PowerHouse Linking Seminar

I just came across the PowerHouse Linking Seminar (thanks, Aaron).

The subject: "Learn to create and execute targeted link building campaigns from linking experts Eric Ward and Debra Mastaler"
The date: October 27/28, 2005
The location: Charlotte Sheraton Airport Hotel (Charlotte, NC)

These two people are some of the most respected names in link building, so it is definitely worth at least checking out.

What do YOU want from TLA?

NickW from Threadwatch is a bit ahead of the curve when it comes to marketing. Rather than getting standard links or banners on Threadwatch, advertisers get sponsored threads where they can engage the blog's audience directly.

Text Link Ads is a regular advertiser of course, and our latest sponsored thread asks, What do you want from a text link company? Please hop on over and let us know!

Greg Boser on Buying Links

I just got back from SES San Jose. Good show, good people, good parties. On the content side, Barry Schwartz wrote some excellent recaps as always. One of the most interesting sessions was Buying and Selling Links.

Greg Boser - WebGuerilla
Brief comments. He is very happy that there is now an actual session on this topic because it used to be considered so âbad.â The wild wild west of buying links is settling down and people are beginning to understand that it is advertising just like any other form. Sees that paid links will continue to be a part of their links in the future. Suggests adding it to your mix.

Text links have come a long way and continue to gain legitimacy and momentum as an advertising method which yields exceptional ROI. Buy up ;-)

Nick Wilson on the Hyperlink Hot Seat

Nick Wilson is the founder of Threadwatch, my *personal* favorite blog. If you read this blog, you know what Threadwatch is... enough said ;-)

1) Ask Jeeves: Up and coming 4th player, or forever 'B Team' material?

If Diller just sits on it, "B Team" all the way. If he pulls his finger out and actually does something with it then they stand a good chance of increasing market share, but even if he pulls out all the stops, i'm not convinced they'd be in with a shot at third place.

It's all about image. If they dumped that bloody stupid butler, rebrand as ASK, take a leaf out of Yahoo's book and open up to the rah rah blogpuppy mania movement, and promote a newer image, they could actually be dangerous. I don't see them having that much gumption or courage, but you never know, Diller could pull a rabbit out of the hat at any time with ASK.

2) In last week's Hyperlink Hot Seat, Aaron Wall commented on how Threadwatch has achieved a high level of success in a relatively short time (e.g., it's been blogrolled on sites like Search Engine Watch, Yahoo! Search Blog and Ask Jeeves Blog). To what do you attribute Threadwatch's steep growth curve of readership and recognition?

Being a bloody minded, egotistical, rude bastard. Didn't you know?

Seriously, I think people are bored of corporate suck up sites, any muppet can use an RSS reader and scan for news, but who wants to read the bland, boring, opinionless "commentary" that most sites in this space spew out?

I'd sooner stick my head in a bucket of cold sick...

3) You're responsible for inserting the words "bollocks" and "wanker" into my daily vocabulary. How do you feel about that?

Very proud. Fine british swear words! You'd not want your 12yr old child to be calling people wankers, but it's pretty mild and harmless really.

4) Sites like ClickZ and CNET are STILL extremely niggardly in re to their linking policy. Will this ever bite them in the butt? Or will they just get away with it forever?

I think both are way behind the curve regarding news, and the way it's reported. But I also think they'll probably get away with being arses for quite some time to come. CNet's latest attempt to catch up, "Blogma", is a farce, it only serves to prove how badly they misunderstand the current climate. As for Clickz, despite some of their staff being deeply unhappy with their non-conversational policies, they're about as clued in as CNet.

Who cares though?

5) The next time I have meat and mashed potatoes, I think I'll put a very large blob of potatoes on my plate with just a little piece of meat. And if someone asks me why I didn't get more meat, I'll just say, "Oh, you mean this?" and pull out a big piece of meat from inside the blob of potatoes, where I've hidden it. Good magic trick, huh?

Yeah! You know, if you did that with minced meat in gravy, you'd have Shepards Pie - And that's LEGAL :)

Aaron Wall Still Likes Directories

Directories have taken a lot of crap lately, but don't count them (all) out yet. Aaron Wall blogged yesterday about how he still likes directories (and believe me, he, if anyone, is aware of their flaws):

Even if Google was not placing significant weighting on directory links I still would use many of them for how they work in the other search algorithms, but with that being said it may also be worth looking more into other sources of link popularity as the business model of junk general directories is dying.

I think the business models that will work the best longterm will be those that have a strong social position in their marketplace, those who can afford to advertise a ton, those who can get media coverage, or those that naturally pick up the random citation on random blogs and community driven sites that provide many random unrequested links.

What I got from all this:

MSN = easy to spam, even with crappy directory linksGood directories = goodBad directories = badCommon sense is making a comeback

Link Building by Buying Web Sites

It's impossible to exhaust all the creative methods of getting new backlinks. A WMW post, Link development by buying competitors, highlights a lesser-used (but powerful) link building method:

My competitors in my business are in 90% of the cases unprofessionell and I just had the idea of increasing our links by buying their websites.

What would be the best way to get their links directing to us? Should we redirect their domain or should we put a bunch of our links on their website?
Any other ideas?

I like this method for several reasons:

If the site you're buying has decent, relevant backlinks, than this will be a good Hilltop-type link to your main siteYou can surround the link  to your main site with links to other authoritative sites, thus putting your main site in a good neighborhoodSince you control the entire site, you can put in tons of intra-content deep links (sorta like the Presell pages from WeBuildPages)Of course when buying and selling assets (and this includes Web sites), I have one golden rule: Buy Cheap, Sell High. If the price is right, go for it! If not, go back to writing high quality content (or comment spamming).  ;-)

Aaron Wall on the Hyperlink Hot Seat

Aaron Wall writes (that is, wrote, and continually rewrites) the most well-known search engine optimization ebook on the Web. He is also the man behind Search-Marketing.info, which, while lesser-known than SEO Book, is a great source for instructional SEO articles.

1) Yahoo!'s search algorithm: Closing in on Google, or 18 months behind?

I think they are closing, but when they started they were far more than 18 months behind, and as they draw closer they reach more toward a point of diminishing returns. I recently interviewed NFFC and he stated:

"This is what I think, SEO is all about emotions, all about human interaction. People, search engineers even, try and force it into a numbers box. Numbers, math and formulas are for people not smart enough to think in concepts."

and that if he worked at a search engine

"I would look to give good things a boost and stop focusing on finding bad things to penalise."

In the past Google was able to give people more reason to give back user data (ie: toolbar and PageRank), Yahoo! is trying to catch up with their My Web idea, but even though they allow users to block sites and share them I still feel none of the competing search services have a brand that can compete with Google, and none of them make users feel like they own and help improve the results.

Look how Google launches other products: Gmail, Orkut, using other brand names. Google wants their name to be synonymous with search. Yahoo! wants to be synonymous with everything, and that thins the brand. Owning content networks means having internal customers, and that creates a biased search service which some people will question the relevancy of.

Google has also bought Urchin and may be creating a payment system to help create the micropayment business model or get more end to end consumer behavior data. As far as collecting user data I think Google has the competition beat, but there is only so much you can do with the data before the focus on more data creates algorithms which resist innovation and change.

I think most of search distribution is down to positioning and who can lock in more users with their other services. The search service which makes you feel like you own the service will be the one that wins in distribution. As far as quality goes I think NFFC was right on that, whoever focuses more on signs of quality than reasons to penalize will win. Adding more human interaction to the algorithms would help a ton as well.

2) NickW: Highly entertaining SEO personality or rebel without a cause?

Based on regularly linking at his site and posting comments to it I obviously like it. My opinion does not matter that much though in the grand scheme of things. If you look at the more official type links, he has got blogrolled on sites like Search Engine Watch, Yahoo! Search Blog, Ask Jeeves Blog, has been Slashdotted a few times, and has had press mentions from sites like Guardian, Slate, etc etc etc.

My site is not on any of those blogrolls, has had little mention in any traditional type of press, and has had limited reach outside of the search community, so I would say in that regard he is doing a much better job than I, especially when you consider that he gets away with far more cursing than I do :)

Even when he calls people out, like ClickZ recently, they still feel the need to comment on his site, so that is fairly impressive. In less than a year his site has probably moved into the top 10 search related sites in terms of quality inbound linkage data, and with modern search algorithms it is all about linkage data.

3) SEOBook: Reached its peak, or just getting started?

Will steal a line from Larry Page at Google's recent quarterly conference call. It is still in the first inning.

4) Do you think the guy that posted here (and in subsequent comments on that thread) is really GoogleGuy as we know him (aka Matt Cutts)?

You don't know a person for sure based on a few heated forum posts. I am not sure if that was GoogleGuy or Matt Cutts. Rumour has it that Matt loves tomatoes though.

5) If you ever fall off the Sears Tower, just go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will try to catch you because, hey, free dummy!

Never been in the Sears Tower. Do not plan on going. I am a HUGE FAN of the dummies crashtestdummies.com/ though. Luckily I was able to link your question to that great band, or there would have been no link based Q&As