Eric Ward founded the Web's first services for announcing, linking, and building buzz for Web sites, back in 1994. Ward is best known as the person behind the linking campaigns for Amazon.com Books, Weather.com, The Link Exchange, Rodney Dangerfield (Rodney.com), the AMA, and PBS.org. His services won the 1995 Award for Internet Marketing Excellence, and he was selected as one of the Web's 100 most influential people by Websight magazine. In 2009 Eric was one of 25 people profiled in the book Online Marketing Heroes. Eric has spoken at over 100 industry conferences and now publishes LinkMoses Private, a subscription based link opportunity and strategy service. Eric has written linking strategy and advice columns for SearchEngineLand, MarketingProfs, ClickZ, Search Marketing Standard, SearchEngineGuide, Web Marketing Today, and Ad Age magazine. Learn more about Eric and his content publicity and link building services at http://www.ericward.com
I’ve seen a few hundred articles and columns and blog posts about the GFP update, ranging from small SEO blogs all the way up to the Wall Street Journal. The primary focus of all these articles has been two-fold. First, those who are operating what was deemed as “shallow” content have taken a hit in […]
Ask many search marketers what the holy grail of link building is, and their top answer may likely be: .edu links. Golden, right? Ranking rocket fuel. Not quite. You see, not all .edu links are treated equally, both by those who link to them, and by engines that examine those links. It’s hard to believe […]
With the wide variety of tools, tactics, techniques and strategies in use today by link builders, sometimes the best advice involves the simplest of things. I’m probably the most guilty contributor here at Link Week when it comes to big picture philosophizing, so this week rather than writing another strategy column, I thought I’d bring […]
The words curator and curation have been showing up a lot lately, whether it’s with regards to cataloging the Web, mining social media, seeking links, or identifying trustworthy product reviews. This is when my Web years start to show. I’m thrilled to see the current group of “in-the-know” web marketers talk the curation talk. And […]
Google’s Place Pages in the SERPs have everyone freaked out. If you haven’t read Greg Sterling’s excellent piece New Place Search Shows Google’s Commitment To Local, I highly recommend it. In addition to the potential SEO impact Greg discusses, there are a couple key points specific to link building that are worth making. As with […]
This is my first column since returning from SMX East. Thank you to Debra, Danny, Chris, Karen, Elisabeth and everyone else who made this a fantastic show. I even spent time in the exhibitor hall, which I haven’t been able to bring myself to do since back in the 90’s when a vendor brought in […]
Google instant caused a near freak out within the SEO world, but oddly there has not been a peep about Google instant and link building. Have a look at the below Google search results as of 9/28/2010. Exact Match Search Term Results “google instant and seo” 36,700 “google instant and ppc” 25,800 “google instant kills […]
When studying backlinks to competitor sites, most people do so in order to identify potential link targets for their own site. While this is a very useful thing to do, there are many other strategically useful bits of competitive intelligence that can be deduced by studying links. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say […]
Most readers here are familiar with the concept of search engine “signals”, i.e., things the bots look for and count, and algorithm’s use and score, in order produce the search results page. While all of us agree such signals exist, this doesn’t mean we all agree what those signals are and to what degree any […]
Anyone with an interest in linking, link building and algorithms who hasn’t yet read the latest Google patent might want to have a look. It’s located on the USPTO database at an impossibly long URL, so here’s a shortcut: https://bit.ly/9pbQfr. Note that this patent, while only granted a couple months ago, was filed June 17, […]
For every so-called “rule” about link building, there are exceptions. You might find consensus on a rule or two, like – site wide footers bad, follow links good! – but your greatest enemy as a link builder is ignoring your gut. I think logic might just start in the gut and is then confirmed in […]
In tough times when every marketing dollar matters, client questions about link building ROI tend to come up earlier in the conversation. If you are spending money to hire a link builder, you have every right to ask what the ROI might be for any tactic or service your link builder is suggesting you use. […]
Any of you who have read any of my posts over the years know I’m a contrarian link builder. I don’t like general directories, I’ve never believed in mass article syndication, I don’t buy links, I don’t like reciprocity for the sake of reciprocity, and I despise press releases purely for the sake of link […]
The cookie cutter approach to link building has never really worked. You can’t apply the identical linking strategy for one site to another site. Even so, services that sell that exact thing have flourished. I really can’t believe people are still buying link building packages from cheapest-priced, overseas vendors/workers who can barely type, and don’t […]
Many people think of link building as purely an SEO endeavor. You build links to improve rank. I’ll argue this is the wrong way to think about link building, but not here in today’s column. I’ve accepted that when people use the phrase link building, chances are the word Google is not far from coming […]
This week, I’m stepping away from my usual article format and instead, address several linking related questions and comments I haven’t seen discussed as much across the link building blog/twitter/feed o-sphere. I welcome your feedback, comments, opinions and answers. People will tell you that one of the better ways to spot link targets is to […]
What are your link building plans for 2010? Me? I’ll be making some significant changes to my business model for the first time in fourteen years. I’ll be training more clients to become their own link builders. I’ve earned 100% of my living by providing link building tactics, strategies and services since 1994. While the […]
Last week Debra Mastaler posted the most illuminating DMOZ article I have ever read. In DMOZ: A Solid Directory Or The Great Pumpkin Of Search?, she got through to the right people and asked some hard questions. Many SEO folks consider DMOZ irrelevant. After years of angst and sleepless nights waiting for a link that […]
No website is without linking related flaws. Whether it’s on-site or off, I can’t say that I’ve ever encountered a “perfect” website from a linking perspective. Some link building mistakes are unintentional and inconsequential, others are catastrophic. See When Link Rehabilitation Is A Viable Option. The idiom “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” is […]
The Wikipedia entry for “Elephant in the room” reads that it is an English idiom for an obvious truth that is being ignored or goes unaddressed. It is based on the idea that an elephant in a room would be impossible to overlook; thus, people in the room who pretend the elephant is not there […]
People will tell you it’s no longer possible to obtain links by asking for them via email. Spend even a little time reading the SEO/SEM blogs, forums, comments, etc., and you’ll find a reasonable and well-meaning post, something like this beauty I read over at the UK version of TechCrunch. “The days of asking a […]
I recently read Is Most Of SEO Just A Boondoggle? and the subsequent comments and attacks on the author Jill Whalen, and it’s become my own tipping point. Enough is enough. Every word of that column was right on the money. It’s just rare (and welcomed) for a well known expert to state in a […]
During a recent conference call, I made one of those bold statements that was half for effect, and half in hopes of quieting an “online strategist” that was also on the call. In my deepest voice, I proclaimed: “In the same way the engines can evaluate the links pointing at your site and rank you […]
If there’s one link development tactic that has been used to death, it has to be “see who’s linking to your competition and get them to link to you”. There are tools galore to help you do this, software you buy and install on your desktop, or web based apps. It’s a fairly simple technique […]
You’ve probably heard the term “Federated Search“. It’s the term used to describe the process of simultaneously searching multiple search engines or online databases from a single search box. Federated search is unfortunately an awkward term. It sounds like something from the Civil War. Federated search is closely related to meta-search. If you’ve ever used […]
Big news last week: Twitter Search to dive deeper, rank results. Twitter’s @Santosh Jayaram has indicated Twitter Search, which currently searches only Twitter post text, will begin crawling links and indexing the content of pages posted in tweets. To help with search result ranking, Twitter is creating a “reputation” ranking system that among other things […]
URL shortening services have become quite popular lately, primarily due to the restricted length of “tweets” on Twitter. Danny Sullivan compared several of these services in URL Shorteners: Which Shortening Service Should You Use? and talked about the SEO implications of using these services, especially when it comes to passing along link love. But not […]
I’ve read so many articles lately about Twitter, from mainstream press to the sports world to the SEO world, that all seem to focus on the “phenomena” aspect of it. After the Twittles (Twitter+Skittles) thing happened, it was like a dam bursting. Everyone wanted to know who was doing what with Twitter, how to use […]
After working in a profession for many years you might logically assume you don’t need to spend as much time learning still more about it. Take bowling. If you’ve been bowling for twenty years, do you still need lessons, or are you close to being as good a bowler as you’re ever going to be? […]
Why in the world would someone who earns a living building links write that you need to stop hiring other people to build your links and start doing it yourself? Because that’s what’s in your best interest. If you hope to survive this down economy, and thrive long term once things improve, now is a […]
Over the course of a Web site’s existence, it will earn a certain amount of link equity, which in simpler terms, is the collection of the links that point to a site at any moment in time. It’s fair to say that in some cases, no matter how fantastic a site’s content is, the links […]
At the risk of offending anyone who earns their living by offering any of the below services, myself included, I pose this composite inquiry to all of us. It helps illustrate what I view as the biggest problem with the link building services sector. The problem is that the majority of link building services for […]
Link Rehab? I have to admit I never would have envisioned back in the day that link rehabilitation would become a necessary link building strategy. But here we are. As a quick primer, link rehabilitation is the process of cleaning up, removing, and modifying paid and/or unearned links that point to your site that you […]
My Link Week columns rotate every other week, and over the course of the last few columns several questions and comments have been sent my way. For this week’s column, I’m responding to a selection of those questions and comments.
Everywhere you look right now, there's another headline pointing to another story that in either a direct or subtle way affects link building.
Imagine you have been asked to work on a project where the sole goal is to rank a new site in the top five for the term Christmas Gifts, and your fees would be based on where in the top five that site ranks by December 1st, just 20 days from now. If you don’t […]
How did folks build links before tools were available? Just a few years ago, there was no way to identify hubs, authorities, vortals, or spokes, rims, chutes and ladders. (Click here for the full effect of that sentence via a ten second mp3 audio message.) When I wander around conference expo halls, I see booth […]
What happens when everyone knows everything about linking? What happens when everyone uses the same 15,400 linking tools, and everyone has created the perfect back link profile, and everyone has properly tricked out anchor text, everyone has perfectly sculpted this, awesomely funneled that, cleverly silo'd this, no-followed that, etc., etc., etc? Who wins then?
One challenge we all have is showing our clients evidence that our work is having the effect we said it would. What would make this part of the process easier is if there was one single universal tool that could identify every single instance when a site is mentioned, linked, tagged, tweeted, or feeded. That perfect tool doesn't exist, but a few weeks ago Delicious unveiled a relaunch, and what was once really a pain is now a breeze.
I love big sites. They are like sprawling mansions in a state of renewal and dilapidation at the same time. New kitchen, old bath. Sub-zero inside, rotten wood outside. The longer a site has been around, and the bigger that site is, the more likely it is that site will have already attracted hundreds if […]