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| A New Perspective On Link Building Posted: 20 Jun 2011 04:37 AM PDT Posted by Dan Deceuster This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
Let's be honest, link building is not the most glamorous task out there. We all know it has to be done. We all know search engine algorithms heavily weight link metrics. But no one ever looks forward to sitting down and building links. I believe this paradigm is self-defeating. If you don't want to do something but still do it because you have to, how can you expect to be successful? In sports you hear phrases like "the other team just wanted it more" or "they didn't show up to play" or something similar. When athletes are just going through the motions it is pretty obvious. What would make link building any different? I think it is time to offer a new perspective on link building. Let's start thinking of it as relationship building instead. Please bear in mind, I'm not talking about low level linking tactics like social bookmarks, directory submissions or article publication. No real relationship is involved in acquiring these links. However, for those who like to leave blog comments, request link exchanges or email webmasters, it's time to get your head in the game. Building A Relationship Online I'm not talking about eHarmony here. I'm talking about the relationships we can build with webmasters, which in turn naturally play out in their websites and ours. Let me start with a personal example. I started a college football blog a few years ago. After about a year of the routine link building tactics, I decided it was time to start building relationships. For those of you familiar with the BCS, I am aggressively opposed to it. I did, however, know of a blog or two that favored it. I decided to reach out to one of these webmasters. I suggested that he first post an argument in favor of the BCS. I would then respond on my blog and reference his original argument. The debate ended up going back and forth over a few months and several blog posts. Naturally, I followed his blog and he followed mine. I linked to his blog and he linked to mine. My readers visited his blog and his readers visited mine. All the good things you are supposed to get from a successful SEO campaign naturally came to both of us through that relationship. What would have happened if I was just another link in his blogroll? What would have happened if he was just another link in my comments? Perhaps our rankings would have improved slightly, but we both would have missed out on the extra visitors and subscriptions. A Case Study: Danny Sullivan
Probably not. You probably want to build a relationship with Danny, which would in turn do more for your blog than that one link anyway. So how could you go about doing this? First, find as much information as you can about Danny without being a creepy stalker. A quick Google search could tell you he runs Search Engine Land, has a personal blog at Daggle.com, has a Twitter and Facebook account, uploads photos to Flickr, answers questions on Quora, shares stories on Digg, posts videos on YouTube and even has a Wikipedia entry. This can take all of 10 minutes and in that superficial research you can learn a lot about Danny as well as see other connections he has in the industry which could benefit you as well. After doing the research, you should start engaging Danny in various ways. Some obvious methods would be to comment on his blog posts at Search Engine Land, interact on Twitter or reply to his answers on Quora. After a few weeks, Danny may start to recognize your name when he sees it. The next thing I would try would probably be pitching a topic for SMX. If you write to Danny, who by now has a general idea of who you are, and come up with a great pitch for a great lecture at SMX, there's a good chance you could present in front of hundreds of people in your industry. Which do you suppose is more valuable, a link from Search Engine Land or a 15 minute introduction and presentation in front of other industry experts? Not to mention at that point you will have interacted directly with Danny as a result of being an SMX speaker. An aspiring SEO blogger would do well to have one of the most influential people in the industry as a friend on Facebook and follower on Twitter, don't you think? Finding Relationship Opportunities Most of the time our existing relationships are what lead us to new relationships. You may not know Danny Sullivan or Rand Fishkin, but do you know someone who works at Search Engine Land or SEOMoz? The best relationship opportunities can be found in our existing relationships. Networking can be a very powerful tool in building new relationships. One of the best books I've read in a long time is called The City Of Influence. I highly recommend it for those looking for more information on the value of relationships and how to network in order to build new relationships. Another easy way to build a new relationship is by looking for guest blogging opportunities. For example, I just did a Google search for 'finance + guest + blog' and found several websites that publish guest posts as well as tips for being a guest blogger. If you were in the finance industry, these could be great relationships. Bloggers seem to be the most open to making new connections, so another technique is to simply Google your keyword + blog. Look for blogs in your industry and find people you can reach out to. Another method would be to search Twitter for your keywords and see who you can connect with. Speaking from personal experience, I get emails all the time from people looking for links. I ignore them. Every once in a while I get an inquiry from my personal blog, or a direct message in Twitter, or an email proposal that doesn't involve links at all. I pay attention to these and other webmasters do too. Conclusion Rand Fishkin has a brilliant slideshow that explains the history and future of Google rankings. Evidence is pretty strong that social media is starting to have a big impact on organic rankings. In other words, relationships, not links, are poised to become the top ranking factor. Search engines openly say they calculate a users authority and trust. A tweet, like, citation or mention from an authority user is going to go a long way in the future of SEO. So remember, links matter now and you need to have them to be successful. Don't stop looking for link opportunities. But I would stress that the link building of the future is going to be relationship building. People are going to influence rankings more than links do. So let's stop focusing on the link building and start focusing on the relationship building. I believe we'll all be better off for it. P.S. Don't miss Rand's great post Head Smacking Tip #20: Don't Ask Sites for Links. Find People and Connect that he wrote after this post was initially written. |
| Building Faceted Navigation That Doesn't Suck Posted: 19 Jun 2011 01:48 PM PDT Posted by MikeCP Back in February I wrote a post here on SEOmoz called "Tips and Must-Haves for your eCommerce Platform". One of the essentials I mentioned was faceted navigation that doesn't suck. The fact is, a good faceted navigation system is hard to come by because of the intricacies involved. In this post I'd like to dive a bit deeper into this topic. ----- Developers and technical SEOs have heard the search engine mouthpieces say it over and over: "Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines". If you ask me, there's one big reason why "primarily" sneaks itself into that statement: Faceted Navigation. Oh, how nice it would be to be able to build faceted navigation into a site without concern for the search engines. Unfortunately, this isn't the case, and in this post I'll attempt to break down what it takes to do it right for both users and search engines. But hold on here. Let's first define faceted navigation. Faceted navigation is most often found on eCommerce sites, and is a means to allow the user to apply filters (ok, or "facets") as they browse through thousands of products. You'll find faceted navigation on most any eCommerce site with a ton of products, like Best Buy.
In the example above, I've filtered my way down to find the perfect product:
As a user, that was enjoyable. I can add and subtract filters all day until I've found exactly what I want. For the search engine, there can be a number of unfavorable consequences. Naive Faceted NavigationThe search engine might begin to crawl through these facets, wrecklessly adding and subtracting filters and indexing whatever the hell it wants. Eventually crawl fatigue catches up to it, and it leaves your site. Sounds like someone I know:
This is the naive way to build faceted navigation because it allows all pages to be crawled and indexed, and the hope is that the engines figure out what's important on their own. SPOILER ALERT: They won't. More than likely, plenty of actually important pages will not get the crawl love they deserve. Can I Noindex or Nofollow?There are plenty of eCommerce packages out there that utilize the robots = noindex and nofollow as a solution to this problem, but it's really not helping too much. Each has their own shortcomings. Noindex - Well, you've managed to keep the really ugly, over-faceted pages out of the index, but the noindex does nothing to stop the search engines from wasting crawl bandwidth. Nofollow - Remember, robots=nofollow doesn't mean the engines aren't going to crawl through the link, it just means no link equity will flow through the link. Again, this isn't a good method to preserving crawl bandwidth. Now, the extreme opposite way to handle faceted navigation... The Hatchet ApproachThis is the method that Best Buy appears to be employing. The top-level categories are crawled and indexed, but once any sort of facet is applied the pages are excluded via robots.txt. It's the reason why their main "Laptops" page is in the index, but "Apple Laptops" is not. And therein lie the fault with the hatchet approach. You might very well be missing out on some really strong organic landing pages. Don't you think Best Buy would like to rank for "Apple Laptops"?* They don't. * I'm merely using Best Buy as an example of the hatchet approach. There could very well be some ulterior reasoning for not having an indexed "Apple Laptops" page. So How To Build Faceted Navigation That Doesn't Suck?The principles of great faceted navigation should be becoming clear... Faceted Navigation Should:
Easier said then done, but let's talk about potential ways to make it happen. Solution 1: AJAXOver the last 2 years or so, the search engines have made strides in the indexation of AJAX content. By following some standards set by Google, webmasters are now able to have their AJAX content indexed (to some degree). With the user experience created by AJAX so favorable, websites are beginning to take advantage. All that aside, in my example I want use AJAX in a way that keeps the engines from crawling through and indexing pages that are only navigable through AJAX. There are a few eCommerce sites that are doing this right now with their navigation. The JavaScript-enabled UserAJAX can make the user experience of applying and unapplying filters to your navigation fast and enjoyable. In this example, we want an uncrawlable AJAX faceted navigation. For this segment of our user base, our needs are met. Take the 'narrow your search' feature on FramesDirect for a live example.
Here we are on the Oakley glasses static page. We can add and subtract facets. The page won't reload, the URL won't change, and the items will filter right there on-page.
Non-JavaScript Users and the All Important Search EnginesThis is where it gets tricky, but it's also where the magic happens. We want to build our AJAX navigation in a way that the fallback for non-JavaScript users is a static HTML navigation block. This HTML block contains faux-facets that are just links to deeper html pages, which we've chosen to build based on search volume. Let's demonstrateWhile shopping at Stinky Jim's Smile-Time eCommerce Shoppe, the JavaScript enabled user sees this:
That navigation is generated at page load via JavaScript, so when the non-JavaScript user (and the search engine) arrives, it never loads. Instead, our fallback is presented:
Now, we've got our 'top categories' (AKA organic landing pages) indexed, and the engines are only spending time crawling pages that matter. Unfortunately, I've never actually seen this solution implemented anywhere, so I can't link to a live example. In theory, this is a great way to tackle this problem. Mockups courtesy of Mockingbird. I wish there embed feature was better, but it's a great mockup tool! Wait...Is This Cloaking?Cloaking is the practice of showing different content to users and search engines. In my opinion, this is not cloaking, and actually I think Google would quite like this solution. Forgetting the search engines for a minute, we're providing a means for the non-JavaScript user to navigate through an eCommerce site, when otherwise it would be a frustrating experience. Building a universally accessible site is surely something of which Google would approve. Solution 2: Selective Robots.txtThis solution is the happy medium between the Naive and the Hatchet approach. With the selective robots.txt solution, we'll define a URL parameter that will serve as road block to the search engines. Let's call that "crawl=no". Our robots.txt file might look like this:
Now, we'll need to create some server-side rules that define when that "crawl=no" is appended to a URL. One simple idea might be to append "crawl=no" from the third facet application forward. To describe:
Take a look at the faceted navigation on TrendToGo. They've implemented almost exactly this method of dealing with facets. Honestly, I like the AJAX solution better because of the AJAX user experience, but both should get the job done. Any More Solutions or Live Examples?I expect that a lot of the folks who are able to innovate with their navigation are those smaller, more agile businesses. These are the sites that might be under most peoples' radars, including my own. If you know of any other excellently built faceted navigation implementations on the web, I'd love to hear about it in the comments or let me know on Twitter. P.S. If you're one of the million people calling to hire my dog, you can now stop. Space is now happily employed by SEOmoz, where he's making a VERY competitive salary of treats. |
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