Time for the session I’ve been looking forward to the most from the conference, hoping for some juicy linkbuilding tips.  No time for an intro – straight in.

Andrew Girdwood – BigMouthMedia

Andrew kicks off by talking about how the linkbuilding industry is killing the web – “The Inconvenient Truth of Link Building”.  Basically there has been such a flood of shite content, press releases and scraping just from the point of view of getting links that the web has been polluted.  Links are supposed to be a vote of confidence, but this has been muddied.

Andrew proposes a methodology for filtering out natural links. Start by asking whether the link is on a trusted site or not, if not, the link should be devalued.  If yes, ask “is the rate of growth for links to the sites natural?”, and also “has the link been ‘built’?” – his argument is that if the link has been ‘built’ ie manufactured rather than naturally acquired it shouldnt be counted by search engines.  Personally, I think the onus should be on search engines to be able to figure out what counts as a vote and what doesn’t – if you don’t like how sites are ranking based on certain ‘built’ links then that’s fine but they’re not going away anytime soon.  I think a lot of built links are perfectly natural and editorially given based on the content and the effort required.  Just as a lot of ‘natural’ links are manipulated via offline relationships, PR and backscratching and have little to do with editorial approval. I think Fantomaster would probably say “who cares? if it works it works, leave the rest to Google to figure out”.  :)

In terms of natural signals Andrew is a fan of Facebook like buttons as well as other social media sites and Google Reader likes/recommendations – these are things that help people vote on content which puts it in front of others.  I think the suggestion is that these are becoming better signals than links.   My reaction is that these can be gamed just as much (if not more) than links.  Social media ‘likes’ also dont give you the same long term editorial vote as a physical link (better for QDF IMO).

Definitely food for thought from Andrew here!  I think I’d like to hear more about exactly what he means.

Dixon Jones – Receptional

Dixon starts with a plug for Majestic SEO.  He is going to go through some ways of using the tool.  He shows the cumulative comparitive backlink tool as a way of analysing the competitor landscape in a niche.

Dixon demonstrates a way of visualising anchor text within Majestic – a raw dump of anchor text of backlinks in an Excel is not all that useful.  Going from how Avinash Kaushik has talked about using visualisation tools, he suggests dumping a list of anchor texts into TagCrowd to get an idea of what the key themes and words within the anhchor texts are.

Dixon then talks about reclaiming lost links by pinging your backlinks and determining which ones are 404ing or have 302 redirects.  Not sure whether this function is a feature of Majestic or whether he is using something like Xenu to crawl a list of backlinks (looks that way).

Re Quality vs Quantity links – Dixon thinks Google still hasn’t figured out the correct balance of filtering out ‘bad’ links (in agreement with Andrew) but there are very few links to any site that individually provide a lot of link juice. These are the ones to look for when analysing competitor backlinks.

Don’t just look at the backlinks to the homepage or entire site – look at backlinks to individual inner pages – this is a great way to find golden links to competitors.

Good tips but nothing really ‘out of the box’ in my view – just how to use Majestic for competitor link analysis.

Q from Rob: is there a correlation between backlink domain diversity or number of Class C IPs and rankings? Dixon: it doesnt take a genius to figure out that thousands of links from the same Class C IP are basically controlled by the same country, so it is a big signal.

Kelvin Newman – SiteVisibility

Kelvin is going to share 17 (yes seventeen) Ways to get links from university and government sites.  This is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for from SMX.  Kelvin stresses that there isn’t inherent benefit from an ac.uk or .gov but of course these tend to be

1. Reach out to bloggers. This is a great tactic in itself, but realise that there are a lot of academic blogs hosted on university sites. Follow/read them,
2. Offer a student / staff discount, then ask to be mentioned on their website (personally I can vouch for this technique as one of the best ways of building authority links to a site).
3. Give the university some good press – they all have press departments looking to showcase good things people are saying about this
4. Participate in a scheme – eg industrial placement / sandwich schemes where they provide an intern / graduate.  These were then featured as a case study on their site.  So you get business benefit as well as link benefit from this
5. Sponsor a student event (it’ll cost peanuts to do) – get a link back
6. Deliver a careers talk – it’s hard to get a job as a graduate, so they love guest speakers from every sector. As well as the obvious benefits to your business of attracting graduates, you can also get links from their careers site and events calendars
7. Advertise a job via their careers service – get a link back to your site – again this clearly has a business benefit
8. Become a case study for their business department – eg MBA courses and business studies degrees can analyse the company -> links
9. Get boycotted! A little bit of bad publicity doesn’t hurt much – eg Sussex Uni (where I went as did Kelvin) has a reputation for being quite activist
10. Consider launching a community website – government sites tend to link to these – eg local organisations – secondary link juice this way
11. Set up a charitable website – it’s much easier to get links without commercial content
12. Some government sites do have business directories! They have the highest editorial standards of any directories I’ve ever seen, but they are out there!
13. Put on an event – the more local the better, again one of the few commercial sites a government site will link to
14. Start a campaign (it helps if the council agreees with the cause) [on a side note, great image of an I <3 Myself badge - actually all the images are top drawer as always with Kelvin's slideshows]
15. Job websites are one of the few types of purely commercial sites that government websites will link to
16. Run For Parliament (LOL) – this could be an outrageous PR stunt, many authority sites including government ones will link to
17. Tip 17 was missing which Kelvin blames on the birth of his daughter (fair enough man, you’ve just delivered your weight in gold there).  But he does say he’s working on an encylopedia of linkbuilding which will have a few more.  Cant want to check it out!

A Question from Rob to Kelvin: you might have problems eg getting your university radio site to link to your viagra site… Kelvin agrees and makes the point that all of these techniques are not purely about getting a link – they have to be more than that and have some kind of viable relationship element to them.  Good point, well made.

Really impressed with this one, well done Kelvin!  I wonder whether UK universities and government sites are going to be flooded with approaches from SEOs pimping out their clients now.  I doubt it, because (a) people tend not to follow up on linkbuilding tips, and (b) most of these require some actual effort to build a relationship / do some graft to get the benefit, that rules out a lot of people.  If you’re one of the remaining few you’re on to a winner.

[Update: Below are Kelvin's slides, complete with cool pictures. I could of course have embedded this above the notes, but of course you wouldn't have bothered to read them then!]

John Straw from Influence Finder

John is showcasing a new tool for finding influential link sources, Influence Finder, which SEOchicks has exclusively scooped earlier today – check it out!  The basic idea behind the tool (which frankly looks pretty awesome) is to take the raw data provided by backlink tools to narrow it down to what are the most influential links within that backlink profile.

The first thing the tool does is to collate lists from different tools (starting with Majestic API)  to get the maximum data set, and then verify which still exist.

Then the tool tries to identify which of the links come from blogs, the idea being that blogs are strong places where influential links can be found.  This is done using a decision tree, which has a 94% accuracy of determining what is a blog and what isn’t looks pretty clever.

Then the list of blogs are sorted to filter out which are active, ‘alive’ (ie not auto feed bots) and not lapsed bloggers.  Lots of scientific method involved here.

The results? They reckon the algo the tool uses to identify linking partner sources is very good.  He shows some examples of an analysis on Econsultancy who wanted to know which are the relationships that are most worth building up, ie the bloggers that are more influential.

Also he says that MyDeco have tried this and the linkbuilding that used to take them 1 day now takes 1hr with this tool, apparently.

I think this is a fascinating tool and one I look forward to having a play around with at some point.  The important thing to note is  that this isn’t a way of finding authoritative links – you can do this with metrics like PR, mozRank etc. But this is about finding influential bloggers to build relationships with.  It’s something that we SEOs (and indeed social media marketers) do manually – it’s a time consuming but very important process.  If  it does as good a job as it seems it could revolutionise the process of identifying blog partners.

Apparently social media influence tracking is on the way but not yet part of the tool.  Another mention for Nichola Stott who asks about the “salmon protocol” – personally I have no clue what this is, it sounds like a Monty Python sketch to me.  That girl is like a walking encyclopaedia, seriously.

Final Tips:

• Build relationships (eg bloggers)
• The links which are harder to get are the most valuable

linkbuilding · liveblogging · smx

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