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Grow Your Business with Strategic Link Building Through Reporters

The news media industry has been a great resource to marketers looking to increase reach and create quality backlinks to their websites. Link building using reporters and journalists is an increasingly popular technique to boost search engine rankings and website authority.

An effective approach requires coordination and collaboration between the marketers and reporters, in order to make sure the content created relays the message of the brand and produces the highest level of impact. What’s more, the steady stream of news updates that come along with link building serves as an effective reminder of the brand to the public.

As such, leveraging the right reporters to engage in link building activities should be an important part of any successful digital marketing strategy.

Ready to skyrocket your business growth? Then link building through reporters is the way to go! This article will discuss the various techniques and approaches to using reporters to aid in link building and demonstrate the incredible results that can be achieved. Strategic link building is a complex, yet powerful, tool in any brand’s arsenal, but when it works in conjunction with reporters, the opportunities for success are limitless.

From creating genuine relationships with reporters to leveraging those relationships to increase visibility and attract quality links, this article will explore the nuances and potential of this innovative tactic. Don’t miss out on growing your business with strategic link building through reporters – read on to increase your ROI!

Table of Contents

1. Introduction to Strategic Link Building

Strategic Link Building is an essential component of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) that contributes to a brand’s online success. It is a process of identifying domains, both relevant and high-authority, and obtaining backlinks from them to improve the visibility of a website and increase its organic traffic.

Strategic link building helps build relationships with key influencers and expands brand reach. It also reduces the risk of Google penalties and provides organic keyword rankings since the quality of backlinks play a major role in search engine algorithms.

When executed properly and with a focused strategy, link building can be a powerful, long-term asset.

2. Benefits of Strategic Link Building

Link building is a strategic process that helps search engine optimization, driving traffic to your website by enhancing online visibility and gaining higher search rankings. Natural link building is the most effective strategy to build high-quality organic links that add to the domain authority and offer content to link sources.

It not only improves your website rankings, but also helps to create a strong reputation among other webmasters. Furthermore, increasing link popularity helps promote your website, resulting in more relevant traffic and potential customers.

With strategic link building, it also allows users to discover your website in more places, making your content more visible in the search engines. Finally, strategic link building helps to produce quality content that offers interesting and valuable information for other websites and visitors, in turn earning your website more visitors, more engagement and more visitors who are likely to convert to customers.

3. Understanding Your Goals and Desired Outcomes

Understanding your goals and desired outcomes is essential to any successful project. Set realistic expectations and take time to identify precisely what it is you want to achieve.

Doing so will help you prioritize, stay on track, and move closer to accomplishing your goal. By making a plan, you can more easily troubleshoot, establish milestones, and delegate tasks.

Additionally, identifying challenges, critical success factors, realistic timelines and potential risks can help ensure success and prepare for any potential pitfalls. Bottom line, taking the time to proactively understand, define and measure your goals and desired outcomes can maximize your chance of meeting objectives and generating successful results.

4. Finding and Connecting with Relevant Reporters

Finding, connecting with, and building relationships with relevant reporters is essential for any public relations professional. Through research, publishing compelling press releases, maintaining a press list, and networking, PR professionals can connect and build relationships with reporters to help advance the goals of any organization.

It is important to learn which reporters cover specific topics and industries in order to craft messages that are tailored to their interests and readers. Additionally, staying up to date on industry news and trends can help PR professionals stay several steps ahead in the story cycle.

Ultimately, by thinking of reporters as peers and collaborators, PR pros can better establish mutually beneficial relationships with reporters that can help ensure successful publicity for any organization.

5. Crafting Engaging Content to Capture Reporter Attention

Crafting content that captures the attention of reporters and prompts them to cover your story is key to successful public relations. With the competition for column space and coverage rampant, standing out from the pack is critical.

In order to do this, an organization must have a clear message and an effective strategy to convey it. Content should be presented in an engaging way that will cause reporters to take notice and make their story stand out from the noise.

The more captivating the content, the more likely it is to be featured in the media. This can be done by incorporating interesting facts, interesting visuals, or by citing reliable sources, such as the company’s leaders, researchers, or industry leaders.

This will give the content a reliable, authoritative edge, as well as spark the reporter’s interest and encourage them to explore the story in greater depth.

6. Analyzing the Effectiveness of Your Link Building Campaign

Analyzing the effectiveness of your link building campaign is an essential step in building a successful SEO strategy. By closely examining the link profiles of your website and its competitors, you can gain an understanding of which link building tactics are proving the most successful and which ones need revision.

Knowing which links are driving the most traffic, where links are being placed, and which ones are no longer active can help you better target your link building efforts and maximize the impact they have on your traffic and rankings. With the right analysis and data, you can fine-tune your link building efforts and have a greater chance of long-term success.

7. Establishing Best Practices for Future Link Building Efforts

To ensure the best possible link building results for the future, it is essential to establish best practices. First, all links must be from relevant websites and content.

A good rule of thumb is to ensure that all links come from credible, trusted sources. Additionally, any content associated with a link should be valuable and informative.

Next, it is important to prioritize quality over quantity; a few, high-quality links are more beneficial than numerous low-quality, spammy links. Lastly, it is necessary to ensure that all links have effective anchor text.

By following these best practices, any organization’s link building efforts can remain successful for many years.

Leveraging Link Building With Reporters: Unlock the Power of Digital Strategies

Web Moves Internet Strategists can help you leverage link building with reporters to your benefit. By leveraging your digital presence, utilizing specific keywords, researching compelling industry content, and identifying the right reporters to reach out to, we can positively impact your link building campaigns.

Our team of digital strategists can even help craft personalized content and customized outreach to potential link partners. We are confident that our link building strategies with reporters will help gain greater visibility for your website, strengthen your website’s overall authority, and drive more qualified leads to your business website.

Wrap Up

Ending with a reminder to keep the process honest, ethical and sustainable, link building using reporters is a viable approach and one that can be significantly rewarding if done correctly. Remember that creating quality content is essential, adding value to the readers you target, and building relationships with the correct people will yield the most fruitful partnerships.

Reporters possess the skills, analytics and industry knowledge that can take your content to the next level and help you spread awareness for your brand. Putting the effort in to create and maintain sound relationships, and motivated strategies with your contacts within journalism, could be the key to organic traction for your website or blog.

Good luck!

Online visibility is essential for building a business. Being seen on the web directly leads to business and brand growth which is what makes the acquisition of new website visitors so valuable, especially today when the competition is very high.

One of the best ways for increasing your website traffic is through a joint effort of content marketing and SEO. The collaboration of these particular fields has provided us with all kinds of strategies and techniques getting more and more people to visit your website. In a sea of different possibilities to incorporate, one stands out for being extremely effective – the Skyscraper Technique.

What Is the Skyscraper Technique?

in 2015 Brian Dean first described The Skyscraper Technique in a case study where he explained how he discovered a method to double his organic website traffic in just two weeks!

Over the years, the Skyscraper Technique has been replicated many times along with some minor tweaks and embellishments. Still, the core of the strategy remains pretty much the same which is to find content with lots of backlinks and create a better version with a goal of collecting a portion of those backlinks.

The Skyscraper Technique plays on our psychological tendencies to be attracted to the very best and finest. The idea is that people will take a look at your improved version of content and will feel inclined to enrich their page with a link to yours. Following that logic, the more obvious it is that your content is superior the better your chances of acquiring a backlink are.

How to Execute the Skyscraper Technique Properly

In the last four years, many have tried to replicate Brian’s method and managed to increase their website traffic profusely. Ryan and folks from Creative Live used it to promote an infographic on calculating your freelance hourly rate which resulted in over 70 000 new page views along with just under 3500 new subscribers.

That being said not everyone was able to reach similar levels of success. Such is the case with Olga and her team at Chanty. In an in-depth post-mortem, they described that missing the keyword was the critical point that completely derailed their Skyscraper link building attempt. It’s clear that a lot of it has to do with proper preparation and execution.

1. Discover the Right Candidate

There are several characteristics that will help you make the right choice for your brand when deciding on which content you want to compete with. First and foremost, explore top-ranking content that is relevant to the services you’re providing. This will ensure that your efforts will attract the right type of audience for your brand, meaning they’ll be more likely to become your clients or customers.

Use Google Search to find content that is already performing and ranking very highly for a popular topic relevant to your niche. While exploring various topics, analyze the number of backlinks to a high-performing piece of content using SEO tools such as Ahrefs or SEMrush. Acquiring a backlink profile for a particular page will help you determine the number of backlinks, where they are coming from and some other useful metrics like URL and domain authority.

The key factor that should help you decide should be the sweet spot between the number of backlinks a content page has and the perceived room for improvement. If you are able to find a piece of content that has lots of backlinks but you’re confident you can produce something significantly better – you’re on the right track!

2. Create a Tempting Alternative

Now that you’ve narrowed down the topics and the competitors, you can work on creating a superior piece of content that will provide a more up to date, richer and more insightful experience for the readers.

Some of the characteristics that make a piece of content more appealing are length, freshness, structure, design and rich media. However, all of these factors need to contribute directly to the quality of your content. Adding 5 lukewarm tips to a pretty extensive list just to make your version longer will actually hurt the quality of your article!

The most important thing is that your content does a better job of presenting the topic to the reader. Your main focus should be on providing them with a unique perspective and revealing valuable insights in a way that’s truly engaging. If you’d like to learn more about how to make engaging content – click here!

3. Reach Out to Your List of Targets

The first two steps will set a framework for your success but only by doing quality email outreach will you be able to realize its full potential. From the backlink profile you’ve acquired in the first step, you can create a list of targets for your outreach campaign. You’ll need to explore all pages that have linked back to the content you’re trying to top and find people are the decision-makers for those particular pages.

When reaching out, explain why you’re doing so, provide a link to your superior content, clarify what makes it a better fit and ask them directly to refer to your link instead. Getting the right formula will take some time and effort but always be mindful of the fact what’s really in it for them.

And don’t get discouraged if you get negative responses – it’s just a part of the process. The Skyscraper Technique is in its essence a numbers game. This just goes to show why you should target content with lots of backlinks in the first place!

Final Thoughts
The Skyscraper Technique has proven its value through many different case studies. Still, it’s not exactly hard science and lots of aspects are context-related making it very difficult to write an overarching bulletproof guide. Additionally, lots of different external factors will contribute to the results. If you’re just starting out and don’t have a large online presence and a strong personal brand it may prove to be less effective and more difficult.

The great thing about it is that it guides your content but in no way limits what you can do with it once you’ve finished the process. Good, quality content is a useful marketing asset in and of itself meaning you can gain value from it in more ways than one. There are other ways in which you can promote it or even repurpose it. Whatever happens, if you’re flexible and resilient – none of your work goes to waste!

Google Logo - SEO MovesIf you work in the field of SEO, you probably understand that Google controls everything. We constantly bend to its will and try to outthink it at every turn. Just as space travel is unpredictable because we haven’t yet experienced much of it, SEO is also a largely new frontier and we seldom know what to expect from our environment. Our environment, of course, is Google. But what if Google didn’t exist? Where would we look for sites? How would we get links? Your brain is probably boiling over with great ideas right now, and that’s the point of this whole thing—if we eliminate Google from the equation entirely, those paths that we come up with are almost completely organic.

Google is extremely popular with both the general public and with SEO professionals, but it often locks us inside of a box. At some point we’re not exploring the web on our own, and instead we are relying on an algorithm and some web spiders to explore for us. We can break out of this box and choose our own destination in a natural, organic way. Considering the question “what if Google didn’t exist?” is a great way to answer the question “where can I get more links?”

What If?

Playing “what if?” is a fun, but sometimes dangerous, game. It’s easy to get stuck down in the mire of negativity and use “what if?” to fuel your own pessimistic fire. If you use it correctly, however, “what if?” can be a great catalyst for ideas and innovation. For example, think about the popular post apocalypse genre of fiction, where a shovel might become the protagonist’s best weapon, best tool and best friend. Similarly, in a world without Google, a message board buried somewhere inside of a mediocre site with low domain authority might become an excellent research tool. After all, if all of these people are willing to brave an underwhelming site just to talk to each other and share about a topic, that means they’re passionate about it. Passion leads to great info, great leads on new sites and useful links. Google does exist, of course, but thinking outside of that box produces some interesting results.

(more…)

Just heading to bed and noticed that out of the blue, many exact match domains have slipped in search. I noticed a number of exact match domains names have slipped somewhere from 5-40 positions in search. It was really long over due that Google fixed this issue. Exact match had gotten so far out of hand that domain names like www.health-insurance-quotes.us were ranking well.

Glad to see Google has discovered a way to tweak this, although I am not a fan of some of the recent changes Google has made, they really did need to make some serious changes.

Google has been releasing changes to it’s algorithm rapid fire, I think they updated it about 3-4 times in the past 60 days. I think they may take a breather soon, and possibly even turn back some of their changes. I think they have moved with a VERY heavy hand on some of their link updates, and have really scared everyone online.

Everyone now is worried about “over optimization” I have had nearly every client of ours contacting us about this, so needless to say it is on everyone’s mind (including mine).

google page rank missing

I noticed last night that Google’s visible page rank had disappeared for several tools I use. I looked around a little bit but could not find any tool that was working. I think the SEO community has been looking towards this for quite some time, as people have put far too much emphasis on Google’s visible page rank to the point where an entire economy (Text Link Industry) has been developed around a websites Page Rank and the associated value you can extract from selling links.

I think the guys from Majestic SEO and SEOMoz are both quite pleased to see this change, as they both have built into their link spider the ability to score the link value of a website based upon somewhat similar characteristics to that of Google’s Page rank.

I guess we will see how this all plays out over the coming days, weeks, months or years. I think the removal of visible page rank has been long over due.

 

 

Bing Webmaster Tools

If we are going to understand the latest nuance of online searching we need to know just which fundamentals we’re dealing with. If we are going to understand how to fine-tune and adjust our Web-based lives we need to know something about the tools we’re planning to use.

We’ll start from the announcement of “the release of the updated Bing Webmaster Tools,” as announced in July on www.bing.com.

According to the information provided at the time, “After the Bing launch, we reached out to the webmaster and SEO communities to see how we could improve the Webmaster Tools. Your feedback was very consistent: you wanted more transparency to see how Bing crawls and indexes your sites, more control over your content in the Bing Index, and more information to help you optimize your sites for Bing.” That’s the word from Anthony M. Garcia, Senior Product Manager for Bing Webmaster Tools.

New and Improved

The goal, according to the Webmaster Center, was to change everything, or, in the staff’s words “hit the reset button and rebuild the tools from the ground up.” The latest tool was announced by Garcia in the same forum on Dec. 14. He wrote that a new Inbound Links feature was released to provide “registered site owners the ability to easily & intuitively retrieve data about links to their sites. “

Bing apparently got a lot of feedback from SEO pros and Web-site owners about “the importance of this data to better understand how their sites are ranked in Bing.”

Users can now learn details about the number of inbound links over time, with details on URL and anchor text. In addition, users can export this link data so it can be studied offline.

Garcia wrote, “It is important to note that the count of inbound links will be based on content stored in the Bing index vs. a complete, comprehensive count of links between every page on the Internet.” This could be a crucial distinction for many site owners and other industry professionals.

Building Blocks

New top-floor tools such as the just-announced Inbound Links item have to be supported by a strong and well-constructed foundation and lower floors. That was the goal when Bing “hit the reset button” a few months ago. Developers were aiming for a simpler experience that was also more intuitive.

The focus, according to Bing, was on “three key areas: crawl, index and traffic.” The new work included Index Explorer and Submit URLs, which basically provide more information about Bing’s crawls and indexes, but also gives the user improved control. Garcia wrote:

Index Explorer gives you unprecedented access to browse through the Bing index in order to verify which of your directories and pages have been included. Submit URLs gives you the ability to signal which URLs Bing should add to the index. Other new features include: Crawl Issues to view details on redirects, malware, and exclusions encountered while crawling sites; and Block URLs to prevent specific URLs from appearing in Bing search engine results pages.

In addition, the new tools take advantage of Microsoft Silverlight 4 to deliver rich charting functionality that will help you quickly analyze up to six months of crawling, indexing, and traffic data. That means more transparency and more control to help you make decisions, which optimize your sites for Bing.

At this point we should have a better-than-average idea of what the developers and managers intended with the new Bing Webmaster Tools. But if we don’t understand the overall changes made we might find that we’re a bit confused about the latest innovation. Let’s take a look back at some foundation material.

Back Then

In previous incarnations, Bing was Live Search, Windows Live Search and MSN Search. This new “decision engine” came under the broader category of Web search engine and was introduced to the general public in San Diego in May 2009. It was online a few days later.

That first product included such changes as search suggestions listed as queries are entered. According to information from the company Bing also included a list of related searches based on Powerset semantic technology. (Microsoft bought Powerset in 2008.) Bing was also introduced as the muscle behind Yahoo! Search.

To get to the roots of Bing predecessors you have to go back an entire lifetime (in Internet terms) to 1998 and 1999. At that time, the company offered MSN Search and gradually added such improvements as self-constructed search-engine results that could be updated on a regular basis. Serious upgrades were moved out in 2004 and 2005, with results made available to other search portals.

In 2006, the world was introduced to Windows Live Search, the replacement for MSN Search. This new iteration used such tabs as Web, images, news, desktop etc. It was at this point that Microsoft no longer used Picsearch to provide images within the service. In-house developers created their own image-search mechanisms.

A year later the company effectively changed the playing field by moving the search products away from Windows Live services. The new product became Live Search, under the Platform and Systems division of the company. It’s important to also understand that Live Search was integrated with Microsoft adCenter at this time.

There’s More

Some of the key elements in the transformation of Microsoft search tools (from Windows Live Search and MSN Search to Bing) include:

  • 2008 – Separate search categories/tools for books and academic subjects were discontinued. These were integrated into the overall search program
  • 2008 – Live Search Macros discontinued
  • 2009 – Live Product Upload discontinued
  • 2009 – MSN QnA lived briefly between February and May

It’s also essential for industry watchers to understand the significance of the change from the “Live” moniker. This decision was made by a company that was concerned about brand image and brand awareness. Bing was born.

So, we’ve come from the last century and MSN/Live Search to Bing, in about 10 or 11 years. Where does that leave us? Well, in 2009 Microsoft and Yahoo! signed an agreement to replace Yahoo! search tools with Bing. The contract is intended to last 10 years.

Not only has Bing become the power behind another brand it has resurrected Microsoft’s share of the search market. Industry figures show that the big company’s market share was declining until Bing gave it the adrenaline rush needed. In October 2010 Bing was in the top five among search engines by volume.

Painful Birth?

Was the transition from Live to Bing painful for users? It would be necessary to survey a majority of those folks to get an accurate picture of what the change meant. Microsoft and the people behind Bing introduced the change as good news.

In July, Garcia wrote, “We have good news for all the veteran users of the Bing Webmaster Tools. Your existing Webmaster Center accounts have been automatically upgraded to the new tools. This means that starting today, you’re already a registered user of the new Bing Webmaster Tools. There’s no need to create a new account, change ownership verification codes, or re-enter site data. If you don’t have a current account, you can easily sign-up and register your sites to begin using the new tools.”

A few veterans have classified Bing Webmaster Tools as good, if not the best. There were some preliminary problems with Bing reporting targeted United States Web sites as being United Kingdom sites. The problem seemed to be with specific tags that have the letters “gb” in them. This was written about on SEORankings by founder Wesley LeFebvre, based in Seattle.

At the time, LeFebvre asked if some of these sites were suffering in the organic-ranking category because of the mistaken information. He also questioned the validity of Bing, Google and Yahoo! local rankings in light of this information. LeFebvre set a goal of finding out if other organic search engines use this tag.

In October, Steve Tullis wrote on the Webmaster Center blog “In keeping with our themes of rapid change and responding to input and feedback from the webmaster community, we are working on future feature planning for the Bing webmaster tools and we would like to hear your thoughts in a few areas.”

Tullis discussed Crawl-Delay and asked several specific questions about support and control in this area. He asked users and webmasters if they preferred to have crawl-delay supported in robots.txt, in addition to several other pointed questions.

The door to getting assistance with Bing Webmaster Tools is on the Bing Webmaster Center Help page. While that may seem obvious, it doesn’t hurt to make contact with the source somewhere in your search for information about new versions, upgrades and additions. Judging from initial reports from both the company and a few users, the new tools are workable and the Inbound Links addition is absolutely essential.

It’s a bit early to try any detailed comparisons on Bing Webmaster Tools and its Inbound Links structure. But rest assured there are plenty of people out there who will be providing useful reports.

The bottom line is, if a Web site has a good quantity of reliable, subject-related links it should be placed at or near the top of the popular search engines. Link building is both a science and an art. There are proven ways to make these connections work without wasting a lot of time and money getting onto every list available. This means you have to do what it takes to make your site and your links available to the correct group of people.

link buildingThe network that can carry a Web site to the top is built with exposure to a specific group of people. Target audiences are the crucial factor for anyone considering directory submissions.

Assume you have a site that offers Product X and related services. A particular sector of the online population will go to search engines and use Product X or one of the related services as a keyword for their search. Your goal is to have a Web site and its link at the top of the search engine when this target group searches. This could mean significant traffic to your site and consequently, significant income for you.

Link building is not a quick way to make a dollar or two. It takes careful planning and serious effort. You should also make use of several of the quality directories in your chosen area, whether these are link directories, article directories or a combination of both. You should also know about the different kinds of links so you can make the most efficient use of your time and effort.

Here are some key categories:

  • No Follow – Search engines treat the no-follow directions as “a signal that link popularity should not be passed through that link.” (Wikipedia) This is a “way of not vouching for the quality of the site being linked to, and is heavily used by sites that allow users to insert links into content that isn’t reviewed before being published.”
  • Authority – You may have to buy these links from sites such as Google Search, Yahoo Directory etc. These sites rank for top-level keywords.
  • Directory – The best advice is to submit only three or four times a month to directories. Don’t flood them!! Some people who work with SEO think directory links are the best way to go but they may not be as strong as relevant, one-way links.
  • One-Way – This will be one of the most effective ways to get rankings. Think about quality content and link bait. Don’t get trapped into sponsored links and advertising. Try forums for focused content and audiences.
  • Press Release – Press release submission services and sites are leaders in the field. Try PR.com, for example.
  • Reciprocal – This type of link is rather easy to get but is not necessarily the most effective link category. Think about this: Reciprocal links are usually an equal exchange – you get what you give in quality and reliability.
  • Pre-sell Page – These might be a little harder to find. Contact webmasters. The entire page is your content so they can be excellent for SEO.
  • Social Media – This has become a real buzzword in the online community over the past couple of years. With this type of link you need to think about people getting together and having a conversation. That’s the key word today – conversation.
  • RSS/Blog – Think about syndication. Start your blog with quality content and make sure you have RSS, Atom etc.

This is only a short list!! There are many other types of links that you can use to build your presence. Use these ideas and learn more about: site-wide links; three-way link; links to and from media outlets such as radio stations, television stations and newspaper companies; edu and gov links; article submission links.

Not Just the Traffic, Silly!

link trafficNo matter how you go about getting linked up with others who have similar interests, stimulating traffic is only part of the story. Remember, we mentioned conversations earlier. Success in the online world is about connections, of course, but after you make the connection you need to continue the conversation.

Of course, it’s tempting to just get started, try to make money quickly and move on to something else. A few people have been fortunate enough to do this. You may find that success has a short life span when you flood the Web with information and hope 1 percent or 2 percent come back to you. However, if you have a little more patience than the next guy, use some intelligence and focus on the right link or article directories you may find yourself building a more long-term business.

You may as well begin with the free directories when you begin the process of submitting your site link to a links directory. Many of these will establish good connections in sufficient numbers. It pays, however, to be selective when submitting to the many free directory sites. You could sign on with a link-submission service if you have funds to pay the fees. Be very selective with this method because some services might flood the Web with your link and you are looking for quality connections.

People interested in your particular service or product will be looking for your sign and a brief explanation of what you offer. Those who are searching for something entirely different probably won’t come into your “store.” Your choice of a few select link or article directories is like putting up the right sign on your “main street business.” In fact, it may be better if they don’t. You need to focus on the customers with real potential.

In order to understand the rise of paid content, it’s necessary to understand the meaning of the nofollow tag and  how it is used (and some would say abused) by large sites like Twitter.

The nofollow tag is used to tell some search engines (*cough*Google*cough*) that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s search engine ranking. It was originally intended to reduce the effectiveness of search engine spam. Spam comments were the nofollow tag’s original targets: spam comments on blogs were used to get back links and try to squeeze a few drops of link juice from as many places as possible. By making comment links nofollow, the webmaster is in effect saying, “I am in no way vouching for the quality of the place this link goes. Don’t give them any of my link juice. Maybe it’s a good site, but I’m not taking chances.”

Nofollow links are not meant for preventing stuff from being indexed or for blocking access. The ways to do this are by using the robots.txt file for blocking access, and using on-page meta elements that specify on a page by page basis what a search engine crawler should (or should not) do with the content that’s on the crawled page.

Nofollow was born in 2005, and since that time, in the SEO arms race between the search engines and those who want to game them, websites started selectively using the nofollow tag to “sculpt” page rank for pages within their own site. In other words, a link going to an internal page that was ticking over nicely could be made into a nofollow link in an attempt to “conserve” PageRank juice to give to another internal page that was just starting out, or struggling, and needed some help.

Well, Google frowns on this, insisting that you’re better off in the long run to use links to your site’s pages but not to selectively use the nofollow tag in an attempt to juice up the pages you think need a boost. According to Matt Cutts, the only time you should use nofollow is when you cannot or don’t want to vouch for the content of a site. An example would be a link added by an outside user (say, in a comment thread) that you don’t trust. Cutts suggested that unknown users leaving links on your guestbook page should automatically have their links nofollowed.
Right, so what does this have to do with paid content?

The nofollow tag was supposed to squash paid links, which Google hates.

Paid content companies take advantage of Google’s emphasis on domain authority, by buying up trusted sites like eHow (purchased by the seemingly insatiable Demand Media) and dumping lots and lots of esoteric content into it. Why do they do this? They get the domain authority, and the esoteric content helps ensure that when someone, somewhere searches for an article on, say, how to make a butterfly shaped cake, the content that they paid a content writer a couple of bucks for will show up at the top of the search engine results. In other words, they’re targeting the proverbial “long tail.”

How do these sites know what content to buy? They have algorithms that comb through keywords and keyword combinations and determine where there are gaps in information. Then the content buyers commission writers to write content specifically to fill those gaps. You may have heard the statistic that 20 to 25% of queries on Google have never been searched before. That’s a huge, huge number of queries. The more of those queries you can anticipate and answer, the more hits your site will get over the long term.

While link spam and comment spam were clear attempts at short term efforts for sites to claw their way to the top of the search engine rankings, and were relatively easy to squash using nofollow tags, paid content is more of a long term strategy, and it’s not clear what, if anything Google can do about it.

What seems to be happening is that sites like Twitter are kneeling down before their Google overlords (as one side of the story goes) and automatically making even the most harmless links (such as your own link to your own website on the “Bio” part of your Twitter profile) nofollow links. That has seriously ticked off a lot of long term Twitter users who legitimately poured in lots of very real, original content and can now no longer get any link love from that Bio link, even though it’s from them, to their very own site. When this happened, the metaphors about Google and Twitter ran rampant: “throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” “shutting the barn door after the horse gets out,” “cutting off its nose to spite its face,” etc.

The strategy seems to be that if nofollow links are being used as they were intended (well, as Google intended anyway), sites that are all promotion and no content would have a harder way getting to the top of the search engine results pages. Google’s fear is that paid content will game the system when it comes to odd or unusual searches, and the person who really does devote his life to making the world’s best butterfly-shaped cakes will lose out to the paid content sites who had writers or videographers hack together a 5-step instructional page or video.

Whether it will work or not is yet to be seen. As for now, paid content sites are doing pretty well for themselves. And the search engines that cater to them, like Ask.com, which wraps a few “real” sites in with sponsored results, are doing pretty well too. From February 2010 to March 2010, Ask.com’s share of search engine traffic went from 2.84% to 3.44%, while the traffic for the other (and admittedly much larger) search engines stayed relatively flat. Have a look at the screen shot of Ask.com’s results for “How do I bake a butterfly shaped cake” to see for yourself the influence of paid content on this search engine.

paid content

reciprocal link exchange

If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you might be scratching your head and saying, “What?”

We’ve come down hard on link exchanges for the purpose of building your Google PageRank or search engine standing, and there’s good reason for it. It started out as a way to cheat to get to the top. You give some links, and you get some back. It sounds harmless, and when done “organically” it’s not just harmless, it’s a great way to boost your position in the search engine rank pages (SERPs). Say you run a blog about motorcycle gear and you’ve been at it for awhile, so you’ve built up some history. You might find some of the site you wish would link to you (but that may never know you exist) and simply ask if they would link to your site. Quite often the answer is “yes.” Most legitimate websites have enough good will that they’ll give a promising newcomer a little help.

However, in between the link farms, which are created solely to increase back links regardless of relevancy or reputation, and doing it the old fashioned way by asking sites to link to you, there are some programs that walk a middle path. They may have a legitimate website where site owners can categorize their site and find other sites that are about the same (or nearly the same) topic. For example, such a site might have a category for cooking blogs and another category for political blogs, another for sites on antique book appraising, and a bunch more categories.

The idea is that each day you’ll go to your category or one that’s closely related, look at several sites, and click a button that gives that site some link love by placing a link to it. And every day a bunch of other sites in your niche will do the same thing and hopefully leave you some back links in exchange.

Is this “cheating”? Will search engines penalize you for this?

It’s hard to say.

In the screen shot you can see part of Google’s Webmaster guidelines that kind of / sort of address this. Clearly, exchanging links for the sake of links regardless of relevancy or quality is not good. Google will penalize your site for this.

link exchange guidelines

On the other hand, it says that “link schemes” can damage your standing and include among “link schemes”

Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)

The important word in that statement is “excessive.” How do you define “excessive”?

One way that link exchanges may seem excessive has less to do with their sheer numbers and more to do with their relevancy. If you run a site about organic gardening and exchange links with a couple of, ahem, “adult entertainment” blogs, you’re doing much more harm than good.

If, however, you participate in a link exchange with a relevant category and you find a few sites that you wouldn’t have found otherwise, that are good fits for your site as far as relevancy and quality, then there’s no real problem. If you had found those sites organically, you probably would have asked for links from them anyway. You just had a little help finding them.

Look at it this way: If Google gave no influence to back links, either good or bad, or if Google didn’t exist, would you link to those sites and ask for links to yours? Or alternatively, would you link to those sites even if you had no idea if they would link to you? If the answer is yes, then you’re probably OK.

If you run a site and you have, say three hours a day you devote to research and / or link building (I wish!) then you probably shouldn’t devote more than one of those hours to participating in a targeted link exchange. Spend the other two working on other off-page optimization like searching out new sites to evaluate and possibly ask for back links. That way you won’t risk an explosion in link numbers that would tip off the search engine gods and make them think you’re up to some illegitimate link-swapping.

When you find a relevant site that you really like, and you read it and are convinced it would be a good back link to have, asking directly for that back link means a lot more than the three or four links you might get on an “I’ll link to you if you link to me” site. For one thing, it’s great to get that vote of confidence when someone likes your site enough to ask for a link. The first time some cool site contacts you to ask for a back link is a milestone of sorts.

And another thing to consider is this: how many high quality sites do you know of that have link exchange “badges” – particularly above the fold – that indicate their participation in link exchange sites? Not many, I’d bet. While they’re not exactly signs of desperation, they show exactly what you’re up to, and indicate that maybe you can’t get back links any other way. Fair? Of course not. But that’s the reality you have to deal with.

Link farms and paid link exchanges really will harm your site, no question. Targeted link exchange programs where you give and ask for links based on relevancy and perceived quality can be OK, as long as you don’t depend “excessively” on these sites for links.

Press Releases

Online public relations campaigns can be used as very effective off-page SEO. Done well, they can increase targeted traffic to your site. A good PR effort for SEO should include keyword optimized press releases to increase the visibility of your brand in the marketplace and get you more leads and sales.

In the best of all worlds, you would use both “push” and “pull” marketing, where you push your message to the media your prospects tend to use most. The pull strategy “pulls” prospects to your site by making your site more visible in media where your prospects already visit. The end result can be more traffic, higher placement on SERPs, more organic, high quality, inbound links to your site, and press releases being picked up by top industry publications.

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