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
My last two Link Week columns have touched on communication between link builder and client. In Link Development Realities Versus What We Tell Our Clients I discussed how, as strategists and link builders, part of what we do involves a degree of selection of tactic, and what to do when confronted with clients who are […]
Some client scenarios can be uncomfortable. Among them is when the client has worked especially hard to create a content area that they feel is linkworthy, and thus should attract links, but you, as the person who has to go get those links, aren’t quite as enthusiastic about the potential for success. The Scenario: A […]
This week I’m seeking some feedback for a future column with a working title of “Link Development Realities Versus What We Tell Our Clients” The idea for this column came from a client conference call I participated in this past week. As the call progressed, it became more and more evident that several of the […]
If you are an experienced link builder, you might be tempted to read something other than today’s column, which on first glance may appear a bit to rudimentary for your skills. If you do stick around, and I hope you do, I’ll share with you what I consider to be one of the tragic mistakes […]
As much as I hate to pile on, run it into the ground, or beat a dead horse, when the topic is link bait I can’t resist; thus this week’s Link Week column. The recent fake-news-story-as-successful-link-bait event and the surrounding firestorm has bugged me and had me thinking, which is dangerous when I’m supposed to […]
Sometimes link building is more difficult and painful than a root canal, and sometimes it’s so easy it happens in spite of us. It can be especially frustrating when you are trying to build links for a site that is perfectly deserving of the links you are requesting, yet your link requests are not answered […]
A couple weeks back I wrote a LinkWeek column here titled “Your Site’s Manifest Linking Destiny“. At the end of that column I closed with the following thoughts…
One of the challenges link builders face is pursuing links that will differentiate one site from competing sites in a way that still produces a natural ILP (inbound link profile). Backlink forensics is a method I use to see who already links to who, and part of that process, perhaps the most important part, is […]
There are plenty of business processes where the development of a set or list of “Best Practices” makes really good sense. But what about link building? Is/are there a core set of link building best practices that really work? Fourteen years of link building for 1,000+ clients indicate to me that the answer is…nope.
Imagine for a moment that you need to find some information on the web, and it’s really important. You need to be able to trust what you find, and you need to have confidence that what you find is truly the best-of-class content you could find, or darn close. Let’s say the search term is […]
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.
My last column, When Linking Experts Go Underground, elicited some interesting responses, and a private email with the following awesome request: OK Eric – if you really follow hundreds of SEM news sources every day, you are seeing literally thousands of headlines every week. How do you spot the few that actually relate to and […]
For years I’ve seen a free and flowing stream of information and advice about how to build links, and as the engines have improved detection of the junk, the better link builders continued to thrive while those who sold crappy services to crappy content ran for cover. At least three of the most dependable link […]
In 2007, half your links stopped helping you and in 2008, half your budget has likely been whacked. Now what do you do?
Here’s a pair of tough questions to kick Link Week for 2008 off with a bang. In 2007, many long-practiced link building tactics stopped being effective. Many link building companies and consultants sold the exact tactics/services that are now useless. Why didn’t you see this coming, and if you did, why did you sell those […]
Whenever I begin a link building and content publicity project, I start with research. One of the areas I research is trusted sources. The type of trusted sources I am referring to are those people that have already shown an interest in the topic of the site I’m building links for and have created a […]
Five years ago, in June of 2002, I was helping announce and build links for Home Depot’s Online Kitchen & Bath Design Center. Have a look at the announcement I ran on my URLwire site here. Notice that the URL Home Depot used for the design center was https://www.homedepot.com/designcenter/. I love nice short clean URLs […]
It’s been a while since I’ve looked at Google’s page titled How to submit your content to Google. On first glance, it would be easy to assume this page represents all your options for submission and link seeking. The page includes the sections:
In looking over my past few columns, I worried my commentary had drifted perhaps a bit too much to the negative side of the link building milieu (always wanted to write a sentence with the word milieu in it). So, as a Yin to that Yang, here are several reasons why, after fourteen years, I […]
In the wake of the mass hysteria over Google’s recent PageRank decreases, devaluing of certain links, and the resulting rankings drop many people experienced, I’d like to offer some perspective and advice. First, my rankings at EricWard.com didn’t drop one spot. And remember that my site is 100% devoted to link building, so I have […]
Let’s take a quick trip back to Link Building 101. Have a look at the below email that hit my inbox over the weekend. It may look friendly, unassuming, even polite. I bet you have one just like it. I receive several of these every day, and while they are probably crafted by well meaning […]
Here we go again… The Associated Press (AP) is suing news aggregation site Moreover and parent company VeriSign, claiming copyright infringement for, among other things, linking to the AP news without permission (here’s the complaint in PDF format). In an awesome bit of newsbot irony, you can read all the gory details via Reuters.
As a link builder and content publicist, I rarely see a link building challenge that cannot be overcome. Today there are many unique and legitimate ways to attract and generate links that didn’t exist ten years ago. There are different styles and approaches to link building, all of which can be effective. And there is […]
I had the pleasure of participating on a Link Building Clinic at the Shop.org conference in Las Vegas last week. This conference attracts a different crowd than the SEO/SEM related shows in that practically every attendee at a Shop.org show is running a web site that sells something. Now, link building for a shopping site […]
Let’s play a game to illustrate some not-so-silly linking strategies. Imagine you just launched a new web site devoted to breeding chipmunks. If I gave you a choice of the following three sets of inbound links, and I told you you could have one set and only one set, which set of links would you […]
As hard as we work to attract, build and encourage new links to our content, many of us (like me) make silly mistakes that are often overlooked. In August of 1997 I wrote an article that compared and contrasted several press release distribution services. It was titled E-mail Press Release Service Comparison and the filename […]
Last week’s column Aggressively Seeking Links – How Much Is Too Much? sparked several comments and questions. In the past, I’ve hesitated to revisit previous columns, preferring to let them stand on their own, but this time I’d like to make an exception to clarify some of the assertions I made.
When it comes to link building, how much is too much? How fast is too fast? Neither of these questions would have been asked in 1997, because their was no such thing as too fast or too much. But it isn’t 1997 anymore is it? And since link development now plays a prominent role in […]
A big part of my professional life is spent teaching and training corporate clients how to become self sufficient at in-house link building and content publicity. Those readers here who have heard me speak at conferences may remember how strongly I have stated my position that to be effective over the long term, you must […]
Here in the Link Week column, we mostly discuss intermediate to advanced linking related subjects, but I’m compelled to cover a very basic topic this week. Link requests. The link builders are out in force this summer. The proof is in my inbox. Over the two weeks since my last LinkWeek column, I’ve counted the […]
There’s an interesting thread over at SEOmoz about how some unscrupulous marketers will try to sabotage a competitor’s web site by engaging in social media communications and link seeding/spamming tactics that they hope will spark a rash of bad publicity and maybe even trigger some sort of rankings and/or reputational search penalty against their competitor. […]
I’m an extreme believer in linking analysis and competitive linking intelligence. I have tools that analyze millions of links every week. I have scripts that compare, contrast, group, separate, divide and categorize links to a degree that would make your eyes cross. As I type this one of my competitive link audit scripts is in […]
It’s summer. Hot, humid, sticky and itchy. The perfect time to rant. Especially if you are a link seeking content publicist glued to a monitor while all your clients have gone on vacation. So here are five things I hate about linking, and I have more if you want them:
If you had the chance to hire a full-time employee to engage in content publicity and link building, what type of person would you look for? What sorts of skills would you want? What personal traits would you value? As companies realize that content publicity and link building must be a core part of online […]
The term “Social Media” is used ad nauseum to describe an ever growing collection of tools and services by which people share content, links, opinions, experience and perspectives with each other. Keeping up with the latest Social Media services and sites can make you dizzy. Wikipedia now lists 21 different types of social media related […]
Before we go further, the bottom line. Specific to link building and link driven content publicity, the roll-out of Google Universal Search should not cause you to make any drastic changes in how you go about building links for your content. However, it is worth looking at a couple aspects of the Universal Search results […]
The recent Google update, known to some of us as the “Google shuffle”, had a number of people freaked out. Seeing your site’s ranking suddenly change is a reality we all face. Sometimes the changes are legitimate, reflecting a shift in the algorithm, or in the inbound link profile of your site or your competitor’s […]
How do you measure link building effectiveness? The easy answers are by search rank improvement or click traffic. But the easy answers are moving targets and nobody knows where they are headed. The links that are giving you page one rankings today might stop helping you one day. The algorithms of tomorrow will be different […]
I just finished reading “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy, hence the title of today’s column. If you’ve read it then you understand. It’s a bit dramatic, but then again drama, controversy and hyperbole is LinkBaiting 101. Sadly I add. The apocalypse I speak of is related to link building, and what I mean by it […]
Over the past several months I’ve had an avalanche of very specific inquiries, all with a related scenario. People are worried that their previous link building activities have hurt their site’s rankings, are going to hurt their site’s rankings at any moment, or are not helping their site’s rankings. When I probe them for more […]