Powerful Linkbait: Contests & Incentives

Apr 30, 2009 at 7:00am ET by Michael Gray

Most people in the industry look at contests and incentives as branding and marketing tools. However if you are willing to get creative, you can turn a contest into a powerful link building tool that will, over time, help your organic rankings. When most marketing and advertising teams look at a contest they are looking for mass exposure, so they choose a prize that is going to have wide appeal, like an an iPod or iPhone. However as an SEO you need to look at this as an opportunity to build the anchor text you want, especially the really hard to get commercial anchor text. Want to rank for [...]

Filed in: 100% Organic, Link Building: Linkbait

Getting Links From Known, Quality Linkers

Jul 10, 2008 at 4:10pm ET by Josh Dreller

I always like to see what types of link building things people talk about and/or present. Based on some basic tips provided by Roger Montti in the "Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques" session at SMX Advanced, this post will expand upon those to describe a specific link building plan that nearly any site can use. Here is my expanded version of Roger's tips on how to extract which .EDU sites link to a competitor of yours (or to an important company in your space). These commands work on either Yahoo or Microsoft Live Search, but not Google at this point: linkdomain:domain-to-check.com s [...]

Filed in: Link Building: General, Link Building: Linkbait

Yes, Truthiness Is A Credibility Factor Google Cares About

May 26, 2008 at 9:18am ET by Barry Schwartz

Doing A Fake Story For Linkbait? Disclose -- Or Face The Wrath Of Google from last week is still a hot topic of discussion in the industry. In fact, Google's Matt Cutts posted a more detailed explanation of why a fake story without disclosure is something, in some cases, Google cares about. Matt says, "if a site says that they completely made up a story to get links, Google doesn't have to trust the links to that site as much." But is that about intent of the author? Does the intent have to be about influencing your search results for Google to trust you less or is it something larger? I [...]

Filed in: Google: SEO, Google: Web Search, Link Building: Linkbait, SEO: Spamming

Doing A Fake Story For Linkbait? Disclose — Or Face The Wrath Of Google

May 22, 2008 at 9:07am ET by Barry Schwartz

Link baiting entered a new area last week when Lyndon Antcliff had success with a fake story being picked up by some mainstream media sites as well as social news sites. Controversy erupted over the tactic, and now it likely will go into a second cycle after Google's Matt Cutts has suggested that Google might penalize pages that don't disclose stories are fake. The story was named 13 Year Old Steals Dad's Credit Card to Buy Hookers, but it wasn't true. Nevertheless, several news agencies picked up the story, plus it made it to the front page of Digg and many other social media sites and garn [...]

Filed in: Google: SEO, Google: Web Search, Link Building: Linkbait, SEO: Spamming

How Social Media Becomes Link Fertilizer

Mar 4, 2008 at 11:31am ET by Eric Ward

The title of this article doesn't mean I'm changing my position on social media as link driver. Yes, it's possible, but for the overwhelming majority of web sites, a widespread and costly social linking strategy is a waste of time and money. Go ahead, call me a heretic, but inside you know I'm right. If the site is this one for adult diapers then really, what's the social media end game? Sure, you could write a blog post or article like "Ten Uses For Adult Diapers you Never Thought Of" or "Five Sexiest Senior Citizens Naked," and sure, it might just make it to the Digg homepage, where not [...]

Filed in: Google: SEO, Google: Web Search, Link Building, Link Building: Linkbait, Link Week, SEO: Spamming, Search Engines: StumbleUpon, Social Media Marketing

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