SEO

Since we’re all on this topic today. What makes a famous SEO anyway. That to me is an idiotic term. Let’s take other industries. Are there “O-Ring Sales Celebrities” and are there secret O-Ring meetings? People shouldn’t want to be famous, they should just want to make some connections. Don’t be an ass, help people when you can and they’ll help you in return. All it takes is an email, no need for a blog if you don’t want to write one. It’s called networking people. So without further ado:

If you’re a “famous” SEO and you are a douchebag fucktard that only will associate with other “famous” SEO fucktards and are holier than everyone else because you think you’re entitled:

If you’re a “famous” SEO and friendly to the people that are friendly to you, help your colleagues when you can, and although you probably don’t have time to talk to the little guy sometimes that’s okay because your time is limited and having that many people clamoring to be your friend just to use you is probably annoying but it’s the effort that counts:

If you’re a “regular” SEO and you are a douchebag fucktard that only will associate with “famous” SEO fucktards because you think that’s the only way you’re going to get anywhere:

If you’re a “regular” SEO and friendly to the people that are friendly to you, help your colleagues, and give everyone a chance whether they’re famous or not:

If you’re a human and buy me a beer at the next conference

Okay people. I don’t understand why all of the sudden we have multiple posts on “SEO red flags”…whatever that really means anyway. Can we please just say that all SEO could be interpreted by a search engine as a red flag? I agree with all of these posts, but I also disagree with all of these posts. It all depends on how it’s used so why are we writing about it?

Nofollow As A Red Flag: So they recommend we use nofollow then use it against us. Nofollow helps the search engines stay away from bad content and keeps them from indexing things that shouldn’t be indexed (in theory. Really it’s a cop-out b/c the Google spam team can’t keep up). The engines are trying to get more and more people to adopt the use of the stupid tag, so why would there be a flag/penalty/review of it. Obviously anything in excess is going to raise a flag. If I drink 117 red bulls in an hour someone will be raising a flag for me at my funeral.

Updating Links As A Red Flag: Updating links? Why is it unnatural to think you’d want to correct links that were wrong. When you change your site architecture all of your links are going to change; or they should anyway. Why would Google want links going to irrelevant pages or anchor text that is wrong. It just makes their jobs more difficult. If I were to eat 4 gallons of ice cream in one night, I’d be sick…or a woman during…nevermind.

Sitemaps As A Red Flag: Uh, telling Google where your pages are only helps them crawl and index your site. If my sitemap goes from 20 pages to 25 million pages…duh. It’s like if I used a 50 caliber machine gun to kill a mouse. There will be some collateral damage.

Links Page As A Red Flag: Everyone knows what I’m talking about. If I have 50 pages of content and 438 pages of links that would be like France getting attacked. They would be raising a flag. A white one but a flag nonetheless.

Do I really need to keep going with this? The point is everything can be a red flag if used inappropriately. Minimal use of blackhat techniques is a red flag. Overuse of whitehat techniques is a red flag. SEO itself is a red flag. Can’t we have some different colors or something? Having a website is a red flag dammit. Hey you…are you reading this? That’s a red flag, you’re out for the season.

PS: My comments are fixed if you had a problem recently

Jim Boykin recently launched his new members only training/tool set program called Internet Marketing Ninjas. If you haven’t heard of it yet it is for sure worth looking into. (I would imagine most of you have as I don’t get that many n00b SEO people here)

I took a good look at each piece of the program. It’s not a cheap membership ($2995) but the quality of the material should warrant the price.

Jim has collected enough speakers to pretty much cover all aspects of search marketing and the majority are industry people I respect. Each of them speak at length about their specific specialties which is much more information than you usually get hearing them speak at a conference. Most of the videos average around an hour or so, but some are longer and cover more topics (ShoeMoney for instance has a 3.5 hour video).

- Aaron Wall of SEO Book
- Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim
- Bill Slawski of SEO by the Sea
- Christine Churchill of KeyRelevance
- Cameron Olthuis
- Jim Boykin We Build Pages
- Jim Gilbert KeyRelevance
- Jeremy Schoemaker of ShoeMoney
- Jill Whalen of High Rankings
- Lee Odden of TopRank
- Neil Patel of Pronet Advertising
- Todd Malicoat of Stuntdubl

I previewed some of the videos and the quality of information sounds great. You can only preview 5 minutes or so of each presentation so I didn’t get the whole experience, but with that long of a discussion I’ll assume they’re spilling most of the beans (nobody spills all the beans, especially this group, but I’d bet you get more than usual).

The price of admission is probably worth the 3k they charge simply because of the video, but you also get access to the members only tools from We Build Pages. Now most of these tools used to be free so I tried a lot of them, and they work okay. I assume since it’s going private they will be maintained a little better (something similar to the SEOmoz Premier tools). That being said, I wouldn’t sign up just for the tools. It’s nice to have them all in one place, but the majority can be found elsewhere or developed yourself with an intermediate level of coding skills.

There are also a few tools I thought were strange to even promote. Header checker, keyword density report, and spider view? I think if you’re dropping 3 dimes on this you’re probably beyond that. Another thing I would recommend is a little better explanation of what some of the tools actually do. For example, maybe a little hint at what the “Mac Daddy SEO Analysis” tool does. I am really interested in how the Link Value Tool works because I’ve been discussing building a tool like this with Scott and Jon over at Raven SEO. I guess I’ll have to sign up to find out what this one does.

Overall I give it a thumbs up. I would be interested in some feedback on anyone who has signed up for it.

Wiep recently came out with a Link Value poll in the essence of the SEOmoz Search Engine Ranking Factors and asked a panel of 17 link building experts their opinions on 39 different properties of a link and the potential weight of each. It’s a great report with some excellent insight so if you haven’t seen it, go give it a read.

As you may have noticed by my not so subtle title, I’m concentrating on a certain expert. Now I don’t personally know Eric other than speaking to him at a couple of conferences so this isn’t a personal attack. I know he’s been link building since 1994 and whatever blaa blaa blaa. Maybe he just doesn’t want to let go of any information but in my opinion this makes him look like a Digital Point poser. Let’s look at his responses to each question:

1. Anchor Text: “Multiple factors play into the ultimate effect of anchor text. The best anchor text in the world is meaningless if the site has not shown previous signals of trust.”
2. Type of link: “Again, multiple factors play into the ultimate effect of text and/or image links. The best image links in the world are meaningless if the site where they reside has not shown previous signals of trust.”
3. Surrounding text: “Multiple factors play into the ultimate effect of surrounding text. In some cases it will be useful, in some cases it will be useless.”
4. Number of links: “It will depend on quality of the source sites.”
5. Location of link: “It will depend on the source site.”
6. Reciprocity: “It will depend on the sites and the subject matter, and the historical subject specific reciprocity tendencies”
7. Target page: “As with all things, it is not as simple as people want to make it. No two sites are created equal and thus the links between them cannot be categorized equally.”
8. Location of link in source code: “It will depend on the source site.”
9. Page authority: “It will depend on the source site.”
10. Total amount of links: “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It will depend on the source site’s previously earned trust.”
11. Page authority (in internal links): “I’ve ranked pages #1 with nothing more than a single link from a single page.”
12. Age of the page: “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. You have to know what to look for. It will depend on the source site’s previosuly earned trust.”
13. Page relevance (contextual relevance): “It will depend on the both source and destination site.”
14. Amount of non-linking content: “It will depend on the source site’s previously earned trust.”
15. URL of the page: “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. You have to know what to look for.”
16. Page authority (in PageRank): “It will depend on the source site.”
17. Last date of page edit: “Not always. You have to know what to look for.”
18. Page type: “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It will depend on the source site’s previously earned trust.”
19. Domain authority (in quality of backlinks): “But…not 100% of the time.”
20. Age of domain: “Unless it was an old crappy site to begin with. If the content was junk, ten years later it is simply aged junk.”
21. Relevant authority (in rankings on relevant keywords): “Bingo. Keno. Yahtzee. Amen.”
22. Domain authority (in PageRank): “But…not 100% of the time.”
23. Domain authority (in rankings on irrelevant keywords): “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It will depend on the source site’s previosuly earned trust.”
24. Domain relevance: “For higher end trusted content sites the domain name relevance is absolutely meaningless, and has to be.”
25. TLD (.com, .edu, etc.): “You can find worthless content on any TLD. The TLD alone is not enough to say the link value will be higher/lower.”
26. Robots.txt excluded page: “SERP only.”
27. Javascript link: “SERP only.”
28. Noindex page: “SERP only.”

No response on Age of the link, Amount of outbound links, Relevance of other outbound links, Quality of other outbound links, Page relevance, Domain authority (in # of backlinks), Alexa ranking, Link is on penalized page, Redirect link, Bad neighborhood links are present and Paid Link triggers.

Weip didn’t list what value each person placed on each item so that makes it a bit confusing sometimes. However, I can see only one answer that actually isn’t doublespeak. Question 21, relevant authority in rankings on relevant keywords. Well yea, of course. The remaining culmination of his answers: “it depends, sometimes, not always” and according to him all these will work if the domain has trust (but he had no response to paid link triggers). Sometimes. Maybe. If you know what to look for.

If I were looking for some link development outsourcing and/or consulting (which I currently am actually) this doesn’t make me want to call him at all. Sometimes I’m sick and tired of people being labeled as “experts” in this industry simply because they’ve been around for a long time. Woopie fucking doo, you’ve emailed Jerry Yang…sign me up. I’m sure Eric know what he’s doing and he’s had a billion testimonials and has been called the godfather of link building, but I’ve yet to take away one piece of advice from anything he’s said online or at a conference that actually helps me do anything. And by no means am I calling myself better at it so let’s not even go there.

I just made some enemies. Bring it.

TheGypsy recently penned a good write-up on phrase based optimization (Part I, Part II). I wanted to write a prequel of sorts on why building relevant content links are important.

Page Segmentation. I know it’s a dead duck, but it seems everyone has different ideas on what this actually is. I’m not an IR expert, but here is my view on the subject. Page segmentation attempts to extract the sections of a web page and value those parts. This is not based on anything visual as some people often proclaim. It will extract blocks from the document in order to find the more important sections of a page. Repetitive information such as navigation and advertisements can be easily pulled out and given a lower weight, as these components are often placed in certain positions and formats on the site in question and throughout the structure of the web, as well as often use the same text throughout. This is done using a “shingling” algorithm to determine duplicate content and to filter out those noisy links.

Based on this interpretation, different blocks may contain links to different topics. Traditional link analysis did not differentiate links out of different semantic blocks. There is a fair amount of math involved which I will skip over, but the just of it is that sections with semantically relevant content that have passed the shingling filters are more important than those that are in navigational (margin) areas. It should also be noted the user will probably be viewing the larger content related blocks with a higher frequency and be more inclined to follow those links. There are additional formulas for determining relationships between blocks on a page, as it is likely some blocks in the navigational area are related. This is why the weight of these can fluctuate.

Another theory is to use an authority score on both the entire page and on each individual block together. This is calculated by first pulling the most important pages, then looking at the most important blocks on those pages. Theoretically this will allow the search engine to filter out the noise of advertisement and navigation type links. You can see that links in advertisements are normally in less important blocks, and could be assigned a lower weight (or none at all) than those in main content areas.

Lesson here? Get your links inside relevant content. Forget sidebar and ROS links when you can. Then go and read about phrase based indexing so you actually use the correct linking model. Then go buy some content links and have a heyday.