I recently wrote a post for the YOUmoz section of SEOmoz which detailed some findings from a quick survey I did.

The survey detailed what companies are spending on press release distribution services and 20 SEO’s from various UK agencies answered the survey. You can read the full post here – Are You Wasting Budget With Online Press Release Distribution?

The spend results were as follows:

As you can see, companies are spending a huge amount with online press distribution services, but the worrying trend was that this was their main link building strategy!!

I went on to test a press release service to see what kind of link value it might hold:

As you can see the results from a link building point of view were poor, out of 299, less than 15 were indexed in Google. As an isolated link building strategy this is seriously flawed.

Press releases can be useful as part of a wider strategy and if you use press releases or are planning to use them you should go read the post on SEOmoz, you can give it a thumbs up whilst you’re there

Link building is never easy and is probably the most frustrating task an SEO has to undertake. There are many different tools and techniques designed to help you be a more effective link builder, however if you use them without a plan or in isolation of each other you’ll soon find that it just doesn’t work.

Whenever you start a link building campaign you have to seriously consider the signals you are presenting to Google, including velocity, anchor text, sources and content. What kind of link patterns would you associate with a natural profile? How would these links be developed and where would they come from?

It doesn’t take a genius, just some logical thought and application. Think about it, when an online source suddenly gains a lot of links, how does this normally happen? You can bet Google are thinking about what these signals might be and how they can develop their algorithm to benefit websites that display such signals.

I am not endorsing the ‘build it and they will come’ mentality, I am simply encouraging some thought around the ‘natural’ offsite signals that might occur when something does go viral and/or acquire a lot of strong quality links in a reasonable amount of time.

This post is slightly linked to one I wrote on YOUmoz (not yet published) which considers the amount of budget wasted on isolated link building techniques.

The Viral Content Myth

At Branded3 we spend a lot of time trying to understand what offsite signals give us the biggest impact, it’s not always easy, but one thing I constantly have an issue with is ‘viral’ content. What is it? Why does certain content just work?

With not far off a decade in the SEO industry I have come to some conclusions regarding viral content, and that is:

The success of viral or link worthy content is more dependent on the publisher, than the true quality or appeal of the content

I believe many work under the false assumption that if they create something really awesome everyone will come along and link to it. The truth is unless you get the right sources to talk about it, it is never going to get the links it deserves.

It’s all about trust, think about it…. If you see a tweet/stumble/Facebook share linking to what seems like an interesting title, are you more likely to share it if the source is a trusted one? My guess is that you would.

I see it all the time on this blog and others that I read, some of my poorest content does better than much better articles simply because the right person has got hold of it and shared it with their community. There is some great content on SEOmoz, however the author of the article will often be the determining factor of how well liked or linked to it is. The more popular the author is the more popular the content, regardless of the actual quality.

The bottom line is trust matters, and if you don’t have it then you need to find someone who does and reach out to them. It’s time consuming, disheartening and difficult to master, but it is an absolute necessity.

Knowing this will change the way you link build, it will change the way you execute your viral efforts.

So how do we apply this? I want to run through a typical link building process we use to develop what we believe are the best possible offsite signals.

Creating the Right Signals

Let’s first take a look at a process chart I put together, then I’ll take you through each step and the reasoning behind them.

This process is set up to create the signals Google pick up on if you were to create a viral piece of content on your site, and/or that same content was referenced by an authoritative source somewhere else on the web.

Social/Content Idea

We have already established one of the determining factors of well linked to content is the source or publisher, however the content that you create still needs to be of interest to your audience whether it’s an interesting statistic, infographic or contention opinion.

You need to decide not only what type of content will be successful through social channels, but what type of content is going to attract links. Sure social sharing is fast becoming an important signal but if you want the maximum impact on your rankings it has to appeal to the linkerati not just those who share on Twitter and Facebook.

That’s why infographics are so popular because they are republished all over the web, with a link Bingo

Sourcing the Publisher

I must stress at this point, if you are fortunate enough to be the authority, the voice that everyone listens to and links to, then you don’t have to worry about this step, whatever content you decide to go with can go on your own domain.

However, the majority of us aren’t fortunate enough to be the authority, or we have a business that is never going to be conceived as commercially unbiased. So for the majority we have to highlight the authority sources in our industry and reach out to them. If your industry is particularly niche, then look to local and national newspapers and reach out to journalists that write in relevant columns.

If you’re persistent there is always a way to find these authority sources, maybe you won’t be in a strong enough position to reach for the top sources, so start with some mid-level players and work your way up. If you have an adequately sized budget money always talks.

Getting the Content Live

The next few steps can be rolled up into one, and let’s face it, there’s not much to discuss around getting your content live, however there are a few tips I’d like you to consider:

1 – Agree on the content beforehand with the publisher, this will save you a lot of time rewriting and amending

2 – Use a quote from your company somewhere in the article if possible, others will no doubt write and refer back to the publisher, you want a reason for them to link back to you too

Once the content has gone live you need to seamlessly move into the next few phases.

Leverage Relationships

Any SEO or Link Builder should be continually developing relationships within the blogsphere and reaching out to bloggers of all sizes within the industry they are working in. When your content goes live on the ‘authority’ source you can then leverage these relationships to develop guaranteed discussion and links.

Either re write the story, or ask the blogger to write and comment on the source from their own perspective, obviously attributing the links in a way most beneficial to your cause.

It’s important that these posts go live within days of the main resource going live, freshness is key to getting the maximum benefit.

If you’re struggling for bloggers to help you try BLU.

Syndication

Now I know there are mixed feelings about this in the SEO community, however I personally believe creating ‘noise’ links through press releases and syndication can be beneficial as part of the complete strategy.

Whenever you get a link on a ‘top’ resource, that article will go on to be scraped, hundreds if not thousands of times. It will also be re-reported all over the web on websites differing in terms of quality.

Google knows this, don’t you think they will consider it when weighing up offsite signals? I do, in fact I have seen much better results from using this as part of the strategy.

How do I use it? Re write articles around the subject matter, link back to the main resource as well as the target page on your website and spread the content around the web using press/article distribution. Use differing anchor text in each article, you’re not trying to Google bomb your site, just helping to recreate what happens when something naturally gets spread around the web.

Creating Social Signals

We all know that the social graph is growing in strength in terms of its impact on rankings, nowhere near as strong as the link graph but we know it’s a factor none the less.

Just like with bloggers you need to be continually reaching out to people via social media, constantly expanding your circle of influence. Then when your grand link building plan goes live you can send it their way and hopefully rely on some very influential shares.

Due to the viral nature of some of this strategy it is important to monitor your Google alerts, and contact any sites that have failed to give you a link. I am of the opinion that once content has been crawled new links put in it don’t count half as much, however I still think it is worth the effort to drop a short email to all those who fail to add a link, especially if they are a potential source of traffic.

There are three key points I’d like people to get from this post:

1) Creating link worthy content is as much about the publisher as it is the quality of content, trust is everything

2) Don’t use link building techniques in isolation, one strategy alone is never going to give you the results you want

3) Try and make all this happen in the space of a week, it has to resemble links and content that have a viral nature

Oh and when my YOUmoz post finally does go live, please head over there and give it a thumbs up There are some pretty interesting stats in there.

As always I’d love to hear your thoughts and any strategies that you find work.

The term ‘link spikes’ has been around a long time, usually to describe unnatural link patterns that Google uses to put the smack down on overly aggressive link builders.

Using the term in this way is correct and yes, creating crazy link spikes in your link profile will put you in trouble.

What people don’t realise is that it isn’t just positive link spikes that can cause issues but also negative ones. Spikes from lost links can be as damaging as spikes from link growth.

Of course losing links can mean lost rankings, however in my experience lost links can also trip filters and mean a specific page on your site will just never rank, no matter what you do.

Negative Link Spike Case Study

I had the unfortunate opportunity of experiencing a filter on an affiliate site of mine. After renting a few links for 6 months I decided to pull them down, knowing I had plenty in reserve to keep my rankings.

These links were site wide and all had the same anchor text, when they were removed I lost 52,000 links from 3 domains. Technically this should have been a good thing as the links were completely unnatural and obviously paid.

Two days after the removal of these links my site dropped rankings, not just for the target keyword but for any other search terms containg the target term. Elsewhere organic traffic was growing, and growing well, but this keyword and variations weren’t even in the top 100, you can clearly see the effect on traffic below for the page where the links were pointing.

The first thing I did was try and replace the lost links, I didn’t think this would work but wanted to see what happened, the answer? Rankings dropped even further. Now I had created 2 unnatural link spikes in a row and new my rankings would never recover.

Sometimes when you begin working on a new site you may come across ugly site wide links that you think need cleaning up, however do this with extreme caution, negative link spikes are as dangerous as positive ones.

First of all let me confess the term ‘fresh rank’ has been stolen from fellow SEO blogger Justin Briggs, I am going to refer to one of his excellent posts throughout the rest of this one.

You will no doubt know about Google’s new QDF upgrade, an algorithm tweak designed to get you to ‘fresh’ content quicker, rather than bringing up old static results.

You can see an example of it here;

They’re not site links but links to fresh content on the BBC for the search term ‘football’.

Google has stated that this affects around 35% of search queries, don’t get that mixed up with searches. Now that is all well and good but from my point of view I want to know a few key points;

1) How does Google decide what is fresh?

2) Is the link graph involved when deciding ‘freshness’?

3) How do links from these ‘fresh’ pages influence rankings for the taget website?

I wrote a really short post a few months ago based on fresh links vs text links vs links placed in old content. The results clarified that links in fresh content had a more significant impact on rankings.

However, I feel the need to delve more into this, as I think this strategy is one of the most important link building tasks you can undertake and will help you cement long term core rankings.

How Does Google Determine Freshness?

Justin wrote a great post on this on his blog and if you really want to delve into this you should definitely go take a read, I just want to touch on some of his points and then try to understand how we can use it for link building purposes.

Document Discovery

I think it is safe to assume that the discovery of a document through Googles crawl for the first time is enough to indicate freshness. There is a little bit of debate around this, but nothing that affects the take aways too much, does Google count it as fresh when it is first crawled, first linked to, first mentioned in a social capacity, first indexed…? No one really knows and the truth is it is probably a mixture of all those factors.

Proportion of Change

Is a document fresh if it hasn’t been discovered before, or is it if a document has significantly changed since the last crawl? Do Google give the content a score on a sliding scale?

This is important to know, if the freshness of a document determines the power of a link from that document then we need to know what this scale is, Google is never going to give anything away, I doubt a new FreshRank toolbar is going to emerge, however we can test this through our link building efforts.

Fresh Rank

This brings us nicely onto ‘fresh rank’ a term I am fully attributing to Justin. In the paper Systems and Methods for Determining Document Freshness, it describes a method of passing a freshness score between pages.

So just like PageRank is passed between pages so is FreshRank, so whether or not your landing page is ‘fresh’ will depend not only on the changing content on the page but also by the freshness of pages linking in, hence we have some kind of freshness score.

Is Freshness More Influential Than PageRank

I use the term PageRank very loosely and only to describe the authority of a domain or page based on the quality and quantity of links it has pointing to it.

We all know how PageRank travels around the web and through our sites, its long been the currency of the web, the more links a site or pages a site has pointing to it, the more value a link from it will pass.

Now before I go into this any further, let me first declare this has not been tested or researched in any way, my opinion is based on working with an SEO department that manually builds over 5,000 unique links every month.

The PageRank Model

Value is passed from page to page based on popularity.

FreshRank Model

I am a firm believer that the above model is already in place and has been for sometime and that Google use a combination of FreshRank and PageRank to determine the ranking of a given page.

No one knows the exact calculation but it could be that a link from a fresher PR1 page is worth as much as a static PR6, maybe that is overselling it a bit but certainly getting multiple fresh links every month can be just as effective as acquiring 1 high PR link a month. I guess the ideal is to combine the two.

I’ve worked with many sites over the years and the best way to impact rankings is by creating a fresh link profile. The ultimate combination would be creating a fresh link from a high PageRank (authority) domain, combining high PageRank with a FreshRank strategy, is a sure way of dominating your industry SERP.

Diminishing Value

The one problem with a ‘fresh’ link building strategy is that it is likely to diminish in value over time, therefore efforts have to be ongoing.

PageRank flowing through a link is going to be more consistent than Fresh Rank flow, a document rarely consistently acquires a large quantity of links naturally, however once a document has a certain amount of PageRank it generally keeps it, that is of course as long as the links remain live and and the PageRank isn’t pushed through multiple 301′s.

As you can see from the above model links are carrying PageRank and FreshRank, however what about 6 months later;

Overtime the freshness of the linking documents will diminish, no doubt everytime Google crawls them it will give them a new score. If only we could build lots of links that are from fresh, high domain authority pages that are going to be continually linked to for the rest of their existance

Overall Thoughts

I have seriously thought about researching this in more depth, but from the results we see on a daily basis it is pretty much a given. SEO strategies that involve the consistent development of links from fresh pages will almost always achieve higher rankings than those that don’t.

Only Google will know exactly how this works and one day they may be willing to shed a little more light on it but that won’t stop me and more SEO’s implementing it.

Would be great to hear some debate on this or examples of tests/research.

OK, I’m going to cover some basics here but time and time again I get asked about monitoring indexation levels and what factors affect them.

There are quite a few misconceptions in this area and a lot of people rely on the wrong set of data, they also rely on old techniques to improve this, so let’s have a go at discussing some of the main areas.

HTML & XML Sitemaps

What does a sitemap really do? My opinion? Absolutely nothing in terms of getting a site indexed. It’s an auditing tool to monitor and test the architecture of your website, it doesn’t matter how many sitemaps you have, if the structure of your site is poor you’re going to have low indexation levels.

This is especially true of XML sitemaps; however what about HTML site maps?

Again in my opinion HTML site maps are over rated and used to cover up poor navigation, or used in the hope that they will create a magical ‘thumbs up’ signal to Google. The truth is most HTML site maps are not user friendly and consist of a pile of links, spread out over many pages, especially if you have a large site. With Panda hitting websites hard the last thing I would want on my site is a load of pages filled with html links tipping me over the low quality threshold.

The only time HTML site maps are effective in my opinion is if they are genuinely helping users navigate their way through a site and should include descriptive text as well as links to the various areas of the site, however if you own a website with 100,000 product pages the last thing you want to do is create a site linking to them all. The way your site is structured should help users and Google find all those products easily and effectively.

So to round up, yes use an xml sitemap to audit your site; don’t create a HTML site map unless it is user friendly and in place to help those users find their way to important parts of your site.

Try using multiple XML sitemaps to monitor the performance of different areas of your site.

Performing a Site Search

We’ve all done it and still probably do it, however this is a really inaccurate way of monitoring how many pages are actually indexed on your website. You can do one search and a search a minute later that fetches a different result.

However, if you know there are roughly 500,000 pages on your site, then doing a quick search can give you a very broad understanding of how well you are being indexed.

So go easy using the site: operator

Using Analytics

This is the best way of understanding not only how well your website is indexed but also the quality of those pages, it’s been spoken of many times before but let’s go over it again.

Login to google analytics, go into traffic sources and select google / organic, then select a secondary dimension of ‘landing page’, this will show you how many pages Google sent traffic to over a certain period of time, monitoring this figure every month gives you a really good indication of the indexation levels of your website, I would use and monitor this figure over anything else.

So there we have a few ways of monitoring but how do we get more of our site indexed?

Flat Architecture

Sorry to go back to basics but want to cover it for a sense of completeness.

First thing, don’t get confused with getting your site crawled and getting it indexed; these are two completely separate things. Once Google finds out your site exists I have no doubt it will crawl your whole site at some point, however in my experience getting good amounts of your site indexed comes down to one factor and that is trust.

Having a flat architecture is all about creating the shortest route possible to the pages on your site, how many clicks are your major pages away from the top level?

(image from SEOmoz)

It’s simple really, the closer a page is to the top level the more trusted it is going to be and therefore has more chance of being indexed.

It all comes down to links

It’s easy to get a page ranked by building lots of anchor text rich links to a page, however if you have done this before you will also have realised it has very little impact on the overall trust of a website.

I speak with clients about this a lot, we point out an overall increase in traffic and indexation levels and the client will say ‘but you we’re trying to rank us for X not the other keywords that drove traffic, this was just natural growth that would have occurred anyway’.

Trusted, quality links will affect the overall organic traffic to a website and are absolutely essential for seeing a continual growth in organic traffic.

Yes by all means build optimised links to your site and go after rankings but you have to incorporate a strategy for getting links from the best sites in your industry, the most trusted sites, without them your website will never perform to its full potential.

The above are the main factors but site speed and quality of content since Panda are having more and more of an effect on the indexation of a website. Check the speed and make any necessary changes to rectify speed issues, also check for duplicate or pages with low quality content.

Remember Panda is a ‘threshold’ based algorithm, removing as many low quality pages from your site as possible will could be all it takes to sort out Panda issues.

As ever would love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments.

Technically SEO could never be classed as natural, you’re undertaking activities to game the engines, whether you’re a spammer or a link bait specialist we’re all trying to achieve the same things, higher rankings and more traffic.

That said whatever activity you choose to undertake, you absolutely have to make it look natural, I don’t know why so many people struggle with this concept but with the recent changes and updates it’s more important than ever to come across as ‘genuine’.

So we’ve established SEO isn’t natural but we have to make it look like it is, how do we do it?

Over the years I have had the opportunity to work on all types of sites, corporate giants to brand new start ups, no matter what type of site you work on the results always last longer when you make things natural.

Lets go a through a few things that make up the natural mix;

Anchor Text

Good old anchor text! Not sure if you’ve all noticed recently but Google has been tightening it’s filters, sites with a lack of brand, variation and image vs text have been getting hit. With this in mind it’s more important than ever to build your anchor text using all of these elements;

Keyword Variation

If you’re trying to rank for a particular term don’t focus all your anchor text on the exact term, you will get filtered out eventually. I find the best way to pick anchor text variations is by using Google Suggest and the Keyword Tool;

Use multiple terms regularly to keep on the right side of Google, it will also help you rank for more long tail variations. In terms of getting the right mix its difficult to say, I personally like to use no more than 30% exact, unless there is a good reason to be more aggressive, a peak season etc…

Brand Anchor Text

I blogged about this last year and quite a few people rubbished it, however I am sure most have seen positive results from building brand into their profile.

Again not sure what the exact mix is but if your anchor text profile is less than 30% brand orientated then I’d say it’s something you need to look at.

It’s not a case of doing this alone and you get high rankings, however if you are stuck in position 5 – 10 and just can’t break into that top 3 pack, then maybe this is something you need to look at.

Location of Links

I am seeing more and more link profile issues relating to the location of  links. If your site is based in the UK, you only ever do business in the UK and all your links are from the US then do you really think that is going to go unnoticed forever?

Blekko is pretty good for understanding the location split of your links.

Site Wide vs In Content

Again another obvious one, site wide links have been associated with link buying for a long time and towards the end of last year they were hit pretty hard. My advice would be to only use them when relevant and try and keep it brand based. In content links are so much more natural, think about it, when do people link? A brand new site would obviously create lots of new links, a new piece of content, however an established site would rarely keep updating exteranl links on a page, if all you do is acquire links on static pages your strategy is seriously flawed, stick with getting fresh links on new pages.

The idea of a ‘freshness’ boost has been talked about for years but it works, I would take a fresh page on a decent domain over a PR9 link any day.

Authority Spread of Incoming Links

Again I have written about this in the past and as far as I can tell it still plays a major factor in establishing how natural the link profile of a website is;

You can use open site explorer to get the data and here’s a guide to pulling it into excel.

If all your links come from domains with an authority less than 20, the chances are you’re doing low quality publishing on article directories only and other low quality blogs. If all your links are from domains above 50 you’re probably spending a fortune on high PR links on authority sites. Even if all your links are in the middle somewhere you’re probably buying from a link broker.

What you should be trying to achieve is a very even spread of domain authority with links from every source possible, this to me would more likely be a natural profile.

Types of Links

This depends on the type of site you run, however I find it best to cover all bases. However be smart about it, if you run a 3 page site selling training services, you’re hardly going to be linked to by lots of fresh articles on blogs, however lots of business directories might be conceivable. If you run a blog then of course you should acquire more fresh links and social mentions.

However no matter what site you’re running I would always recommend a good mix, directories, press hubs, blogs, social sites and forums. Mix it up as much as possible.

Justified Links

If you have a site that never updates then your link velocity is going to be low, maybe a few partners and industry relevant websites every month but anything more than that is just going to look too unnatural. If you’re constantly increasing the content and pages on your site then you’re naturally going to warrant a higher link velocity.

Do things on page to justify the amount of links coming back to your site.

Natural Link Patterns

I think one of the worst link strategies you can adopt is ‘quality and relevance only’, why?

Think about it, if all the links your site ever acquires are those on high authority static pages, relevant to your industry and have to have a certain amount of links to them, does this really look natural? Would a link profile growing like this ever look natural?

Let me share a good example for you;

I got a link a couple of weeks ago from a post on SEOmoz blog, great link, super relevant and even had a good anchor text Happy days? Well ye, however a link on SEOmoz was not all I got, in 48 hours the my post that the link was pointing at got 210 track backs, 210!!! These were from all kinds of sources, scraper sites, news hubs, blogs re writing and publishing.

I think Google has to take this kind of link activity into account, one quality link and hundreds of crap ones within 24 hours? Do I get penalised? Is this unnatural? No and no. So why aren’t SEO’s taking this into account when running link building campaigns? Yes get quality links but don’t just leave it there.

I’m sure there are many other linking factors to consider when trying to establish a natural link profile, however these, for me at least, seem to be the most prominent. Please feel free to discuss anymore in the comments.

I have decided to write this post in direct response to the recent White Board Friday over at SEOmoz, I agree with some of the advice given but I think it was put across in the wrong way.

The post basically portrayed article spinning & mass article distribution as a ‘scummy’ strategy and condemned all who use it as cheap marketers or naive newbies; I have and do occasionally use article marketing and consider myself neither, so obviously I have something to say on the matter.

If you want you can check out some of my comments on the post

OK, let me just make something clear before I go into the defence of such techniques, links from article directories alone will not get you rankings, the sites your content will be placed on is solely set up for the purpose of content creation and building backlinks, they are not quality sites or resources, but is that the point?

Any savvy SEO knows the above but as SEO’s what are we commissioned with? In my experience and opinion whether for ourselves or clients we’re looking to increase online visibility through higher rankings and long tail content production, this in turn leads to higher revenues. If we can do this in a way that is not harmful to our sites then is it a problem that we use article marketing?

OK, let’s begin the defence.

Ease of Use

One of the criticisms Rand makes in his video is that ‘this kind of article marketing is a waste of time’ and that we can all use it more effectively.

In my opinion article marketing is a quick and easy bolt on, not an SEO strategy but a quick and easy way to distribute unique content.

Maybe you have just sent out a press release, spin it a few times and then distribute it to a few article directories, it’ll take no more than an hour and can have a significant impact on your overall campaign.

Is it Really Any Different?

Whether you fire out some articles or search for a blog to publish on, you’re doing it to get links. Sure the quality of that one link on a decent site will probably outweigh the article submissions but then why not do both?

Let’s look at it this way:

You push out a press release via a local wire, what happens? It goes out to a load of low quality hubs, all identical and most with the same template, is this any different?

You set up an opportunity to write for one of the best blogs in your niche, you write it, it gets published then scrapers come along and your content with links is on hundreds if not thousands of crap sites. By the way these crap scraper links can sometimes help! Is it really that different?

It doesn’t matter how you go about distributing content, the chances are it is going to end up on crap sites, with links pointing back to your site.

Do follow blog commenting, directory submissions etc… They are all carried out with one purpose in mind, to get more links.

Just go For Quality!

I have written about this so many times but for the sake of completeness let’s try it again.

Firstly, creating a great viral piece is not easy and whether it works or not largely comes down to luck. Not even the best in the industry can muster the perfect viral campaign every time and even when they do they will struggle getting optimised links back to their sites and will still lose out to the link buyers.

You could spend days putting a viral piece together and it could flop! Is that a waste of time? Regardless of quality?

If you’re a savvy SEO you will know that in order to stay ahead of the competition and at the top of Google you need to have a diverse strategy for acquiring links, yes spend 95% of your energy looking for quality opportunities but don’t underestimate or ignore other opportunities to get your content and links out there, to do so is crazy. If Google decides to devalue the links one day you have still got all the quality work you have done to fall back on. Why not use it?

I am pretty confident that if you had two competitors;

Competitor A – Goes after quality only and ignores the mass distribution channels

Competitor B – Does everything A is doing but adds article marketing, spinning and press releases to the mix

Who do you think will win?

B is adding all the quality of A, but boosts it with the additional, low cost distribution methods. It’s a no brainer in my opinion.

Why I think Rand’s Advice is Dangerous for Newbies

Let me start this by saying I have a massive amount of respect for Rand, what he has done at SEOmoz and the quality advice he continues to give, however I think he has got this one slightly wrong.

People that read SEOmoz include the super savvy all the way down to the SEO newbie. These new SEO’s, probably trying to build their own SEO web presence, will take everything that is said literally and will probably go out now and avoid article marketing like the plague! That’s a problem. Why?

I get the opportunity to speak with a lot of people new to SEO, don’t have a budget and are trying to promote their niche website. They hang on every word that is said online, a lot have lost confidence because they had been advised to do something, been going hard at it for 6 months and it isn’t working.

Just yesterday I was speaking with a newb who was trying to do his own SEO for his local catering company, he had read all the advice about sourcing quality resources and ignoring anything slightly spammy or cheap. The problem is 12 months had passed and he hadn’t got anywhere! He had lost all confidence in SEO claiming it was all luck!

What was basically happening was he was being killed by his more savvy competitors who were doing everything he was doing but adding a little extra to the mix.

If you’re a newb starting up and you take the advice in the video literally then you will get stomped on by more savvy competitors, you’ll lose confidence in SEO which will probably lead you to make even bigger, more damaging mistakes. Unfortunately I see it all the time.

Sure if all you do is article marketing it still won’t work, you need a combined strategy.

My Advice?

Yes quality is important and everyone doing SEO should create a strategy that allows them to acquire solid links from genuine sites, however use these cheap easy methods to give your quality strategy a boost.

e.g.

If you’re putting a quality a piece together for a top blog, do 5 – 10 re spins of it, send it out via a few directories, and maybe place it on some lower quality blogs. If the piece deserves it fire out a press release as well. The impact will be so much greater.

If you’re pushing out a press release about a new product range make sure you have 10 – 20 copies ready to go out to bloggers and push it out via article directories also.

Basically make use of every content distribution channel you have available, why not?

Penalties?

In 8 years of SEO I have never seen a penalty dished out for article marketing, press releases or any other form of mass content distribution, sure they might be devalued but if you’re using them as a bolt on to your killer strategies where is the risk??

Of course this is my opinion and I am sure some will fiercely oppose this position, please let me know your thoughts in the comments or if you have ever seen any penalties handed out.

After watching a recent video on Shoemoney and reading a rather excellent article on SEOmoz by Justin, I felt inspired to talk about a subject that everyone seems to dance around… Link Wheels, do they work? Don’t they? How can Google filter them.

Shoemoney interviewed one of the guys from Link Wheelers making some pretty bold claims about how effective link wheels are and Justin on SEOmoz gave an excellent break down of how the engines may filter out low quality links based on certain signals. Do links wheels get caught in these filters? Are they a valid link building model? Well, here’s what I think.

There is a little bit of stigma attached to link wheels, widely associated with spam and thin affiliate sites but the fact is, if done properly, link wheels or making use of your web properties can work really well.

If you are investing in link building then why not consider using that budget/resource to create your own ‘useful’ web properties and use these to link intelligently back to you main website? It makes perfect sense! Some smart affiliates have been doing this years.

Do you already have external sites? Are you using them to link intelligently back to your ‘money’ site?

At this point I think it would be a good idea to go over what link wheels are, how to use them and how not to use them.

What are link wheels?

Essentially they are web properties that interlink and point back to your main website or ‘money’ site, the technique has been around for years in the SEO industry but it still seems a lot of people aren’t familiar with them.

They are mainly used to create the illusion that your main site is the authority in it’s niche, building multiple web properties with relevant content and optimised links creates an external hub of info, if this hub of rich content cites your main website as the authority then of course Google is going to follow those optimised links and reward your main site.

Yes, this tactic can be used in a spammy way to manipulate rankings but if done with quality in mind the links you create will stand the test of time.

What not to do

Let’s be clear about one thing, this tactic works, however if you want to sleep easy knowing all your hard work is going to last, then it’s best to do it right. A lot of webmasters looking for the quick win will do the following:

• Create 10 – 15 Web 2.0 properties usually using free publishing websites like blogger, wordpress and squidoo
• Copy and paste content from an article directory or Google news
• Add the exact same anchor text on each site back to their money site
• Link all the properties together with one link 1 to 2, 2 to 3 etc……
• Never add content or build links into these new properties again

If you’re going to build an external hub of websites this is not the way to do it, don’t get me wrong, it will probably work but for how long? In my experience you’ll be lucky to get more than a month out of these links before they are devalued by one of Google’s many filters.

What to do…

Think about the traffic within your niche, what answers are they looking for that your site doesn’t provide for? For example, you may be running a beauty salon but a lot of the traffic within your niche is looking for teeth whitening or semi permanent makeup, it might not be appropriate to have content about this on your site but it doesn’t mean you can’t create one to cater for it.

What Kind of site should I register?

If I am honest, building a micro site on Blogger or on your own domain, it makes no difference, however you own your domain, you’ll always have control of it, plus you’ll have more flexibility in terms of design.

It has to be genuine

Make the content unique, add value and link out to some great resources on the web, invest some time in creating a decent design, have an about page and write at least 4 pages of content to get you started.

Yes! This is a lot of hard work, but the end result will be a link to your main site from a high relevancy, high quality resource that you own, run and control.

I have created 10 Micro sites, how do I link them together?

What ever you do don’t go and paste all the links in the footer to everyone of your web properties all anchor text rich!

Instead think more about quality, write a couple of articles on the topic thinking about how you could interlink with your main site, a micro site and another quality external resource.

Creating external sources this way will ensure the links you create continue to pass value in the long run.

DON’T interlink every micro site together!!

The idea is that Google need to believe these sites are all external properties, if you interlink them altogether it becomes easy to understand they are all controlled by the same person.

Linking between sites should look like something similar to the below:

Second level link building

So you have:

- 10 – 15 relevant micro sites
- 3 – 6 pages of quality, unique content on each site
- smart linking patterns to all micro sites and to the main site

Now all these sites should all ready have some link juice from each other but you’re going to need to boost it and I find the best way to do this is through article marketing.

Write an article for each site and point it back to each of your web properties, as well as linking it to a random quality resource on the topic (remember it has to be natural).

This will give each site the boost it needs to flow maximum link juice all the way back to your main website.

Many companies out there invest in link building and so they should, it works, however in my mind some investment should go into developing external hubs that focus on providing genuine content and assisting the main site in becoming an authority in it’s given niche.

Will it dodge the filters?

Early on in the post I made reference to a post by Justin Briggs, he details some filters your links can get picked up with, let’s quickly explore them and see if we’re vulnerable.

Truncated PageRank

This filter is based on a site having a lot of links from sources that aren’t well linked to, throw up spam sites, low quality content sites would all fall under this and if all your links are coming from sites that have few incoming links then you could get caught in the filter.

Link wheels like the ones described above will be secondary links, they will be linked together and then boosted with article directories, this means the juice passing to the main site are less likely to be impacted.

We’re safe!

Owned Sites

If you have a network of sites, all registered by you and on the same IP, this is going to let Google know these are ‘accessible’ properties and the link value could be filtered out.

The micro sites we build should be on different IP’s and where possible registered under different names.

Pretty Safe again.

Relative Mass of Spam Links

Again, the more spammy sources you have linking to you the more likely you’re going to trip a filter.

All our microsites will be full of genuine content, provide real references and be of genuine use to a reader.

They aren’t going to hurt our main site.

Link Growth / Speeds to Nodes

Again a simple concept that has been around a while, how quickly is your link profile growing, natural sites will develop more rapidly as the site gains more authority, spam sites gain a lot of links quickly but die off over time.

This is one where the link wheels could get caught out, build your sites gradually, don’t rush through them and risk building too many links too quickly.

Still safe.

Trust Rank

The closer you are to deemed spam sites the more likely you are to be spam???

In my opinion I’m not sure how important trust rank is, maybe it is a signal but one that only works with other ‘spam’ signals, otherwise it makes it far too easy to effect competitors just by spamming them.

Plus, you can unfortunately rank high on spam links alone. Either way our sites are genuine.

Nothing to worry about!

Anchor Text

If you go using the same anchor text on every property you will get caught, use your brain mix up the anchor text and stay safe.

Link Growth Threshold

Justin describes how some links can be devalued if they come through too quickly, it’s not difficult for Google to understand what should be being linked to and what is manipulation. Social signals and search trends can confirm if a site is worthy of links.

Again we’re being slow and steady, win win.

Robust PageRank

Genuine sites don’t rely on one or two powerful links, will you site fall if you remove 1 or 2 strong links? If so you’re potentially susceptible to a filter.

However building your micro sites will provide genuine diversity, bullet dodged.

PageRank Diversity

I published a post on this not so long ago:

- Sites with a link profile consisting of high PageRank sources looks unnatural and possibly paid

- Sites with nothing but low quality sources look spammy

You still need to be link building as well as developing these properties and building them will actually assist in the diversity of your link profile.

Diminishing Returns

This backs up the idea of domain diversity, no longer will site wide links be massively powerful but instead the more links you have from one domain the less powerful the links will be.

This tells us there is a threshold on the amount of link juice we can get from these micro sites, however that doesn’t mean their not worth developing.

The fact is there is nothing Google can do automatically to stop this type of link building, it works and as long as Google relies on links it will continue to work.

Do it intelligently and you will see massive returns!

We’ve known since 2009 that Google fully supports the cross domain rel=canonical and more recently it has transpired that the canonical may be faster and more effective than a 301, the traditional way for SEO’s to point the right link juice at the right places.

Seriously, there are a number of ways this can be used to boost SEO efforts and deliver the right signals to the right pages.

Getting Social Signals To Boring Pages

If you run an ecommerce site selling ‘dog leads’ you are likely going to struggle to get any social attention, however now Twitter and Facebook links are part of the algo, and from what we are seeing a pretty significant factor, you really want to be leveraging this to boost your rankings, so what do you do?

Well, start by making sure you have a blog with all the usual social buttons, write a post, something catchy with lot’s of images, ’5 most expensive dog leads’… maybe.

Push this around your social power accounts, share it on Twitter, Facebook, Stumble etc…… Now this post has plenty of social POW, all helping it rank

But hold on, the page we really want to rank higher is our ‘Premium Leads’ range

So…. We simply use the canonical tag to pass on all that lovely social juice! The User get’s the quirky content but Google credits your premium range.

Now this could be considered a little bit ‘grey hat’ but you could put things in place to minimise any risk, ‘This post was written on the back of research by our Premium Leads department’… I think you know what I am getting at.

Building Links Before Products Hit

My fellow SEO and colleague at Branded3 gave a great presentation on getting the most out of SEO specifically for Ecommerce sites, part of the presentation focussed on building links to blog posts targeting products that you know are coming to the market place but not yet released.

When it comes to new product releases Google seem to have a ‘first past the post’ rule, if you get the best page up and linked to the quickest then you win in the long run.

So you optimise and link to the blog posts months before it is launched and then 301 once the actual product page is live! Geniuous and works well, trust me.

However the user loses that smashing post on the blog, well they do if you 301 but if the canonical works better, hey presto!

Manipulation

Of course this leaves the door wide open to manipulation and there are many who would consider the above, grey if not black hat, however the fact remains it works well and Google allow it, at least for now.

SEO’s have been buying canonical links for ages, however with this recent research you can bet it is going to become more and more common. Are Google going to start punishing sites that buy canonical links

You will have all seen and heard me mention the fact that Google now seems to be choosing which page of your site to rank based on internal links & on page factors, rather than relying solely on external links and the anchor text used.

This all happened at the end of last Summer and seems to be rolling  out for more and more search queries, a classic example of what this has done can be seen when you search for any major phrase;

Most of these internal pages that are now ranking were home pages last year and when you break down the link profile I can almost guarantee you the vast majority of links targeting the keyword in question link back to the homepage.

Why Are Google Doing This

There hasn’t been that much commentary on it, however we can only presume Google are looking to show the most relevant page on a domain, regardless of where links point to externally. The reasons for this aren’t clear but it obviously has something to do with search quality, why send a visitor to a home page when there is a perfectly optimised internal page?

Now this is all well and good but where do you build links to then? Logic says you build links to the most relevant page, however what you think is the most relevant page and what Google does could be 2 entirely separate things.

Sure you may have an internal page optimised for coat hangers but your homepage has your special offers on along with other related products.

How Are Google Doing This

After a few different tests it became clear that Google are using internal anchor text to decide which pages relate to which keywords, just like external links an exact match anchor text will give more weight than some other random variation.

I trialled this on SEO wizz just over a month ago, linking to an internal page with ‘search engine optimisation’, I matched the URL string exactly;

/search-engine-optimisation

However, just doing this wasn’t enough to override the authority of the homepage and because of this the homepage still ranked and came up first when perfroming a site: search + keyword.

Then I created a site wide internal anchor text ‘search engine optimisation’ pointing to the page, within 24 hrs this was now the most relevant page and was ranking in exactly the same position as the homepage, it had literally been switched.

Just to cover all my bases I removed the keyword from the URL and the Title tag of the internal page, yet it still ranked while ever I had the internal anchor text in place.

How To Handle It

If your homepage has been replaced by an internal page you may not need to do anything, you may even see conversion rates go up.

However, if you really want your homepage to be the master page for your target keyword you have 2 options;

1 – Change your internal anchor text to take the focus off the internal page

2 – If you can 301 redirect that page back to the home page

If you need to keep the internal anchor text the way it is then you could try adding a site wide link to the home page using the anchor text, however this can be a little tricky, best way to do it is my adding the text to the alt attribute of your logo or brand image.

Failing this you will just have to optimise the internal page both for search engines and conversions.

But What About Link Building?

The truth is it doesn’t really matter, Google seems to be looking at domains collectively, both internal and external anchor text is being used to decide where a domain should rank not where a page should.

Yes, it’s still good practice to link build to the most relevant page, however it may also be a good to include some anchor text to the home page and any other relevant pages for that keyword.

Use site: search modifier to discover the most relevant pages of your site for the target keyword, target at least 80% of links at the most relevant and spread the others amongst the next 3 or 4.

The main thing to remember now is that you are making your domain synonomous with a keyword not just a page.