Central Perk: SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

joi, 16 septembrie 2010

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

4 Valuable Link Building Services (Zemanta, MyBlogGuest, EightfoldLogic & Whitespark)

Posted: 16 Sep 2010 04:53 AM PDT

In the last year, there's been a plethora of entrants to the field of link building services outside the traditional software basis of reversing competitors' backlinks (like our Link Intersect, LAA or Open Site Explorer tools) and consulting/direct purchase. In this post, I'll try to cover some of the interesting major new services, as well as present some long-standing options that some SEOs may not have discovered.

I've segmented the services below into unique sections to help differentiate the types of link building they offer. Some are more service-based, others are pure-software and the first section is more visibility-based than direct link acquisition.

Zemanta

One of the more unique offerings in the last few years, Zemanta lets publishers submit a feed of content or images to them, which then appear in front of bloggers in the "composition" window (while they write their posts). These are labeled as "related posts" and have multiple benefits:

They can improve branding amongst a blogging audience (as bloggers will see your site/brand name while they write)
They can draw in direct links (if the blogger chooses to link to your work in the post or as a "related post" at the bottom - or through links from image references)
They can attract direct traffic from the bloggers themselves, who are likely to click on links/content that appears to be interesting

Zemanta's Content Recommendations
You can try Zemanta's service via a demo on their site

Zemanta has (according to their team) been formally approved by Google's search quality folks as a white-hat service (which makes sense since all they're doing is showing advertising content to writers, who then determine if they want to link or not) and is now included in Wordpress and Blogger.

SEOmoz has been using them for over a year now (we started with a trial and continued on) and we've seen good results - we tend to get a half dozen or so links to our content (the blog and YOUmoz) each month which can be seen through their reporting system (which has some upgrades in the works).

*Other than our paid use of the service, SEOmoz does not have any affiliations with Zemanta or its founders.

MyBlogGuest

Founded by Ann Smarty, MyBlogGuest provides a platform for those seeking to write and receive guest posts. The service is relatively simple, but potentially quite powerful. If a reasonable number of quality blogs and sites participate in the marketplace, the opportunities for providing great posts and receiving traffic and links back are tremendous (as are the opportunities for those seeking more content and relationships).

Blogging is an inherently social field and while the links may be a primary driver for many interested in the site, Ann has made it clear that she hopes deeper relationships will emerge from the connections. The site's layout and signup process are impressive and compelling, though driving action once inside the platform could still use a bit more polish.

The marketplace is currently based on a forum connections system

You can read more about the project in SearchEngineLand's interview with Ann from February.

I'll be surprised if some Silicon Valley style startups don't pop up to copy this model. Hopefully Ann can stay far enough ahead of the game through a network effect to remain compeitive. It's a terrific idea that needs only enough branding and awareness in the space to take off.

*SEOmoz does not have an affiliation with this site, though we have contracted Ann, personally, to do projects for us in the past.

EightFoldLogic's Linker

Originally known as Enquisite, EightFoldLogic, a software company with offices in Victoria BC and San Francisco has recently launched a marketplace of their own for website owners of all stripes called "Linker." The premise is similar to MyBlogGuest, but the audience is wider and the interface more customized for creating one-to-one, private connections.

Eightfoldlogic's Linker
Linker enables the creation of "criteria" much like personal ads for linking connections

Within a day of signing up in a single category, I had four potential "matches"

Linker's goal is to connect sites and marketers interested in partnerships or link relationships with one another. Since their service ends at the time of connection, the method of obtaining the link is up to the parties involved. This means plenty of white hat options, but also potential gray hat ones - however, EightFoldLogic's Richard Zwicky and the audience they've traditionally attracted lean white hat, so I expect this won't be an issue unless the audience changes substantially.

The concept of marketplaces for link acquisition and connecting to site owners interested in links is a compelling one, but the key, as with MyBlogGuest above, will be achieving the critical mass of users necessary to make the service valuable. To that end, Linker's made their product completely free for the next couple months - you can sign up here.

*SEOmoz provides link data via our API to EightFoldLogic but does not have a financial stake in the company or this product.

Whitespark's Local Citation Finder

A few months ago, I wrote a blog post about a tactic to grow your Google local/maps rankings that involved a similar principle to the automated tool built by Whitespark and Ontolo.

The concept is to find sites that are included in Google Local's "sources" for maps and local review data that link to or reference multiple sites that rank in the local results. It's a simple idea, but well executed and incredibly useful for those seeking to optimize their local listings. You can try the Local Citation Finder here - results take just a few minutes to be returned.

Whitespark Local Citation Finder
Enter some data about your site/goals and the citation finder will email you potential sources for listings

As the local results grow in importance and competition, and as the value of having these consistent, multiple listings rises, I suspect this tool will be incredibly popular. I'd love to see further productization around showing more data about the importance/value of particular local listing sites, and some opportunities to help control and manage those listings, but this first version is pretty exciting on its own.

*SEOmoz does not have a financial or product relationship with either WhiteSpark or Ontolo, though we have been talking to the latter about use of our API in other products.

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Although there are dozens of other services I'd love to cover, these are some of the most interesting to me, personally. As always, looking forward to your thoughts and recommendations, too!

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LDA correlation 0.17 not 0.32

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 03:03 PM PDT

Posted by bhendrickson

LDA is remarkably well correlated to SERPs, but by substantially less than I thought or claimed. Expected correlation (as measured by expected spearman's correlation coefficient over our dataset) is 0.17 instead of 0.32. I found a mistake with the calculation that produced the 0.32 score.

0.17 is a fine number, but it is awkward having previously claimed it was 0.32.

Some Implications:
Statements I made in the past two weeks along the lines of "LDA is more important (as we measure it, yada yada) than other ways we've found to evaluate page content, and even more surprising than any single link metric like the number of linking root domains" are incorrect. A corrected statement would be "LDA is better correlated (yada yada) than other ways to measure page content relevance to a query that we've looked at, but less correlated (yada) than several ways to count links."

Topic modeling is still another promising piece of the pie, but the slice is not as large as I thought. Or claimed.

Slightly long winded description of the bug and what evidence there was of it:
I was looking into the discrepancy between Russ Jones's chart, which showed roughly a linear relationship between SERP ranking and sum LDA scores, and Sean Ferguson's chart, which showed a huge jump for the mean LDA score but the rest pretty random. Russ Jones had based his chart off our tool. Sean based his chart off the spreadsheet. After looking at it for a little bit, it was pretty clear the source of the discrepancy was that the tool and the spreadsheet are inconsistent.

I tried reproducing a few results of the queries in the spreadsheet using the tool. After about a dozen, it was clear the spreadsheet (compared to the tool) had a consistently higher scores for the first result, and consistently lower scores for the other results. That is technically referred to as the ah shit moment.

I reviewed the code that differs for the web page and the spreadsheet, and found a bug that explains this. When generating scores for the spreadsheet, it caused the topics for the query to be largely replaced with topics for the first result. This made the first result to be scored too highly, and later results to be scored lower.

Excluding the first result from every SERP, the bug actually made the results less correlated in the spreadsheet, but the help getting the first result correct was enough to boost the correlation up a lot.

A Few Related Thoughts:

When I release statistics in the future, I will continue to try to ensure we provide enough data to verify (or in this case show a flaw with) the calculation. Although I found the bug, it was only a matter of time before someone else would try reproducing a few of the queries in the tool and see the discrepancy. So releasing data is a good way to ensure mistakes get discovered.
The actual expected correlation coefficient, 0.17, still is, at least to us at SEOmoz, exciting. But the smaller number is less exciting, and it really really sucks I first reported the expected value for the coefficient as 0.32.
Some have claimed there is something invalid with measuring correlation by reporting the expected value of Spearman's correlation coefficients for SERPs. They are still wrong. Two wrongs don't make a right. My programming mistake doesn't invalidate any of the arguments I've made about the math behind the methodology.
Mistakes suck. I feel shitty about it. I'm particularly sorry to anyone who got really excited about 0.32.

Here is a corrected spreadsheet and below is a corrected chart. For historical purposes, I'll leave the incorrect spreadsheet available. I'll edit the two prior LDA blog posts to include links to this one.