but it would be unfair to categorize all Alaskan Halibut Fishing Charters that way, so here’s an example of a honest natural one: http://alaska-halibut-fishing-charters.com/halibut_links.html (I bet that fellow is wondering why he’s getting so much traffic today).

2.  On any interior page of your site, if the title tag of the page as well as the page’s main heading text is an exact keyword match for multiple anchor text links from other sites pointing to that exact page, it’s unnatural.

Caveat by example: A niche glossary, like this http://birding.about.com/od/birdingglossary/Birding_Glossary.htm. It’s titled as such, and linked to by other sites using the words Birding Glossary. This makes sense. It’s natural.

3.  The link says Orlando Limousines and it appears on 60 school newspaper websites, including one from Montana State Technical College. Actually, any site with a link from 60 school newspaper sites islikely unnatural. Or even 6. And has anyone else noticed the current migration of school newspapers from .edu domain space to .com? Wow. I wonder why?

4.  You have ten times the blogroll links as your nearest competitor. Don’t jump me on this one. I agree that blogroll links are often totally legitimate and reflect outstanding content, especially in narrow verticals. But when I can see the world’s worst Forex site has links on over 100 blogrolls, I call it manipulated and unnatural. Poor quality content should not attract links from quality sites in numbers.

5.  Out of the 3000 unique TLD backlinks your site has, 375 of those 3000 TLD’s contain a directory or file named /resources-links.html or links.asp, or /exchange-links.html (I know you must be thinking “surely nobody would do that”, but yes they would). When half your inbounds originate from links pages, that’s unnatural.

6.  Your site has a high number of links, but they all come from just 8 other sites. This one is pretty easy to understand.

7.  82.5 % of your backlinks originate from prweb.com, prnewswire.com, and/or businesswire.com. The remaining 17.5% of your links come from ezinearticles.com

8.  One word: sitewides (or is that two words?)

9.  Your blogspot site about hummingbirds launched a month ago and has already 60,000 links. Caveat: You are Lanny Chambers, hummingbird expert extraordinaire.

10.  Blog networks. No more to say here.

11.  Article networks.  Ditto.

12.  Mass directory submissions outside your vertical.

13.  A site linking to you does not provide an about section, author name, or means of contact.

14.  Blogs with posts of about 400-500 words with 3 links per post, one of them to a .gov site, one to an .edu site, and one to the client site. Easy pickings.

15.  You never used to offer discounts, but now you have student discount links on 50 different University discount program pages. This one is tricky, because the original intent of those discount pages was not to manipulate.

It’s that link builders spotted an opportunity and abused it. When you see a discount link for a GED tutoring program on a University discount page, somebody somewhere is not paying attention.

Remove, Fix, Recover, Repeat…

I believe that some sites, but not all, can recover from unnatural links. There are numerous variables.

A site that’s been around for a decade with 100% natural backlink profile that made a mistake by hiring a shady SEO firm that adds a few hundred unnatural links has a much better chance at recovery than a brand new site that has nothing but spam in its profile. That’s an easy comparison to understand.

Unfortunately, the Web (and links) are all shades of grey, and nobody can predict with certainty the outcome. Your position in the rankings may never return to where it was.  Then again it could, if you have the content to earn it.

If we’ve learned anything with the J.C. Penney and Overstock situations, it’s that Google will forgive, especially for those who are willing to pursue a legitimate content creation and link building strategy.

1. Google anounced that they were changing how they view links (nicely recapped here:)
2. Pandamonium!
3. Certain large blog networks were devalued and webmasters started to receive warnings about unnatural links.

Link building can still work well using ways that I wouldn’t personally advise because I don’t think that the techniques are sustainable. However, I fully recognize that not every site is destined to have a long-term link campaign that seeks to win the race by being slow and steady.

Thus, you’ll keep seeing link builders writing about the “best” ways to do something, and you’ll see others arguing and saying that riskier tactics still work. I doubt we’ll ever see the day when risky tactics don’t work in some way, but I do also believe that unless you want to stay terrified of losing your rankings and traffic, you have to recognize that link building is no longer what it once was.

Maximize Each Link

Get a link to your site and make sure you get the most out of it…traffic and conversions. If you get a great link, build some links to that page too!! Don’t think of a link as being just a one-time event.

If a blogger links to you (perhaps in a roundup or reference to an article that you wrote) then by all means, reach out via email, blog commenting, or social media, and say thanks. Maybe you’ll get another link, be asked for an interview, asked to guest post, etc. Honestly, unless the link was done to tell the world that you’re a horrible moron, you have nothing to lose by saying thank you.

Keep Your Content Linkworthy

Encourage comments and social media sharing. I wouldn’t really want to link to an SEO post that seemed good but had zero comments and social media shares, because I would be wondering “what am I missing here?”

If you write an article and people comment, respond. Encourage members of your staff to comment or respond to other comments, and encourage social sharing. This increases the chances of someone coming back to see what’s next.

In the above example, you can see that this post is getting some good social love. As of this writing, it also had over 20 comments. To me, that’s a signal that the content is linkworthy.

Find New Competitors

Look at your referral sources, find the great ones, and see who else they link to. Those are fantastic sites to perform competitive analysis on.

Here we see that a few of the top SEO industry sites are linking to us at the SEO Chicks blog, so I’d do a quick site search of each of those sites in order to see who’s on their blogrolls and use a tool like Get Rank’s Link Extractor to get a list of sites linked to from the original site.

I’d also suggest that, if you have time, you at least look at any site that puts up a link to you, and see what they link to, even if it’s not a site you recognize. You can find some gems this way.

Keep Analyzing Your Profile

Analyze your link profile more than once. Hopefully you’re keeping a constant eye on your link building campaign but at minimum, you need to review your link profile at least every few months (and much, much more often if you’ve recently been penalized) unless you have a very small site and are generating few links a month.

While I don’t recommend chasing the algorithm, I have to admit that I do it occasionally. Considering the frequency of Google updates, it’s wise to review your profile after each major update if you do this too.

Link Out

I know that reciprocal links aren’t a great strategy for the most part (usually because they are so poorly done) but there is nothing wrong with linking to someone who links to you if you don’t abuse it and rely on it. In fact, linking out initially, to a site that you’d love to get a link from, is a great way to get noticed and generate a link of your own.

If you’re checking for new links or mentions of your name/brand and you see something pop up, don’t you usually check it out? I certainly do, and I occasionally find great new sources to keep my eye on. Even if a link out doesn’t get you a reciprocal link immediately, it still has the potential to help you form a connection that can help you down the road.

Familiarize Yourself With On-Page Work

I am lucky to have come from a programming background and my first efforts were all focused on on-page work, but since links are easy to build without having to touch a site, obviously, I’m sure there are people building links who have little idea about much else.

Links can only do so much for a site, and if you’re building links and seeing no good results, you need to be able to look at reasons outside of the links. With the recent chatter about over-optimization issues, analyzing a backlink profile to figure out where the problem lies will just not cut it any longer. You’re going to have to look at the site too.

This is why I love link building though; it’s never stagnant for long. Even if you do everything the “right” way, you’ll end up having to adapt, which keeps us all on our toes.

Home Depot Asks For Links

The link request was sent by Home Depot to providers it recommends for installation projects. It came to light in a Search Engine Watch forum discussion, picked up by Search Engine Roundtable and further by Bill Hartzer, who got a copy of the letter. It read in part:

The Home Depot is in the process improving our online advertising efforts for our installation services. We are using our brand authority and marketing power to increase traffic to our site and convert customers. We would like to extend this benefit to all of our business partners and are requesting that you add a link on your site to relative key words that will aid our related installation page authority. Please note that the hyperlink does not have to be visually indicated.

Linking to The Home Depot website will benefit our business partners by increasing the page authority of your website. Page Authority predicts the likelihood of a single page to rank well in search results. Ranking high in search results will assist with driving more relevant traffic to your website.

The letter went on to request a link to a particular page with recommended anchor text.

Issues With The Request

I’ve bolded the key parts of the letter that should send up red flags to anyone who knows SEO. Saying that links don’t have to be “visually indicated” is a euphemism for hidden links, and having hidden links can get you penalized by Google.

As for saying linking out will give a ranking boost, that’s pretty much a myth. If it were true, you’d see all types of low-quality sites getting immediate gains just by linking to good sites. Rankings don’t work that way.

Google: Monitoring Closely

When I asked Google about the letter yesterday, I was given this statement:

It’s simply untrue to tell vendors that linking to a specific page will automatically increase the vendors’ page authority. Likewise, encouraging websites to make hidden links to a website can lead to violations of our quality guidelines that result in demotion or removal of pages from our index. We will be monitoring this situation closely and taking appropriate action.

Home Depot: Correcting Its Mistake

Will Home Depot face a ban? Unlike situations with JC Penney and Overstock last year, this isn’t a case of buying links, so there’s no violation in that regard. Nor is it a violation to ask a network associated with your business to link back. The hidden link issue is really the tricky part, and that would depend on whether the suppliers actually implemented links in that way.

For its part, Home Depot said the letter should have never gone out. I spoke with Jean Niemi, a Home Depot spokesperson who told me:

We investigated the letter here internally, and it was a truly unfortunate letter that was poorly worded and misleading.

Niemi said that Home Depot “in no way” supported hiding links nor believes that links to its site will help service providers rank better. She said the letter had gone out to its service providers, which she says number nearly 2,000, without being vetted by Home Depot’s communications team, as it should have.

“We have pretty strict SEO standards, and that’s what we expect to be used,” Niemi said.

She added that Home Depot had contacted Google to alert it to the letter and was sending out a follow-up letter to its service providers to correct errors in the original one.

Related Articles

• New York Times Exposes J.C. Penney Link Scheme That Causes Plummeting Rankings in Google
• Google’s Action Against Paid Links Continues: Overstock & Forbes Latest Casualties; Conductor Exits Brokering Business
• Google Sending Warnings About “Artificial” Or “Unnatural” Links
• Conversation With An Idiot Link Broker

Warnings Issued

Many people have reported getting messages from Google regarding link violations. If you scan the Google Webmaster Help forums, for instance, you will see many examples of these being posted.

Here is how one reads:

Dear site owner or webmaster of ….

We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.

If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.

If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team

Links No Longer “Silently Distrusted”

Last month, Google appeared to take action against several blog/link networks. Are the messages going out because of that? Google told us no. Rather, it is that Google’s choosing to report penalties about bad linking issues more now than in the past.

A Google spokesperson emailed this statement:

The majority of the increase in messages to webmasters is not due to messages about links. Rather, Google recently started sending messages to sites even for egregious or “blackhat” violations of our quality guidelines. The vast majority of the increase in messages is thus due to expanding the types of messages we send, not because of more warnings about links.

It is true that actions on link networks have been more visible lately, but there’s an important disclaimer to that. Google has been able to trace and take action on many types of link networks; we recently decided to make that action more visible. In the past, some links might have been silently distrusted or might not have carried as much weight. More recently, we’ve been surfacing the fact that those links aren’t helping to improve ranking or indexing.

Earlier this year, Google said that it significantly increased the number of messages they have sent through Webmaster Tools in 2012.

Related Stories:

• Google Eliminates Another Link Network, BuildMyRank.com – Just One Of Several?
• Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google
• Google’s Action Against Paid Links Continues: Overstock & Forbes Latest Casualties; Conductor Exits Brokering Business
• Another Company Outed for Paid Links: Sequoia-Backed Milanoo
• Google’s Jaw-Dropping Sponsored Post Campaign For Chrome
• New York Times Continues Paid Link Outing Stories, Looks At Online Flowers Industry
• Google Chrome’s Paid Link Penalty Now Lifted
• Google Sent Over 700,000 Messages Via Webmaster Tools In Past Two Months
• Dilbert Cartoon: Caught For Paid Links On Google