joi, 13 ianuarie 2011

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog


Link Building Training - Strategies, Tactics and Tips

Posted: 13 Jan 2011 04:33 AM PST

Posted by willcritchlow

Want to know more about link building? I've got something you might be interested in. For the first time ever, we are running one-day seminars dedicated purely to link building:

Distilled link building

At both venues, you will be invited to evening networking drinks. If you want to get exclusive one-on-one time with the expert speakers, we're holding a fancy dinner the night before for very limited numbers. It costs £175 / $200 per head - book early and request your place on the booking form.

Many of you have attended a Pro seminar such as the one run by SEOmoz in Seattle (see last year's invitation) or the one run by us in London (see last year's sneak preview). Pro training consistently sells out and the feedback has been phenomenal:

Just finished ProSEO 2010 and yet again Distilled and SEOMoz knock it right out of the park - if you are attending any conference in 2011, you've just found the right people to book with. Richard Hannan, Essential Travel

An event packed full of experts giving away actionable tips and the results of quality research. Cheaper than events of much lower quality too, bargain. Will O'Hara, Zen Web Solutions

Great, focused seminar that other event management teams could learn a lot from. Richard Underwood, Telegraph Media Group

[I am getting gradually less shy about shouting about the feedback (98% satisfaction rating!) as increasingly it's others in our organisation deserving credit for this - shout out to Lynsey Little (@lynslittle) for her phenomenal work on London 2010 - she's handling London and NOLA this time around.]

The feedback we receive at the end of each seminar make for fascinating reading. Predictably, great speakers get great feedback no matter what they are talking about. Slightly less predictably, any session about link building gets high scores. Let me repeat that. It turns out that our attendees keep telling us they want to know about link building.

We carried on for a little while doing what we were doing. Then it struck us(*). What about running a seminar dedicated to link building?

OK, so you can say we were a little slow to catch on, but at least we got there, right?

The schedule

You can expect us to cover:

  • Linkbuilding and social media: hitting the sweet spot
    • Social platforms that recreate the old "linkbait on digg" effect
    • How social forces can influence pages like links and how to earn tweets / likes / shares
    • How to get links from real life relationships
  • Myths and case studies of outreach success
    • Psychology and influence
    • Content hooks to get links
  • Analysis: without data, you are working blind
    • Gathering and sorting link data
    • Understanding link metrics
    • Measuring the competitiveness of SERPs to understand the challenge you face
  • Pitfalls, mistakes and traps for the unwary
  • How to scale link building
    • How to "ask for links" scalably and effectively
    • Using tools
    • How to spend money effectively
  • Expert "give it up" secrets
    • Rand has one about nofollow links....

(*) hat-tip Tom - we were sitting at the back of a link building session by Wil Reynolds in Seattle when he turned to me and said "you know what would win the internet?"

We push our speakers hard to bring their A games - everything is designed to be actionable, specific and tips-oriented. We don't want hand-wavy generalities - we want real stuff, that you didn't already know, backed by evidence, that you can take away and actually use.

There are going to be some more speaker announcements in the coming days, but we already have lined up many of the top-rated speakers from previous events as well as some new faces:

  • Rand Fishkin is speaking at both events (he's from some company called SEOmoz - you might have heard of him)
  • Wil Reynolds from Seer Interactive - after following Wil online forever, I finally met him last year in Seattle where he gave one of the best presentations I've seen on linkbuilding. We've snagged him for London and New Orleans.
  • Tom and I - people might get us confused, but we're easy to tell apart on stage [insert your own joke here]. See for yourself in both countries.
  • Jane Copland from Ayima - as pictured below - I've learnt a lot from Jane and I can't wait to see more of what she has to say - also in both countries
  • Martin MacDonald from Seatwave is speaking in London. His presentation at London Pro was one of the highest-rated - expect some more magic to be revealed based on real data and real-life experimentation
  • Kris Roadruck from click2rank is speaking in New Orleans. He's shared some awesome tips with me behind the scenes. I'm forcing him into the spotlight. Expect great things - I've heard he does well with pressure.
  • More TBC..... Watch this space

Crowd at pro seminar

New Orleans - book now

The New Orleans seminar will be held at The Pan American Conference and Media Center. The conference center is located in downtown NOLA, and is only a short walk from the beautiful French Quarter. I'm personally really looking forward to going to New Orleans after hearing Rand rave about it. I'm assured the party is going to be something special. Book now

Stage at Pro seminar

London - book now

The London seminar will be held at the Congress Centre, the same venue that we held Pro 2010. The venue is located in London’s West End, surrounded by many hotels and great restaurants. The linkbuilding training day will be jam-packed but will be followed by networking drinks at a location nearby to the Congress Centre. Book now

We will also be announcing more details soon around our plans for a memorial lecture dedicated to Jaamit Durrani and evening fundraiser for his family in conjunction with the guys from OMD.


FAQ

I might come back and add more here, but here are a few:

  • Video -  yes - we will be recording both events - watch this space for the announcements of how to get your hands on those videos (and I believe there'll be news about the long-awaited 2010 recordings coming soon as well)
  • Pro seminars - don't worry we aren't going to stop the popular general sessions just because we're getting all specialised. There are plans to have events in Boston (May), Seattle(Aug / Sept) and London (Oct)
  • Staying up-to-date - if you want to make sure you hear all the details of all events, drop your email address here:
* indicates required

Just in case all of this wasn't clear. It's all about linkbuilding, you can book now and it's in London and New Orleans:

Link building training in London and New Orleans

If you still have any questions, you can email events@distilled.co.uk (or drop them in the comments and I'll do my best to pick them up there).


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How Many Links Is Too Many?

Posted: 12 Jan 2011 10:02 AM PST

Posted by Dr. Pete

There's a long-standing debate in SEO about the maximum number of links that you should place on any given page. If you use the SEOmoz PRO Campaign Manager, you may have seen a warning that looks something like this:

Too Many On-page Links Warning

Digging deeper into the "Too Many On-Page Links" warning, you'll see the message:

You should avoid having too many (roughly defined as more than 100) hyperlinks on any given page.

A number of people have asked where we came up with 100 as the magic number and whether this is a hard limit or just a suggestion. I'm going to talk a bit about the history, whether that history still applies, and what the potential consequences are of breaking the 100-link barrier.

Where Did We Get 100?

The 100-link limit actually came from sources within Google and has been restated for years, as recently as a March 2009 post by Matt Cutts, in which he quotes the Google guidelines as saying:

Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

The early crawlers capped the amount of data they would process for any given page, due to bandwidth limitations. Ultimately, 100 links was mostly a good rule of thumb for what would fit in a page that met those processing limits.

Could You Be Penalized?

Before we dig in too deep, I want to make it clear that the 100-link limit has never been a penalty situation. In an August 2007 interview, Rand quotes Matt Cutts as saying:

The "keep the number of links to under 100" is in the technical guideline section, not the quality guidelines section. That means we're not going to remove a page if you have 101 or 102 links on the page. Think of this more as a rule of thumb.

At the time, it's likely that Google started ignoring links after a certain point, but at worst this kept those post-100 links from passing PageRank. The page itself wasn't going to be de-indexed or penalized.

Is 100 Still The Limit?

Since Matt's 2009 comment, the Google guidelines page he quotes seems to have dropped the phrase "fewer than 100." Observations from across the SEO community and multiple Google Webmaster Help threads confirm this change. In April 2010, Google engineer John Mu endorsed the following answer:

100 links to a page is a just a suggestion … There are pages out there with more than 100 links, and it isn't an issue. If your page is sufficiently authoritative, Google is going to be interested in the pages that are being recommended by that page.

Like many Google "limits," this is probably not a concrete number, and most likely varies with site authority. It's also likely that the number has increased over time, as Google overcomes processing limitations (especially post-Caffeine).

So, Does It Still Matter?

The short answer is "yes." There's an inescapable reality in SEO that the more links a page has, the less internal PageRank each of those links passes. To quote Matt again from his interview with Rand:

At any rate, you're dividing the PageRank of that page between hundreds of links, so each link is only going to pass along a minuscule amount of PageRank anyway.

To put it simply, more links equals less PR for each link. The actual math of internal PageRank flow gets complicated fast, but let's look at a couple of very simple examples.

Example 1: 3 Level-2 Pages

Let's say we have a very basic site with a home-page and three 2nd-tier pages linked from it. I'm going to grossly oversimplify the PR model, but let's say those 3 pages each inherit 1/3 of the PR of the home-page. Let's also assume that Google doesn't allow a page to pass 100% of its own PR – we'll cap the amount at 85% of the original page's PR (we're talking about actual PR in this case, not Toolbar PR). The result would look something like this:

3-page Link Example

Here, each of the pages inherits roughly 28% (0.85/3) of the original PR of the home-page. Again, I'm oversimplifying a much more complex reality to make a point.

Example 2: 150 Level-2 Pages

Now, let's expand those 2nd-tier pages and say that the home-page links to 150 internal pages. The diagram and PR values would look something like this:

150-page Link Example

Split 150 ways, the original 85% of the PR the home-page can pass ends up being less than 0.6% (0.85/150) per page. My graphic may have gotten a little carried away, but it's easy to see how quickly internal PR can become diluted in these situations.

What's The Right Number?

As with so many complex SEO issues (and I'm considering this purely from an SEO standpoint), there's no one answer. There's a balance between building a site structure that's too deep, creating pages that are many links removed from high-authority pages, and one that's too "flat," creating a situation like the one above. While many SEOs argue in favor of flat architecture, the basic problem is that it treats every link as being equal. Do you really have 150 (or more) pages that all deserve equal treatment from the home-page and that should all carry equal PR? Probably not, and so we try to take a balanced, hierarchical approach, focusing internal PR on the most important pages first. Ultimately, while it may be outdated, the 100-link guideline is still probably a decent rule of thumb for most sites.


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"I want our democracy to be as good as Christina imagined it."

The White House Your Daily Snapshot for
Thursday, Jan. 13,  2011
 

Remembering the Victims in Tucson

Yesterday, President Obama travelled to Tucson, Arizona to attend a memorial service for the victims of Saturday’s tragic shooting.  During the memorial service the President reflected on the innocent lives that were lost, the heroism of so many brave citizens on that day, and the importance striving to be better members of our community and citizens.

Watch the video.

Photo of the Day

President Obama embraces First Lady Michelle Obama after his remarks at the memorial service for the victims of the shooting in Tucson, Arizona, January 12, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

In Case You Missed It

Here are some of the top stories from the White House blog.

Haiti: One Year Later
Patrick Gaspard, Director of the White House Office of Political Affairs and the highest ranking Haitian-American official in the Obama Administration, looks back on the last year in Haiti and on toward the future.

The President Meets with Prime Minister Hariri on Stability and Justice in Lebanon
The President meets with Prime Minister Hariri of Lebanon amidst efforts by the Hizballah-led coalition to collapse the Lebanese government.

Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Standard Time (EST).

10:15 AM: Briefing by Press Secretary Robert Gibbs WhiteHouse.gov/live

1:30 PM: The President meets with senior advisors

WhiteHouse.gov/live   Indicates events that will be live streamed on WhiteHouse.gov/live.

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SEOptimise

SEOptimise


Reverse Engineer the Search User

Posted: 12 Jan 2011 07:48 AM PST

*

Michael Martinez of SEO Theory published an article a few days ago that explains in depth how useless it is to chase Google’s algorithm. I won’t repeat what he wrote here, you can read his explanation in case you haven’t yet:

Martinez refers to reverse engineering the Google algorithm as futile and decries good old ranking factors as obsolete. I would probably not go as far as he does but nonetheless my approach is similar. I always tried not to obsess about what Google really counts and what not. I was always keen on knowing what is out there in the know but I followed my own “secret list” of ranking factors.


Back in 2004

When I started out in SEO in 2004 the first thing I wanted to sell my first client was a blog: I argued that a user wants to see relevant content on a site and a blog is the easiest way to provide that. By then blogging was popular for 3 years at least but corporate and business blogging was in its infancy. At that time it was still far from apparent that Google prefers blogs in search results. So how did I know?

Well, I simply tried to reverse engineer the search user.

I was a complete novice to SEO in those days unlike now where many people consider me a must read blogger both on SEOptimise and on my own blog. So sometimes I was wrong or years ahead of time or both. For instance I expected Google to favor whole grammatically correct sentences in the title-tag. I imagined the user wanting something similar to a readable meta description up there in the title not just a stupid list of keywords. For years Google seemed to favor repetition and lists over grammar though but today it’s not that obvious anymore. Proper English ranks as well these days.

SEO: short term vs long term

So in way I failed in the short term then. On the other hand reverse engineering the search user allowed me to provide future proof optimization years in advance. I don’t tell you to abandon well known ranking factors even in case they are not so bullet-proof as we might hope. Combine your knowledge of ranking factors with common sense reverse engineering of the search user though. Start with yourself. Try to sit back and look how you really search. Then combine this with user testing and finally with A/B testing. Chances are that what’s best for the user will also be honored by Google sooner or later.

The explanation is quite simple: Google engineers are tweaking their algo constantly to provide users with what they want, when they want and how they want it. So chances are that they discover the same user preferences you do.

Attempt to anticipate Google’s next step by looking not at Google but at Google’s source, the actual search user.

* Image: Engine by Ack Ook

© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. Reverse Engineer the Search User

Related posts:

  1. Will Facebook Search Become the Dominant Player?
  2. Twitter Search Will Rank Tweets One Day – Topsy Does Already
  3. 30​ Web Trends You Have to Know About in 2011

Seth's Blog : Raising expectations (and then dashing them)

[You're getting this note because you subscribed to Seth Godin's blog.]

Raising expectations (and then dashing them)

Have you noticed how upbeat the ads for airlines and banks are?

Judging from the billboards and the newspaper ads, you might be led to believe that Delta is actually a better airline, one that cares. Or that your bank has flexible people eager to bend the rules to help you succeed.

At one level, this is good advertising, because it tells a story that resonates. We want Delta to be the airline it says it is, and so we give them a try.

The problem is this: ads like this actually decrease user satisfaction. If the ad leads to expect one thing and we don't get it, we're more disappointed than if we had gone in with no real expectations at all. Why this matters: if word of mouth is the real advertising, then what you've done is use old-school ad techniques to actually undercut any chance you have to generate new-school results.

So much better to invest that same money in delighting and embracing the customers you already have.

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