In the past I have sometimes thought twice about writing reviews of products on blogs in case Google thought they were paid reviews. A couple of posts from Matt Cutts have got me thinking about where to draw the line.
Take a look at this post and this post, both are promoting products and link to them with some nice anchor text. If the writer wasn’t Matt and the seller wasn’t Amazon then I would be convinced it was a paid review. Pretty cynical I know but if I had written these on Blogstorm I would probably have felt the need to either nofollow the links or write a disclaimer that they were not paid reviews!
My point is that this review was exactly the same as a paid review, even though it wasn’t paid. So to turn things around it seems that I could write a paid review in the same manner and just not disclose that it was paid.
This would be against the Google Guidelines but how would anybody know? Is the review any less trustworthy if money has changed hands?
My view is that trust should flow through links whether they are paid or not – the trust should be based on the trust of the domain giving the link. If The Times starts selling links you can bet they are good ones and should pass trust to the target site. Note that I say “trust”, not anchor text.
If Google started ignoring anchor text from paid links but still let trusted sites pass their trust to other sites that might be a good solution to the paid links problem.
Way back in March 2006 I launched a website called pyramidlinking.com (now offline) that offered users a new way to build static, one way links for free.
A couple of years down the line I thought it might be interesting to look at what happened and most importantly what went wrong.
Please note that the web was a lot different in early 2006. Low quality links and automated solutions worked much better than they do now. Also Google hadn’t started a war on paid links. I certainly wouldn’t think of doing something similar today.
The idea was to create a method of automating the link exchange process. Users would register with the site and it generated a list of 10-50 websites to link to from the users links page – the number of sites people had to link to depended on the number of links they wanted in return.
The key principle behind the site (and the reason for the spammy sounding name) was that users got twice as many links back as they donated to the system. Other great features the site had were a referral scheme where users could refer a friend in exchange for 5 extra links, no html footprint for the links, links exchanged were on topic and could be approved by the webmaster before they went live.
Fantastically every link a site received was from another page with equal or higher PageRank than the page users were donating links from. That meant if your links page was PR4 you got links from pages with PR4,5,6,7,8,9 or even PR10.
In the first week we had over 1000 new users signing up and perhaps 10,000 links being placed.
Very quickly my rudimentary systems to catch cheats were beaten by people cloaking, using links that were commented out in the html code and other methods. My reliance on the community to catch cheats was heavy and most cheaters just left after they got caught meaning the 30 links they had been allocated needed to be re-allocated to other websites signing up to the system.
My model for making money was to sell link placements on some of the sites in the system – so you might be linking to 30 sites from your links page, 10 of them were paying to be there and 20 were just part of the system.
Essentially I had found a way to sell links on over a thousand websites without having to give any of the money to the actual webmasters! What’s more they all knew about it and were actively promoting the system!
The site was launched with a single thread on the DP forums and it quickly grew to over 400 replies.
After a few weeks it was clear that the site was growing out of control and, like Twitter, it was riding a fine line between users wanting to help grow the system and users abandoning ship. Once users started to remove their links it would take perhaps a week before a snowball effect meant the entire project was dead.
So barely 4 weeks after the site was launched I sold it for a decent amount ($3000 if I remember rightly) and left the new owners to implement all the required features.
I don’t think things went very well after this because the site was abandoned soon afterwards. However even 2 years down the line I still think this was a brilliant idea, even though the whole concept was fundamentally flawed. How can a site sustainably offer twice as many links as people are giving?
How does Pyramid Linking Work?
Pyramidlinking.com will help you improve your rankings in search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN by allowing you to quickly build static, relevant and geo-targetted backlinks to your website.
When you register for the service we collect some basic details about your website and then suggest a small number of sites for you to link to. Once you have added the links to your site we send our automated spider to verify that the links have been added correctly. As soon as your links are validated your website is added to the queue of available link partners and will be suggested when new users sign up for the service.
If you choose to display 10 outbound links on a page on your website we will issue credits for 20 links. Your site will remain in the link partner queue until we have verified that 20 sites have added your link.
The links are added to each site as plain html hyperlinks. There are no scripts to install and no ‘footprint’ meaning that the links are totally indistinguishable from normal text links. Every link to your website contains the anchor text of your choice and is placed on a website in the country and category that you have chosen.
Every outbound link we ask you to display on your website will be to a website with the same or lower PageRank than your site. This means that every link to your website will be from a site with the same or higher PageRank than your site.
Benefits
* Gain static text links to your website
* Improve search engine rankings
* Links are relevant and geo-targetted
* No scripts to install
* Search engine friendly & no ‘footprint’
* You receive twice as many links as you give
How it works
* Register your account
* Add your url, category and country
* Choose the sites you want to link to
* Your site is added to the link queue
* Gain good quality backlinks to your website
* Get 5 extra links for each new user you refer
Since I published the How to Build a $1 Million Site in 4 Months article we have had a number of emails and comments wanting to know exactly how to build the sort of links that really help with search engine rankings.
In the past thousands of people have published articles on linkbuilding and I haven’t read one that really stands out. At Branded3 we do things a bit differently to most SEO companies and linkbuilding is no exception.
The sort of links we build are not only links that Google loves but links that Google loves to love. They are links that Matt Cutts would place a big red tick next to if he was our teacher.
Added Value
E-commerce sites are always hard to linkbuild for because most of them have done the bare minimum of uploading their products into some shopping cart software and paying for a nice design. In order to make our linkbuilding campaign efficient we need to add some value to the site.
Here are the best ways to add value:
Write lengthy unique product descriptions
Use high quality product images & let people zoom in
Add tutorials
Create a blog on the site
Add things like suppliers directories
Competitor Analysis
The first task when building links is to replicate the best links that your competitors have. To do this we make a list of the top 20 competing websites and use Yahoo Site Explorer to find the first 1000 links to each of those sites.
Next we need to manually evaluate all 20,000 of these links and ask ourselves three questions:
Is this link high quality?
Can we get a link from this page too?
Can we replicate this link in some other way?
The aim is to build a master list of link targets – places that link to our competitors already and might be persuaded to link to our site too.
By evaluating the links using the questions above we can eliminate the links we don’t want and the links we can’t get and the ones that are left go into our list of link targets.
For example we might find a link that was from a scraper site and decide that it was low quality so we can safely ignore that. Another link might come from our competitors own network so it would be impossible for us to get a link from that site.
Sometimes we might see that a big blog has written about our competitor, if this happens it is usually impossible to get a link from the same page but you can replicate the link by getting another blog to write the same story but about your site instead. For example if you sell really cool kettles you might find that Gizmodo wrote about your competitors cool kettle last year but that Engadget has yet to cover it. A quick email to Engadget might get you a killer link.
Once we have our list of link targets the next step is to figure out ways to get links from them. This process will be different for every site and there is no secret – just email, phone or write to them until you speak to the right person.
Links From Blogs
One of the best sources of links is from blogs. Blogs are frequently updated with topical news stories and there are millions of them to choose from so getting links this way is quite straightforward.
Connecting with lots of bloggers isn’t easy which is why I set up the Buzz Marketing Group so that advertisers can easily reach bloggers that might want to write about their products.
The key is to make sure the blog post looks 100% natural. Millions of free links are given out each month by bloggers and making your unnatural links blend into these is the holy grail of linkbuilding.
Widgets, Sponsored Themes & Other Risky Links
Building links from widgets and sponsored blog themes can take your linkbuilding into a grey area unless you take some precautions. The key is to firstly try to make the links look as un-spammy as possible and secondly to make sure you have an escape strategy to burn the links if they get out of control.
Never use keywords in the anchor text of the links
Always point the links to an internal page so you can block with robots.txt
Never use hidden links
Links from widgets should point at the widgets homepage not a commercial page
Directories
Submitting a site to directories is a good way to show Google your site is reputable. Very few low quality sites have the money to invest in paid directory submissions. Launching a new site usually requires submission to at least the sites below:
This isn’t rocket science but how many sites spend thousands on design and then think twice about $1000 on getting some nice links in the first week.
Linkbait
You are probably thinking that all the methods above are quite straightforward and easy (although a bit labour intensive) and you would be right. Once you have got all the links your competitors have, submitted to the best directories and got loads of links from blogs what do you do next?
The next part is the hard part – building the sort of links that none of your competitors have. Thinking of an amazing new idea that will get you mind blowing links for years to come.
There really is no way to write this down in a blog post because it takes months of planning for each client and each project. The reason these links work so well is that they are so amazingly hard to get that Google just has to love them.
At Branded3 we don’t normally like to talk about how much money our client’s make but in this case I want to make an exception.
A new client at the start of the year requesting a linkbuilding campaign for their brand new e-commerce site. The site was built on a standard shopping cart platform with just the usual SEO modifications (page titles, friendly urls etc) carried out.
We set about building links – a total of 700 to date. The links are all natural and judging by last months figures the search engines love them. In May, the fourth month we have been working on the site and the fourth month it has been live, it made $90,000 from organic search. If the revenue stays at this figure the site will make over $1 million per year.
Of course we hope to keep increasing the revenue and turn the site into a $10 million business inside 12 months.
The reason I am writing about this is to show that building a new site from scratch isn’t impossible. In moderately competitive industries you can overhaul any competitors inside 12 months with the right backlinks.
By building natural links you can avoid most of the traditional sandbox effects and make enough money from long tail traffic to be profitable inside a few months. After that it’s just a question of watching & waiting.
Fantastic news for anybody with a useful website – today the BBC has been told that they need to start linking out more.
The BBC Trust carried out a report into the site and found that things could be a bit better despite the site getting 16.5 million users every month.
Presenting the reports findings, review leader Dame Patricia Hodgson said: “This is a very reassuring set of findings about the quality of the service, the value that it gives to audiences and what they think about it.”
“There must be stronger financial, strategic and editorial controls.”
The trust is also calling for an improved internal search engine, more links to non-BBC websites and more interactivity.
It said any plans for new investment in bbc.co.uk would not be approved until management had made satisfactory plans to further tighten controls.
I have sent my link requests and await the results.
After Dave outed the Economist for selling links they were quick to apply the nofollow tag to prevent Google getting too upset.
Today it seems like the BBC want to waste more of our license fees by buying up some of the tiny footer links for themselves. How many clicks do you think this advert gets compared to the price the BBC pay? If they are using nofollow then why bother with keyword rich links?
They already rank number 1 for “mortgage calculator” so I can’t understand why they are bothering with this unless it’s part of some grand link exchange scheme.
I also wonder how an affiliate site gets a lucrative spot on the right hand side of the BBC’s mortgage calculator page. Since the BBC isn’t allowed to host any advertising on their site that must be one of the most lucrative free links in the world. I realise they are not spiderable links but they surely send targeted traffic.
Social media, linkbaiting, link building, blogging and building an audience are hugely time consuming tasks that require a lot of skill, some great ideas and most importantly a long term vision.
Intelligent online publishers have been creating Link Building Machines for years but others try to rely on short term fixes. The short term fix (as you might have guessed) isn’t a good long term business strategy.
Put simply a Link Building Machine is a site that attracts thousands of links every month and hundreds of links to each one of their recent stories or blog posts without any direct marketing being carried out to create those links.
The BBC is a Link Building Machine, so is Wikipedia, so is Engadget, so is the New York Times. They are all sites that have the following key components making up their Machine.
A large number of fans who love to read their content
A fanbase that likes sharing content across social networks
Fans & readers who publish content on blogs & other websites – the linkerati
Good search engine rankings
Any website that has these elements is a Link Building Machine. Take a site like Wikipedia for example, it doesn’t have any RSS subscribers but Wikipedia ranks highly for so many informational queries that the articles are used as citations and reference links thousands of times every single day.
A site like the BBC can release a news story and find it being shared across thousands of blogs and social networks without the BBC having to do any marketing whatsoever.
One of my favourite examples of a Link Building Machine is a site that has thousands of well optimised images attracting millions of visitors from Google Images every single year. This site cleverly uses this script (this one is good too) to build thousands of new links every month with zero effort.
Creating your machine
Publishing one off linkbait articles is great for traffic and links but it isn’t a particularly effective long term strategy – unless carried out as part of the Link Building Machine development process.
Publish one linkbait article and it might get thousands of readers and hundreds of links but if you can replicate that success and publish similarly high quality articles every day for 6 months you might just end up creating a Link Building Machine.
Forget about building links to your site today – concentrate on your long term goal of finding thousands of people who love your website enough to tell the world whenever you write a new post.
If you check out the people buying links at the bottom of the Economist.com homepage and then do some searches on Google.co.uk for the terms they are targeting such as “loans”, “car insurance” and “travel insurance” you can see the sites that have links from economist.com are doing very well, much better than they were doing a few weeks ago.
Most people think you need millions of links to compete for a keyword such as “loans”. In this case it seems like a paid link from a PR8 site will do the job just fine.
My only concern is that this is pretty much a “who’s who” of link buyers that Google could use to hand out penalties. However Google is quite clearly turning a blind eye to link buyers in the UK so it looks like these sites will reap the benefits for a good few months.
Most people seem to think there is some ambiguity about how Google handles widget links but really there isn’t. Matt Cutts has made it quite clear that some links are OK and others aren’t.
In this post about getting value from scrapers by adding links to the footer of your RSS feed Matt said it was OK as long as the anchor text wasn’t spammy. Basically that means that adding a link to your blog saying “Post from Blogstorm” is acceptable while adding a link saying “Post from Blogstorm search engine optimisation blog” might be deemed to be going overboard. My guess is that in most industries Google won’t be too concerned about this but if you have a blog about payday loans then Google might take action.
The same principle applies to widgets. If you use the name of your site or the name of your widget as the link then it’s not a problem. Really the link should go to the homepage of the widget rather than the homepage of the site. As soon as you start using keyword rich anchor text and linking to your homepage it’s not really surprising that Google gets upset.
I don’t understand why people are getting confused by this? Google wants to rank the most useful sites at the top of their results. They don’t want to rank the site that has the most popular widgets. If you are going to make the effort to use widget bait or any other type of linkbait at least take the time to make it defensible.
