Advanced link building queries, for the link builders who use them extensively, remain a closely guarded secret. It’s easy to understand why. For one, they want to protect a valued link source from getting flooded with link requests from the general link-seeking public. Secondly, there are some choice opportunities out there that would lose their value if the entire SEO community happened to learn about them.

Another complication with discussing and sharing link building queries is that they’re often tailored towards the linkable and shareable assets of a particular organization. Further, two businesses within the same vertical may have widely different linkable assets, and therefore will need to seek different link targets, which requires different queries.

Despite their link-protecting reticence and the complexity of communication, the 21 link builders I surveyed delivered a highly-valuable array of advanced link building queries. Thank you to all who participated!

Framing the process

In my questions, I asked link builders to respond within this framework:

1. Linkable Asset. Definition: what’s “linkable” varies from vertical to vertical. Cash is almost always a linkable asset, as are available jobs, events, expertise for interviews and many other forms of great content.
2. Link Target. Definition: what types of sites, pages, and people seek this linkable asset?
3. Link Prospecting Query. Definition: what queries uncover great targets for your linkable assets?

This framework couldn’t possibly suit every link builders’ style and expertise. I mention it because you’ll see it in some cases below.

Last notes before digging in – I missed getting queries from some great link builders due to time constraints imposed by my late start (apologies to those I missed!). If you want more sample queries from link builders please say so in the comments (and/or add your own) so I can build the case for a follow-up article. And in closing, I’d like to extend a thank you to the SEO Dojo for their warm welcome and link query suggestions.

Link building queries from 21 link builders

Query #1

Ken McGaffin, Keywords and SEO Blogger for Wordtracker Academy:

Here is a mini case-study on our Firefox plug-in ‘SEO Blogger’ which shows how we create linkable assets, queries and approach people for link building.

The link building project

‘SEO Blogger’ Firefox plug in from Wordtracker

At Wordtracker, we wanted to target anyone who published a blog and we were especially interested in business bloggers. We did a reasonable amount of research on the project and it kicked off with doing queries on Google.

We were interesting in identifying sites that had published articles on ‘business blogging’ or advised people how to blog. We identified our prospects using “intitle” queries on Google.

At the last count, this piece of work netted us over 1,000 links in just a few months.

The queries we used were quite simple but they produced an excellent list of target sites.

Here are the queries I used:

• intitle:”business blogging”
• intitle:”business blogs”
• intitle:”blogging tips”

For each query, I’ll look at the first 100 results and then look to compile a list of what I think are the top 50 or so. I concentrate on the top 50 because it’s cost effective. If I get editorial coverage and links from among the top 50, then I know hundreds will follow their example.

You’ve got to have superb content and publicize it through multiple channels. That’s where we put in the bulk of our efforts. For ‘SEO Blogger’ we had a 7-step process:

1. Created a top notch, free plug-in.
2. We created a section on our Academy specifically to offer free blogging articles as well as a blogging download.
3. We also commissioned an e-book from Chris Garrett, “Blogging for Business” that would generate revenue.
4. About 4 days before launch, we contacted our top 50 researched targets, gave them some copy and invited them to be the first to try our new plugin – we asked them to write about it or tweet it if they found it useful. We gave people a strict embargo.
5. We wrote a series of customized press releases that went to the press list we’ve built up over the years. Note that we suggested how to link to us in all our communications.
6. This is the most important step – we responded to questions and queries almost immediately. That meant assigning people to take on that task. I’m convinced our quick responses helped build trust and relationships.
7. Finally, on release, we tweeted about the launch. Many of the bloggers journalists who we had contacted also tweeted at the same time. The results were fantastic – the synergy we got from these multiple channels is always what I’m after.

In summary,  I think you need to have a commitment to create great, free stuff in order to tap into these link targets.

Query #2

Shaun Anderson, of Hobo SEO Company in Scotland.

One of the simplest ways I use to build links for any business is finding colleges and universities who link degree students and alumni to to job opportunities, and promote their student discount partners online. I consider links from very real sites like these as authority building links.

Obviously the first thing to do is get used to publishing your job vacancies and any offers on your site, and then telling potential linking partners about them. TIP: never take these jobs offline either – just mention “Role Filled” and strike out the text.

• Target Asset = Job Vacancy / Internships For (with your important keywords of course)
• Key Link prospects = Universities and colleges, alumni sites
• Link prospecting queries (in Google) = jobs degree site:.ac.uk, careers opportunities site:.ac.uk, careers advice site:.ac.uk, jobs degree site:.edu, careers degree site:.edu, careers advice site:.edu + variations
• View this example page typical of what you might find.

Another variation of this query occurs with colleges and universities who publish links to sites that offer their alumni special student discounts (so effectively, all you need is a student discount for products or services). This is useful even for small businesses in a very tight catchment area.

• Target Asset = Student Discount For (with your important keywords of course)
• Key Link prospects = Universities and colleges, alumni sites
• Link prospecting queries (in Google) = student discount partners site:.ac.uk, student discount partners site:.edu + variations
• View this example page typical of what you might find.

Of course, in every case you need to dig around the site in question but offering a student discount to all colleges and universities and building a list of marketing communications offers at unis and colleges and contacting them asking for a link in their newsletter (which many have) in return for a student discount is going to be more rewarding than sending out 1000 unsolicited spam link request emails. TIP – don’t be cheap. The better your offer for students, the better chance you’ll get a link.

Ultimately these kinds of educational links are a win win – they are not hurting either site, and students get a good deal too. If you have good content on your site, you can just go right on and ask them to link to it if they already have a habit of linking out to similar sites to yours, or even send them articles about “How to get a job in {keyword} services” for their careers newsletter or resource section.

Query #3

Eric Ward, content link builder since 1994

Understanding how to use what Google will give you via advanced syntax queries is one of those private strategies where I don’t tell my exact approach, I only sort of hint at it. The specific queries I use are typically client/subject specific.

That said, I could share some vertical/marginally useful ones, say, if the content I am building links for is PBS’ content on volcanoes.

Then, an example target site would be this one.

And, I would have found that target site via a Google query string like this: [volcano learn diagram useful demonstration other links].

Now, this is a beautiful example, and it’s a real example, and it resulted in a topical link obtained, but…most folks who are building links are not doing so on behalf of PBS content about a vertical like “volcanoes”. So, while my example may look nice, and it worked for me because my clients are content creators like PBS, most folks will see my example and crucify me/it as being “unrealistic” for their purposes, since their content is not as “linkworthy” as PBS’s.

Query #4

Wiep Knol, newly of Linkbuilding.nl

Here’s a list of a few queries that I often use or have used in the past to find interesting websites. I left the most obvious ones out, because I assume that most people already know and use these.

Content targeted:

• {keyword} “guest blogger” OR “guest post” OR “guest article” OR “guest column”
• {keyword} “become a contributor” OR “contribute to this site”
• {keyword} “write for us” OR “write for me”
• {keyword} inurl:category/guest

You can refine these queries by using {keyword location} in stead of {keyword}, or by switching to just {location}.

Resource/ research targeted:

• {keyword} “top * [tools/ articles/ websites/ etc.]” -> refine search to ~1 year ago. Contact anybody who shows up and ask if you can help with the 2009/ 20** edition of the article
• {keyword} research -> see explanation above
• {keyword} {location} resources OR “useful sites” OR links
• {keyword} {USP} intitle:resources -> Use ‘green’, ‘cheapest’ etc as USP
• .edu targeted: {keyword} site:.edu “planned research” OR “upcoming project” -> might return upcoming research/ project/ whatever that can be useful (both for info and for links)

To find specific types of websites:

• {keyword} “Powered by phpBB” OR “powered by vBulletin”
• {keyword} “Blog powered by TypePad” OR “powered by Wordpress”

Additionally, one thing that always works very well for me is asking the client what the most important industry related websites and blogs are, and which ones his or her favorite are. Then I do some searching in the LinkedIn connections and Twitter followers of the client and some of his colleagues, and look for connections with these websites. If I find a match, explain to my client how he can use that connection and turn it into a link. This not only results in links to the client website on highly relevant websites that he likes (=a happy client), but it also makes sure that he is building connections that will be useful in the future as well (= life time value).

Query #5

Ann Smarty, SEO Consultant, SEOSmarty.com

• target asset = new low-calorie chocolate product
• key link prospects = mommy bloggers
• link prospecting queries = [pr welcome], [submit * review], [pr friendly], [pr contact], [pr info], [get * reviewed], [allintitle:get * reviewed], [reviews inurl:submit]

• target asset = a contest by fitness equipment store
• key link prospects = bloggers who cover web contests with a link back to the host
• link prospecting queries = [intitle:submit intitle:contest], [allintitle:submit * contest], [blog contests], [submit * giveaway]

Also from Ann: Link Building Search Queries Collection How to Use Google Wildcard Operator for Link Building and Baiting

Query #6

Debra Mastaler of Alliance-Link, link building services and training

We begin all custom campaigns by sending surveys to the client’s customer base, which cuts our prospecting time in half and pinpoints the sites and/or types of businesses we need to look for. From there, it’s a simple matter of doing basic research to match sites with our client’s demographic. I depend less on queries for this and more on tools like Quantcast and Compete. If I do need to query, I use all four engines (Google, Ask, Yahoo and Bing) plus DMOZ, Hoovers, Lexis Nexis and local directories. My goal is to find businesses with street and algorithmic credibility to pitch my promotions and content to.

Query #7

Melanie Nathan, consultant for Canadian SEO

Footprints: A footprint is simply common text than can be searched for thereby revealing all the places that use the same text.

For example, a Google search for [Allowed HTML tags:] will bring back all the sites and blogs that allow you to use custom anchor text when commenting.

If you happen to come across an authoritative site that allows you to automatically post content with dofollow links (for example, a classified ad), take note of the form they’re using as footprints left by the form software are easily trackable and can allow you to find other sites that are using the same form.

Some examples of common footprints:

Dofollow blog comments:

Corresponding Footprint search: ["Notify me of follow-up comments?"+"Submit the word you see below:"]

Result: Over 60,000 new prospects (ie. sites that use the same dofollow form software)

Dofollow classified ads:

Corresponding Footprint search: ["drupal classified ads courtesy of exodus development, INC"]

Result: Over 40,000 other sites that use the same dofollow classified ad software.

Take it a step further with “drupal classified ads courtesy of exodus development, INC”+health and you’ve narrowed it down to only the sites that mention (for example) health.

Keep in mind that these are just 2 very basic examples. Get creative and you’ll be surprised at what you might uncover.

Disclaimer: I am in NO way suggesting that you spam these types of sites. However, if you’re going to spend the time interacting and engaging with other sites and blogs in your industry (for reals!), I AM suggesting that you maximize your efforts by making sure to interact on sites which will offer the most benefit to your organic goals.

Query #8

Wil Reynolds of the ThinkSeer SEO Agency

• Linkable Asset: A prize (product or service of course ;)
• Link Target: The target is charity web sites where we can give something away and be listed as an in kind donor
• Queries: ["in kind donations" list], ["in kind donors" list]

Query #9

Tom Demers of WordStream, the keyword management software company responsible for The Free Keyword Tool.

A couple of things I’m frequently promoting are videos and free tools or widgets. Here I’ll use some pretty generic queries like:

• target asset = Video Content
• link prospecting queries = intitle:[{target keyword} videos], intitle:[{target keyword} clips]

• target asset = Free tool/widget
• link prospecting queries = intitle:[{target keyword} tools], intitle:[free {target keyword} tools], intitle:[list of free {target keyword} tools], intitle:[list of {target keyword} tools]

Then I’ll use SEO for Firefox to export the data and de-dupe and triage the link prospects based on PageRank.

Beyond just pulling down places linking out, you can also identify a few sites that are on multiple lists. From there, pull down their backlink profiles and sort by page rank (using SEO for Firefox) or find sites that are linking to them multiple times using the Hostname Occurrence Counter. At the end of the process I usually have a nice list of potential link profiles.

Query #10

Gab Goldenberg of SEORoi.com

For queries,  I try to find less commercial sites based on insider jargon, insider topics or thinking about communities. So if you are kindergarten related, I’d look up jargon related to parenting or issues like whether you should carry your kid in a sling or if strollers are better. This works better for B2C than B2B, since I can’t see professionals being up for selling links on their sites, vs the general public. I could be wrong though.

For prospects, I target bloggers, members of the said communities.

Building links to B2C sites that can have a related community. It’s harder when you’re selling stuff like toothpaste or ordinary drugstore items without associated communities.

The upside to this is that if you have the budget, you can saturate the key sites in the community with these paid links and build a brand. In which case, you can thumb your nose at Google because you’ll eventually build direct traffic as a key source as well as referral traffic, reduce their ability to penalize you, etc. I wrote somewhere about my friend Rachel who surfs Wikipedia for entertainment. That’s where you want to get to. Where people bypass Google to get to you directly. It’s ironic, but the best SEO will get you to the point you don’t need search traffic any more.

Check out Gab’s 101-tip guide to buying text links.

Query #11

Arnie Kuenn of Vertical Measures link building service.

Here are a few for you that I have saved in a our database of queries we use for link building:

• “keyword phrase” sponsor charity
• “public library” “useful links” keyword phrase site:.gov
• “useful keyword phrase sites” library –clientwebsite site:.edu
• “helpful keyword phrase sites” library –clientwebsite site:.edu
• “favorite keyword phrase sites” library –clientwebsite site:.edu
• “best keyword phrase” site:.edu OR site:.org
• keyword phrase resources public library site:.us
• keyword phrase site:.edu

Query #12

Members of the Huomah SEO Dojo, SEO Training for Search Warriors.

Many thanks to the fine community at the SEO Dojo for their contributions to this article!

member: fedem of http://www.buyandwalk.com/

• linkdomain:competitor1.com; linkdomain:competitor2.com; -linkdomain:mysite.com

This will give you a landscape of which sites are linking to 2 or 3 of your competitors but not your site. This increase the chances of finding partners willing to link to your site.

Query #13

Ken Lyons of WordStream.

I use search operators to find personal email addresses for link outreach. some of my favorites:

• site:[companywebsite.com] + [name] + email
• site:[companywebsite.com] + [name] + contact
• site:[personalblog.com] + [name] + email
• site:[personalblog.com] + [name] + contact

From 12 Ways to Find Anyone’s Personal Email Address

Query #14

Craig Parker of Soula.com

Social Media Based queries are obviously useful for commenting and scoping out competition so: site:{SN} {keyword}

Where SN (social network) is digg.com, delicious.com or twitter.com etc. and {keyword} is one of your keywords or brands/competitor brands.

The other one I find quite useful is narrowing down themed directories so:

• {keyword} + “add a site”
• {keyword} + “submit url”

Obviously there are literally loads of combinations of these utilizing different words for directory i.e. “suggest url” or “submit listing”

You can also combine it with the intitle or inurl command for extra fun! Again throw in different words for directory like “list” and you can make lots of combinations on this.

• {keyword} + “intitle:directory”
• {keyword} + “inurl:directory”

They are basic ones but can be often overlooked by those not used to this stuff.

Query #15

Jon Santillan of SEO Dubai

I used search operators to find potential links for my link building campaign using footprinted Scripts. This varies from directory, blog commenting, forum, social media directories and competitors.

• Target Asset = Red Widget
• Strategy – A combination of standard text or content that usually can see in a website
• Ex: Directory = inurl:submit.php intext:Powered by “Directory Name” intext: red widget
• Blog Commenting = intext:red widget intext:blog comments powered by “Comment Plugin”
• Social Media = intext:”Submit A New Story” intitle:Register intext: “Name of Social Media Script”
• Forum = inurl:forum intext:red widget

My favorite: Competitors Footprints. Following competitors Backlinks is the most exciting one, you can use link:competitorsdomain.com and check a potential link partner. By following competitors footprints, you can sometimes see the strategy of their link building, for example, if they are using Directory, Blog Commenting, Social Media or Forum. If by any chance you got the name of a Directory Script, Social media script, plug commenting plugin that is not in your list, you can add that in your arsenal.

Once you have figured out the competitors pattern how they are building their backlinks plus your link building strategy I think that will be easier for you.

In my opinion, combining different search operators and website content pattern is one of most effective link building strategy you just need to be more creative to combine and try different combination.

Query #16

Navin Poeran

I’m using advanced queries in combination with Google alerts, to receive mails, whenever there is somewhere i can drop a link.

I just create a new alert with: OR -mysite.com inurl:links

Query #17

Andy Murd of MMMeeja.

I use this query in Google Image Search to find the little “U Comment – I Follow” logo:

• “MY KEYPHRASE” inurl:ifollow*.gif

For deep links to your blog posts, you can add “CommentLuv Enabled” to find the popular Wordpress plugin.

I make RSS feeds from link-building searches so my feed reader nags me to post a few comments per day.

Query #18

David Harry (The Gypsy) of the Huomah SEO Blog

When reverse engineering link profiles, we use stuff like:

• [linkdomain:huomah.com site:.com "SEO Blog"]
• linkdomain: – searches for links to Huomah.com
• Site; – tells it to look for results from ‘.com’ extensions.
• “SEO Blog” searches the KWs on the page (or hopefully in the anchor text)

Or

• [linkdomain:example.com site:.edu "keyword"]
• [linkdomain:example.com site:.gov " keyword"]

Or maybe if we’re looking for relevant pages, we can track the TITLE

• [linkdomain:huomah.com -huomah.com intitle:SEO]

Page URLs are strong also, so we might do something like:

• [linkdomain:huomah.com -huomah.com inurl:"search engine optimization"]

We also can use a variety of low level link trolling with dorks related to:

• [add-links, last-updated 2000 inurl:.edu]

Query #19

Julie Joyce, of the link development firm Link Fish Media

“You can find particularly interesting sites geared towards a very specific interest, by using an organic thought process in which you have no major agenda. This all sounds very New Age but it has led us to some of our best inbound links.

I’ll give you an example for this one, since it’s the only method that isn’t exactly what it sounds like. When working for a site that sells punk rock concert videos, we may search for “punk videos” to start with, then we’ll see a long-tailed search phrase somewhere down in the SERPs on page 3, so we’ll then type that phrase in, then click on the first result, see something on the site’s homepage that triggers an idea, and we’ll end up on a fan site that is devoted to the music of Stiff Little Fingers.

We see that this site seeks to list all online stores that happen to sell Stiff Little Fingers items, and our client has one of these sites. Therefore, it’s a great place to get a link, and it was a somewhat random method of discovery. It’s also relevant but we still go about it in a slightly more haphazard way.”

Excerpted from: 6 Discovery Methods For Finding Ideal Linking Partners

Query #20

Brian Gilley of SocialSEO.com

Drupal Powered Websites (most allow comments links and/or dofollow)

Targeting Drupal sites with the keyword phrase “home mortgages” with comments turned on and that allow HTML links to be added and are almost always followed.

Want to get more specific and search for the keyword in the title. Try the “intitle:” search operator on for size.

Want to get freaky with it and go the broad route and not including Drupal websites or any specific CMS platform? Just search for sites allowing the HTML tag, which usually means a followed link and brings up endless possibilities.

See more tips from Mr. Gilley on how to find backlinks with search queries.

Query #21

Brian Chappell, Search/Social Marketer

Finding people who will want to share your content (…including linking to it…) can be much simpler if you know how to search quickly through the major social networks.

• Linkedin: [site:linkedin.com inurl:in “social media expert”]
• Bebo: [site:.bebo.com inurl:profile inurl:bebo “social media expert”]
• CafeMom: [site:www.cafemom.com inurl:cafemom.com/home/ “stay at home mom”]
• Facebook: [site:facebook.com/people “led zeppelin”]
• Flickr: [site:flickr.com/people “@gmail”]
• Twitter: [site:twitter.com -inurl:statuses -inurl:status “social media expert”]
• MySpace: [site:profile.myspace.com inurl:myspace inurl:fuseaction “go to nc state”]
• YouTube: [site:youtube.com/user “social media expert”]

From: How to Target Users within Social Networks

Additional link query resources:

Two Link Prospecting Query building tools:

• SEOBook Link Suggest Tool
• Link Search Tool by SoloSEO

10 Articles on Advanced Queries for Link Building

1. Long List of Link Searches
2. Five Search Queries to Find Sponsorship Link Opportunities
3. 13 Search Operators for Ultimate Link Building
4. Advanced Link: Operator to Explore Your Competitor’s Backlinks
5. The Power of Search Queries for Link Building: The Basics and Beyond Part 2
6. Link Building Tip: Easily Find DoFollow Blogs Search String
7. Search Engine Query Cheat Sheets
8. Google Hacks for Dorks and SEO prowlers
9. Getting Links From Known, Quality Linkers
10. Eric Ward Queries from Print Search Marketing Standard Interview

I’d thought the googlebombs relating to “miserable failure” and “failure” had finally been defused earlier this year. Guess not. Ranking tops in Google right now, the official White House page for US President Barack Obama:

I’ve not heard of any active campaign to linkbomb Obama to the top for these words, so I’m guessing this is fallout from the long-standing “miserable failure” googlebomb that was impacting his predecessor, President George W. Bush.

Below, some key background from our archives:

Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs from January 2007 provides detailed background on what googlebombing or linkbombing is. In short, it’s a campaign to linking to a particular page with certain words, in hopes of making the page rank for those words. That article also explains how Bush’s biography was bombed into the top results for “failure” and “miserable failure,” until Google put in a solution designed to disable all types of linkbombs (they weren’t trying to help Bush specifically).

Google Says Stephen Colbert Is No Longer The Greatest Living American from May 2007 explains how Google’s solution had a flaw. Rather than running automatically, it required that Google periodically run a linkbomb defusing algorithm. Or so Google said. Some simply felt that the “algorithm” was nothing more than Google making manual edits to remove new bombs, when detected.

Bush – Tops For “Who Is A Failure” On Google from February 2008 shows that Bush was ranking again for a “failure” related query, “who is a failure.” It turns out that this wasn’t a new thing. It was a consequence of earlier “miserable failure” linkbomb that hadn’t been detected, apparently — where changing the order of the words or adding a few more could trigger the bomb to blow up again.

Obama Is “Failure” At Google & “Miserable Failure” At Yahoo from January 2009 shows how Obama inherited the “failure” and “miserable failure” googlebombs from Bush, in part because Obama’s web team redirected visitors looking for Bush’s biography to Obama’s.

That was fixed, and the rankings went away. I’m not sure how long the “who is failure” search has been ranking Obama on Google. It’s puzzling, because his page is isolated from those past Bush links now. A quick rundown on rankings for key terms across the search engines makes things more puzzling:

Google: “Failure,” “miserable failure” and “who is a failure” bring up neither Bush nor Obama in the top 50 results, but “who is failure” ranks Obama #1.

Ask: “Failure” doesn’t find Bush or Obama in the top 50 result. For “miserable failure,” Bush ranks #45. For “who is a failure,” neither ranks. For “who is failure,” Obama ranks #1, as with Google.

Bing: For “failure,” the Bush bio ranks #2 for me. It ranks #3 for “miserable failure.” It ranks #2 for “who is a failure” and “who is failure.”

Yahoo: For “failure,” Bush ranks #11. Bush ranks #5 for “miserable failure.” His bio ranks #16 for “who is a failure.” For “who is failure,” neither Bush nor Obama rank in the top 50 results.

Overall, Bush continues to show up for failure-related terms other than at Google and Ask. With Ask, I suspect this is because they’re taking some of Google’s editorial results. Ask has denied this in the past. But Ask has also prided itself on how in the past, it stood above the other search engines by not showing the same linkbombs that would often appear elsewhere.

So if Bush is the failure based on link analysis but everyone else (or at least Google’s two largest rivals), what’s up with Google? Why’s this happening? Perhaps there’s new link data out there influencing Obama’s page?

Alternatively, it might be something that Ciarán Norris pointed out the last time I wrote about this. There’s still a link that might be transmitting “failure” credit that was aimed at Bush to Obama, at least in how Google counts things.

This was the page that originally was bombed:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html

It now does a 301 permanent redirect to this page:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/presidents/georgewbush/

Without the technical jargon, that means if anyone “calls” that original page, they get forwarded automatically to the new location — and search engines are told to transfer anything they know about the old page to the new one.

Unfortunately, in 2006, that “gwbbio.html” was also temporarily redirected here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/

That page now does a 301 redirect here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/president-obama/

My assumption is that some people who wanted to googlebomb Bush used the post-2006 “/president” address, which is still causing problems today for Obama, just as I was expecting might happen:

Of course, they [the Bush White House] had to do a redirect. Too many people had bookmarked the former address of the biography. But rather than redirect to the new biography page, they choose to point at the page used by all US presidents — Bush currently, Obama next and future presidents to come.

Aside from turning Bush’s search engine problem into a legacy issue for future presidents, the change is also misleading the US public and others. The redirection from the old bio page should lead to the new bio page, not require those using old bookmarks to guess at where the new location is at.

What to do? In looking at my past writings, I realize I never addressed how to handle that “/president” page myself. I don’t think I was expect it to carry much link weight versus the original URL that has been out there so long.

The original page redirects to Bush’s bio, as it should. It might be that it does make sense to keep that “/president” page pointing at whoever is the current sitting president. And they might be forced to inherit whatever linkbombs hit their predecessor in the past.

Following on from my last column when I gave guidance on how to prepare your site for successful international link building, it’s now time to look at the rules of international link building itself—at least the new rules that differ from a typical single country project. Fundamentally, link building is the same everywhere—which means it’s important to consider the quality of the links, check they’re not no-followed and take a view of the quality of the site from which they come. But there are some new factors to be considered—which I’m calling the “new rules of international link building.”

Rule 1: Location, location, location is everything

The most obvious new parameter to consider is location of the site on which a link originates—or perhaps more appropriately, where the search engines believe the link originates. To succeed in a specific geographic region, you are going to need not only good content targeted at that region and in the correct language, but also links to your site from within that region. So, if your target is to sell tire fitting to Austrians, you need a site in German and you need to acquire links from within Austria.

What does that expression “within Austria” actually mean? When you start to consider this question closely, you begin to realize just why local domains really are so crucial outside of the US. There are really only two factors which make any sense—an IP address from an Austrian server or a ‘.at’ domain for Austria.

If you’re running a hosting company serving a particular market—such as Austria—you’re going to want to be competitive and you’re going to want a good connection to the backbone of the internet. This makes it attractive for smaller hosting companies based in many smaller markets to sell—or rather to re-sell—hosting space which sits on servers which may not be located directly in Austria but might actually be in the US, UK or other country where servers resources are easier and more cost-effective to come by. In other words, not physically hosted in Austria.

What this means is that, when choosing a local link partner, the easiest way to be sure that a link from an Austrian organization is treated by search engines as a fully-fledged genuine 100% Austrian link is for it to be coming from a site with a ‘.at’ domain.

Rule 2: Correct geo-targeting helps

Meanwhile, Google allows you to specify within Webmaster Central which geographic region you would like your “.com” to be targeted at. This is a useful workaround for organizations who have a site hosted in the US and on a “.com.” But it is a workaround and there are certain deficiencies with relying on this technique. One relates to selecting link partners. If your “.com” site is targeted at Turkey, for instance, but it’s not using a “.tr” domain then you may find local Turkish link partners don’t identify with your site or wish to exchange links with you because the link will still appear to be US hosted on a “.com.”

A quick straw poll demonstrated that few people really know how Google will treat the location of the link on a geo-targeted page—but most believe that it will be given the location of the hosting if the domain is a “.com.” In a way, it doesn’t matter what the truth is, as this is a case of “perception is reality.” The solution is to correctly geo-target your site which means either hosting it locally to the market you’re targeting (and check that the hosting really is local!) or better still to run your site on the appropriate local domain.

Rule 3: Not all links are created equal

I hope to be digging into this fascinating topic more in the future with the help of the team at Majestic SEO who provided the sample data to illustrate my point. Many link builders consider the quality of links by looking at factors such as PageRank. They will also have an idea of what makes a good PageRank based on previous experience. With the new international rules of link building, it’s time to forget PageRank. Or at least don’t try and compare PageRank scores between markets because the pool of links sited within a particular country or domain will vary significantly.

The data in the chart below looks at a small sample of Majestic global link data looking at the average number of backlinks per unique domain in the top 75 countries on the database. It produces some interesting findings.

The number of backlinks per unique domain for a sample of data in the database.

The chart illustrates and hopefully proves my point that the value of links in particular countries or regions varies subject to how much link “competition” there is in that country—and the quality of the competing sites. It doesn’t even matter if you agree or disagree with the findings in the chart as it will vary by sector—the key point is, “It’s different!”

Top of the list is the European Union, which is a good example. For the purposes of this dataset, the European Union is sites which carry the ‘.eu’ domain. There are relatively few of these—but the typical quality of sites within that group is good. What this means is that, at least in theory, obtaining links from sites classified as within the European Union will be good for the whole network of sites, but the quality of links within that region will need to be of a particularly good quality to compete. Equally, a Saudi Arabian link will be good for the whole network—but expect standards to be high within that country.

At the bottom of the scale, countries such as the Philippines or Uzbekistan will require fewer higher PageRank sites to be competitive within those countries and will offer less value for the whole network globally. The bottom line is—links within some countries can help the whole site perform better globally whereas other countries may be easier to target locally—but will add less to the global link juice. Might be time to re-think your international link building strategy!

The Google Webmaster Central blog has a post on “dealing” with low quality backlinks. In that post, Google basically explains that incoming links is “just one of many” ranking factors. That being the case, Google says if you have bad quality incoming links, “don’t fret” it and focus on things you can control, like your content.

Google does offer advice, such as asking the source of the link to remove your site from their page. If that doesn’t work, there is not much you can do. There is currently no tool in Webmaster Tools to communicate to Google to ignore certain links from sources on the Internet.

Google explains that over time they remove low quality sources from their index, so these links should not hurt you over time. Google recommends you report low quality sites in their spam report tool or paid link report.

At SMX East today, Linkdex is introducing its new SearchDNA tool — a link analysis tool that the company says goes deeper than the already crowded field that it’s competing against.

While some link tools only show up to 1,000 links (think Yahoo Site Explorer), Linkdex says SearchDNA has a database of about one trillion links. It gets that data via a partnership with Majestic SEO, which also offers its own link analysis tools. So, what makes SearchDNA different if they’re using the same data?

According to Linkdex CEO John Straw, SearchDNA goes beyond compiling a list of links and does an SEO analysis on the pages where links are found. That analysis includes about 25 key ranking factors that it uses to determine the “link authority” of pages with inbound links to a URL. The tool allows users to filter and sort inbound links based on those factors — things such as whether the keyword appears in the page title, in H1 tags, in the URL, and so forth.

SearchDNA will go into a private beta soon. When the finished product is ready for public use, Straw says he expects pricing to be about $50/month for a crawl of between 100,000 and 200,000 pages.

Other Link Analysis Tools

As I mentioned above, SearchDNA is entering an already crowded field of link analysis tools. Here’s a quick look at some of the other well known sites and tools that offer link building and link analysis:

• Majestic SEO – bills itself as the biggest database of backlinks and anchor text on the web. Offers a free account, and paid “credits” that allow users to analyze competitors.
• SEOmoz Linkscape – launched at SMX East in 2008, Linkscape says it has more than 54 billion URLs across 230 million domains in its index. Offers basic reports for free and advanced reports with a paid SEOmoz PRo membership.
• Link Diagnosis – this tool just relaunched a new version in September. It analyzes only the top 101 pages on a domain, on the theory that most inbound links will point to those pages. This tool is free.
• SEO Book Link Tools – a set of tools to help with link analysis and link building. Link Harvester is a free tool that queries the Yahoo database and analyzes backlinks. Back Link Analyzer is free, downloadable Windows software that includes anchor text analysis. And Hub Finder is a competitive link tool available to paid subscribers.
• Google Webmaster Tools – free, and shows both a list of inbound links pointing to a domain as well as the anchor text found in those inbound links.
• Yahoo Site Explorer – free, but the recent Yahoo-Microsoft deal has search marketers wondering if Site Explorer will soon disappear. Shows inbound links to a page or domain, and Yahoo has previously said the first 50 links or so are roughly shown in order of value/authority. The export function is limited to 1,000 results.
• Bing Webmaster Center – Bing’s version of what Google and Yahoo also offer, but with some additional link filtering options. Like Site Explorer, the export is limited to 1,000 results.
• SEO Spyglass – downloadable tool that comes in Free, Professional, or Enterprise versions. It shows backlink counts, anchor text, IP range, and much more info about a site’s inbound links.
• Backlink Watch – a free tool that shows the URLs, anchor text, and other inbound link data.

We’ll try to do a deeper look into SearchDNA when it’s available for beta access.

Link Diagnosis, one of the most well-known link analysis tools around, has new owners, a new look, and some fairly substantial changes under the hood. But are all the changes an improvement? Well, after testing a beta version for a few days, and now using the new site that launched today, my answer is … yes and no. Some of the changes add value to what Link Diagnosis offers, but others may leave you wanting to use the old version again. (And you can; more on that below.)

What’s New

Obviously, the look and feel is the first change you’ll notice. The new Link Diagnosis sports a more modern design, and the tool itself functions in Flash. It’s much easier on the eyes, but some users may prefer the simplicity of the old tool. One of the other things you’ll notice right away is a preponderance of ads promoting link building services and the like. This is presumably how the new owners are going to keep the service free.

Perhaps the biggest change to how Link Diagnosis works is the addition of accounts and the ability to save reports and projects in your account. This gives users quick and convenient access to commonly used link data without having to run the same reports time and time again. Speaking of those reports, there are number of changes worth knowing about. Have a look at this sample report run on my personal blog, mattmcgee.com:

In the upper right are new filtering options: by PageRank and by LinkType. (The old version of Link Diagnosis allowed sorting on these elements, which is slightly different from how the new filtering works.) In the link report itself, each of the data columns — PageRank, Anchor Text, Link Type, Outbound Links, Link Strength, and Link History (all in gray above) — supports sorting.

The yellow menu bar above the report offers charts and export functions like the old Link Diagnosis. Under the Links tab are a couple new options: If you highlight one link from the list, you can see the age of the page and/or you can also run a new report. Not shown in the screenshot above is an important new feature: the ability to run a link report on deep pages of a web site. On the old Link Diagnosis, you could only run reports on domain names.

There are two other big changes that need to be mentioned: First, links are counted differently in the new version. On the old version of Link Diagnosis, my personal blog is credited with 380 total backlinks and 110 unique anchor text phrases. On the new version, those numbers drop to 113 and 48, respectively. Joe Griffin, one of the new owners of Link Diagnosis, says that they’re filtering the backlinks to show only the first link from a domain. The old version would show multiple pages per domain as backlinks to a site, but the new one will show just one page.

In other words, the backlink count isn’t actual backlinks; it’s domains that link to your site (or page). Using the example above, only one backlink from blog.mixx.com appears, while on the old version, Link Diagnosis would show several different Mixx blog posts that include links to mattmcgee.com.

The other big change in the new version is that the tool analyzes only the top 101 indexed pages from a domain — basically, the first 101 pages Yahoo lists for a domain. The old version went deeper. While site owners may not like the 101-page limit, Griffin says that “the vast majority of large and small sites have most of their inbound links pointing to their top 100 pages.”

What It Means

If you used the old version of Link Diagnosis, chances are good that the new version will show lower backlink and anchor text counts. The tool will show you the 101 pages that it’s analyzing, so if you know of a page with meaningful inbound links that’s not on the list, the new “single page” option may help a bit. But I suspect that many webmasters, SEOs, and site owners won’t like the changes in how links are counted and the limit on pages indexed. If that’s you, the good news is that you can still access the old Link Diagnosis at classic.linkdiagnosis.com.

Link Diagnosis remains a Firefox-only web tool. You’ll need to download the new Firefox add-on if you’re using the new version of Link Diagnosis, or use the old one if you plan to stay with the classic version. For a complete look at what’s different in the new tool, see the Link Diagnosis blog announcement.

One of the most common recommendations people make about link building is to find out who links to your competitors (aka backlinking your competitors). This is a great idea, but many people who do this miss the most important point of why you do it. Let’s explore the good things you can do while backlinking, and then dig into where the most value lies.

Contacting people who link to your competitors

A common strategy is to develop a list of sites who link to your competitor, and then contact those sites and ask them to link to you. There are many programs that will help you develop such a list. Some of the most interesting ones are Linkscape, Majestic SEO, and Link Diagnosis.

Link Diagnosis is free, and the other two cost a modest amount of money. Link Diagnosis extracts link data using the Yahoo! API, and Linkscape and Majestic SEO assemble their data based on independent crawls of the web. As a result, in return for the fees they charge, Linkscape and Majestic SEO can offer more functionality and depth of data.

Once this data is assembled, the next step is to prioritize the sites. Using metrics such as PageRank (SEOmoz also offers mozRank and mozTrust), you can get an approximation of which sites are providing the most important links to the competitor. However, you do want to get a bit deeper into the analysis, because relevance is an important factor as well. In fact, even if a linking page has relatively low PageRank, but it is relevant to your site, you really don’t want to overlook it.

Once you have settled on a prioritization you now need to figure out who to contact to request the link. Do not use scraper software to do this for you. Scraping contact information off the web is a violation of the CAN-SPAM Act, and the punishment is not a fine (it is time in jail). Equally bad is the fact that scrapers will frequently come up with the wrong contacts.

Use inexpensive human resources to do this work for you. They can be trained to recognize the right contact information, and they can also assess the relevance of the link for you as well. This relevance data is a key to the refining your prioritization of your link targets, because relevance is a big factor in a link’s value.

Once you have this data you can begin mailing people and asking for links. An important part of this is crafting a message that will be well received by the recipient. The key is to remember that they probably did not wake up this morning thinking about what links they were going to add to the page you are interested in, and they certainly were not expecting to hear from you. In essence, you are interrupting them. Be respectful, and you will be far better off.

The problem

Contacting sites that link to your competitor, as we noted above, is a great idea. You should do it. However, it is an expensive manual process that takes a long time to produce benefits. And what is your success rate likely to be? If you run a really successful campaign: about ten percent. So the real problem with making this your link building strategy is that it is not enough to help you achieve your goal (unless your goal is to have a site that is worth 10% of your competitor’s site).

This is a common link building mistake: not putting in a place a plan that will have enough impact to achieve the goals of the business. For example, if your competitor has 20,000 links, and you have 10,000 links of similar quality, putting in place a plan to obtain 500 new links of similar quality is not enough. Of course, if 100 of those links are of much higher quality, that is a different matter altogether.

The biggest value of backlinking

When you analyze your competitor’s backlinks there is a tremendous amount of information made available to you. Dig into the nature of the sites linking to them. In the process we outlined above, understanding the relevance of the sites that link to your competitors is really valuable. But you should look to expand upon that. Have your researcher take the time to define the relevance in detail. Have them answer the question: why did this site link to your competitor?

Is it because of a particular piece of content on the competitor’s site? A special promotional program? Are a lot of links coming from one market sector? Are there related market sectors linking to them that you would not have suspected? What areas of the market do you think might be a good target that are not strongly featured in your competitors’ backlink profiles?

Like any other form of marketing, successful link building requires an ongoing process of brainstorming ideas for improving existing campaigns and coming up with new ones. Your (successful) competitors’ backlinks can be a treasure trove of ideas for link building strategies. I have done this many times and am continually surprised at the novel ideas that leading competitors come up with. But, they are smart. That is how they became a leading competitor. So why not put their brains to work for you?

Facebook allows you to embed fan pages on your own site, which might result in Facebook outranking you for your own brand name. For example, the Search Engine Land fan page has a link for me to “add a fan box to your site.” If you look at the code of that widget, you might notice Facebook is using your brand name as the anchor text to the Facebook URL. Since the URL is search engine friendly and since Facebook has a lot of link popularity and trust, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some Facebook pages outranking the official brand web site, due to this new gadget code.

Here is a screen capture of the code:

I want you to notice this part of the code:

<a href=”http://www.facebook.com/searchengineland”>Search Engine Land</a> on Facebook

As you can see, that is rich anchor text pointing to Facebook. Potentially, Facebook can outrank this site for our own name. So, if you are concerned about that, beware on how you use this gadget and where you use it. Of course, you can always slap on the nofollow attribute to the link, so Google won’t pass along any juice to that page.

Hat tip to Sam from OhNuts for sending this my way.

If you use Majestic SEO’s Compare Domain Backlink History tool to view the link growth profiles of a few sites, you’ll most likely notice at least one link spike somewhere. A link spike is exactly what it sounds like it would be: a point in time when backlinks go up sharply, backlinks go back down sharply.

Link spikes are of particular concern when you realize that they can, in some cases, serve as a red flag to a major search engine. They aren’t exactly trends, of course. Well, not most of the time…you would definitely expect to see link spikes as a trend with certain types of sites, such as sites that only sell Christmas decorations or Halloween costumes for example, where on a somewhat regular interval, link spikes would occur that are quite easily explainable.

What causes link spikes?

Something happens. Yes, it is that simple. Whether that something is a flurry of paid links, a juicy piece of linkbait, news trends, brand PR, etc. can be completely irrelevant if there are no other trends to correspond. With the recent death of Farrah Fawcett, for example, we should expect to see link spikes to sites like www.farrahfawcett.us and the wikipedia entry for her. These link spikes will, however, correspond with search trends of course, thus making them seem a lot less suspicious. On the other hand, if we saw link spikes for a site that sells those animatronic fish that sing “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” we might be scratching our heads.

Types of link spikes occur naturally

• News: if it’s in the news, it’s only natural to assume that you’d also see some link spikes for it.

• Social Media: witness the Trending Topics on Twitter and the Digg Homepage for two good examples. These are especially easily manipulated, as we saw recently with the Jeff Goldblum death rumors.

• PR: whether it’s a new bakery opening in town, the hottest new kids’ movie, or anything else that generates buzz, whether it be big or small, PR of any sort can be expected to produce some link spikes.

Many times, these three will overlap. So what types of link spikes are red flags?

Ones that correspond with nothing of note. These basically look a bit dodgy. Without any other corresponding trends, they really stand out. See above for the animatronic “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” fish.

Linkbait is commonly thought to create link spikes, which can be a bad thing. This is why, when reading about linkbait creation and execution, you will see loads of advice about how it should never be a one-time only event. If you’re going to do some linkbait, planning to do more than one piece is critical in avoiding link spikes that don’t look natural. Spikes on a regular basis are usually ok, though, as they form their own sort of expected trend. If a company does loads of PR at the beginning of each month, over time you’d expect to see a trend of link spikes corresponding (roughly) to those periods.

Determining whether a link spike is organic or non-organic is difficult, which is an issue. How can you tell them apart? I’m not sure that you truly can, actually, which is part of the problem, and yet another reason to always plan out a long-term link development strategy. You can’t think of link building as something that goes on for a few weeks then stops, although plenty of people do. If you do, you could see improved rankings for a period but then they’ll most likely fall back if you don’t keep moving forward.

Recently, I was at an internet marketing convention where the question was posed to a panel: “As a search engine optimizer (SEO), what would you advise your clients to do if an extra million dollars fell into their lap?” The response from the SEOs on the panel was essentially “invest it all in creating great content.”

When questioned, the panel agreed that links were important (since Google’s algorithm prioritizes their analysis of links so highly), but the general implication was that if you create great content the links will come.

It would be fair to say that sometimes good content gets linked to, but it’s rare. According to Google, as of late 2008 they’d indexed one trillion pages. So the probability that one new page of content would be found by a surfer randomly clicking from one link to the next on the internet would be one in a trillion. Man, those are not good odds.

There are many ways to help good content get linked to, but the practical reality is that these same techniques are more often used to help all content get linked to, regardless of the content’s quality. So SEO is just as much about creating “great” content as it is about being great at getting content linked to. I am not suggesting that the quality of the content doesn’t matter, but that the purist approach of simply putting great content into the world and waiting for unnamed altruists to link to it on merit alone relies too much on luck.

Five steps for creating & distributing content

When trying to improve organic SEO, creating great content is just as important as doing a great job of distributing it. These tactics, however, should not be pursued in a vacuum. Instead, you should approach SEO using a holistic strategy. Here is a sample five-step plan that you can customize to fit your company’s objectives.

Step 1: Search Google Trends for keywords that relate to your business that have received heightened attention recently (either because of seasonality or other special events). On a search for “outdoor chairs,” for example, you will see that the number of people searching on this keyword spikes every summer. If you sell outdoor chairs, now would be a good time to target that phrase aggressively.

Once you’ve chosen a topic area you are ready to move on to Step 2.

Step 2: Use the Google keyword tool to find terms related to the concept of “outdoor chairs” to write about. Through appropriate analysis you may find that the terms outdoor chairs, lounge chairs, wood chairs, and folding chairs are relevant to the products you sell, and that they get a lot of search volume.

Refine your target keyword list and move on to Step 3.

Step 3: Search Twitter for the keywords you selected in Step 2 to see what your target customers are talking about in order to get content ideas. @Macktacular is talking about painting children’s Adirondack chairs. @endlessrant seems to need outdoor chairs in a hurry. @jherskowitz is looking for comfy chairs to fit a rooftop bar. Try to pick content ideas that correspond to the keywords you decided to target in Step 2 because you know there is substantial search demand for those keywords.

Once you have your topic, target keywords and specific ideas you are ready for Step 4.

Step 4: Create your content and be sure to include the keywords you identified in Step 2, while also being conscious of what you’ve learned from browsing Twitter in Step 3. Popular content and articles are highlighted on Digg.com, so you may spend some time there browsing popular content that relates to your topics to learn how to structure your article’s title and body copy.

Your article is now written and you’re ready to focus on distribution.

Step 5: Determine a concrete “distribution” goal for each piece of content you’ve created, whether it’s an article, a how-to guide, etc.

Here’s an example:

Now it’s time to get to work. You are ready to distribute your content in accordance with your plan and enjoy the benefits of creating great content and leveraging it to increase traffic, search engine rankings, sales and brand awareness.