The Maine SEO Blog

Happy 2009!  My how the year flies by!!

As a present for entering the New Year, the great Google guru Matt Cutts has confirmed it: Google’s Toolbar PageRank has officially been updated for the first time since September.

The Maine SEO blog has gone from a PR 2 to a PR 4!

Toolbar PageRank is basically inaccurate after a few days, as it’s updated only about every 3 months.  So if yours is up, enjoy and Happy New Year!

Nicki Hicks
What’s your New Year’s PR?

You may have noticed this tiny green bar on your Google toolbar that changes with every site you visit.  In its simplest terms, PageRank is one of Google’s ways to assign weight and rank to websites.

Google bases this particular algorithm off of millions of variables; the major factor being the number of (quality) incoming links.  While no one knows their true PR, the toolbar will at least give you an idea of where you’re at: with a number from 1-10, 1 being low PR and 10 high PR.  (Similarly, you will never know exactly how many incoming links your site has, but Yahoo’s Site Explorer will give you a fairly close number).  Google updates toolbar PageRank approximately every 3 months.

Being somewhat inquisitive, I decided to investigate a little further.  I took a look at 10 sites – with toolbar PR of 1-10.

I also included age because I’ve seen PageRank increase over time, simply from gaining trust from traffic rather than backlinks.  I wanted to test whether or not it had much impact on PR.  However, from this small sample, it seems too difficult to infer that age has anything to do with PR.  Perhaps with a larger sample, I could decide differently.

However, it is easy to see the direct relation between PR and backlinks.  Due to the drastic change in the number of backlinks, I had to split the charts: PR 10-6, then PR 5-1 following in order to see the similarities.

What I learned and confirmed

1. Don’t rely on your toolbar PR; use it instead as a relative guide.
2. Get as many quality, incoming links as you can.
3. Since blogs generally acquire more backlinks than regular sites, a young blog can have a better PageRank than an older site.
4. The only other website with a PR 10 (as far as anyone can tell) than Google, USA.gov, has just over 11 million backlinks – millions less than any examples I provided above a PR 7  – proving the power of a .gov (.edu’s are powerful too!).

Nicki Hicks
Watch your back(links)

Moderator: Detlev Johnson, CEO, SearchReturn

Speaker: Leslie Rohde, Founder, Windrose Software

• Why internal linking? you control your own pages, you control your own links, focuses the effects of external linking
• “Good ranking starts at home”
• Ranking is simple (On-page factors, link reputation, PageRank)
• Link Reputation (links speak louder than pages – Google bombing, aka “miserable failure”; click here, privacy policy, home, etc.)
• Fragmented reputation (”partial truth” – cooking link should be cooking appliances)
• Choose focus and force ranking/PR to “follow the money” (home page push, mid tier push, long tail push)

Speaker: Eric Enge, President, Stone Temple Consulting Corporation

• Syntax (nofollow – attribute/meta-tag, noindex, nofollow and noindex)
• Robots.txt (/test/, /cgi-bin/)
• noindex CAN pass PR
• nofollow meta-tag – will index but won’t pass link juice to ALL links on page
• nofollow attribute – won’t pass link juice to a specific link
• robots.txt – can’t crawl page, see links, or pass link juice
• For duplicate content: noindex pages, once removed: nofollow links to pages, DON’T use robots.txt page: lose ability to pass link juice)
• Content Syndication – syndicate tens of thousands of pages to a PR 8 site, noindex syndicated pages, prevents duplicate content problem, still passes link juice
• Ecommerce site – hard to get links for, solution: build a rich content tree (such as a BLOG), get links to that site, incorporate in the content tree: links to key parts of the site, nofollow all other links
• Basic Sculpting, remove: About us, Advertise with us, Contact us, Press center, List your biz on citysearch, Job opportunities, Partner sites (some)
• Duplicate content w/ http and https

Speaker: Adam Audette, President, AudetteMedia, Inc

• Text links are good – Beware of image links, have text links options, image replacement is an alternative
• Contextual links rule – images have no semantic meaning, images have emotion and context, text has semantic meaning
• Anchor text? – not golden key, be aware of context of pages, watch surrounding pages, influence increases w/ scale, on large sites: anchor text is influential
• Speak to Users – anchor text = calls to action, think about your site’s visitors
• Vary anchor text, keep it natural
• Standardize linking to all pages
• Link/page relations – Link text should match targets – again, telling the truth, keywords should surround the link and be in the link text
• Are your pages impt.? – Check internal link counts; pages w/out many internal links, give signal to bots and people = page isn’t important
• Link Thresholds – No more than 100-150 links/page BUT depends on case – Zappos has over 1500 on their brand page
• Related link structure – use related linking to flatten link structure, encourages crawling, breadcrumbs are good
• Tag pages – Have users tag pages/manually build; create popular pages, categorize, product, RSS Feeds

Speaker: Anton Konikoff, Founder/CEO, Acronym Media

• Keywords in navigation need to be ACCURATE
• Difficult to isolate net impact on rankings
• Potential success metrics: indexing levels, crawl frequency, crawl patterns, click-through rate on links
• BEFORE CHANGING links, link audit: click distribution, page abandon rates, user click paths, path to conversion
• Anchor text still has to be understood by users in order to have an optimal experience, SO balance SEO and user experience
• Business case for internal link changes: consult w/ user experience teams, sift through historical data, collect intel on competitors’ tactics, test suggestions

Q & A

• To pass juice, both Page A and Page B must be indexed
• Other search engines (not Google) follow nofollow tags
• How often is page indexed? – may show importance
• Nofollow affiliates – increase internal PR
• “Internal link currency” – spend wisely within site

NOTE: These notes are the major points of the presentations, and do not include every point the presenter made.

The short answer: no one really knows.
Sorry, I don’t have a copy of Google’s algorithms…do you?

Let’s think about it…

How about a “for instance”?  Let’s suppose that I link to a really interesting and relevant blogpost or article.  The author sees that I’ve linked to them, decides to read my blog, happens to be writing about a related topic as one of my posts, and links to it.  While this is not a reciprocal link, it is a mutual link.  In other words, these links provide benefits for both bloggers’ readers.

The issue is that we don’t know whether Google can tell the difference between mutual and reciprocal linking.  And how would they?  There are no “code footprints” to say whether two people got together and decided to give each other links or whether it happened naturally.

Google can, however, tell if you bought a link or through a link farm.  There are often bits of code associated with these exchanges that will serve as a tell tale sign to search engines that you purchased the link.

What’s important to remember

At the end of the day, links are meant to be helpful for your viewers.  I’ve talked about the importance of anchor text and how it should be keyword rich.  Equally as important is the site that you’re linking to and how relevant it is to the topic at hand.

While there are ways to buy links without looking spammy, I think your best bet is to simply link naturally.  You could also ask for links; both would result in more organic backlinks.

Yet, the question remains: what weight (or PageRank) does Google give mutual links vs. reciprocal links vs. paid links?

Nicki Hicks
Linker Au Natural

There are two major parts to SEO: on-page optimization (your copy, title, headers, descriptions, etc.) and incoming links.  Google measures incoming links with PageRank – essentially an algorithm that assigns a value to a web page from 0-10 most importantly noting how many incoming links that page has (0 being very few links and 10 being very many links).  PageRank is a contributing factor to Google’s overall ranking algorithm – however, the weight to which PageRank is held, no one knows.

What we do know is that incoming links are important.  So for a site that is new or maybe just doesn’t have many incoming links, how do you get more?!  Well, there are many things you can do…

First and foremost, identify which site(s) you want a link from.  It should go without saying that it/they should be related to your site or article – that way, you have related viewers who are interested in the topic(s).

After identifying links you want to pursue, contact the blogger or webmaster somehow.  Truth be told, it’s probably easier to engage a blogger rather than a webmaster; reason being you can comment on blogposts in a much more casual setting.  Just a few things to keep in mind when commenting:

• Get to know the blogger.
• Bring something to the table.  Don’t leave a quick “This was really intriguing” with a link to your site/blog.  (By the way, you get no link juice that way – links in comments are almost always nofollow-ed).
• Start a conversation.  Make the blogger think about what you have to say and possibly respond (that’s what your site’s link is for!)
• Don’t sell yourself…too much.  Sure, include a link back to your site in case they want to visit.  But leaving a comment that is 100% a marketing ploy reads as spam.

After leaving a few (intelligent) comments, contact the blogger directly and ask for a link.  Then, the same rules apply as directly contacting a webmaster.  When contacting a webmaster or blogger directly, then an email or a phone call (maybe both!) is in order.  There are many examples of link building letters out there.  Many of the rules of thumb are the same as leaving blogpost comments, with a few additions:

• If the person blogs or writes articles, and depending on the industry you’re in, you could suggest a review of your site/service/product.
• Spell check.  This is perhaps the easiest rule to overlook.  It’s easy to hit the wrong key, but be sure to read through your email before sending.  What looks more spammy than misspellings?
• Add a little something special, if you can.  If you’re a hotel and contacting a hotel critic, send along a coupon for a stay at your hotel.  If you’re an author looking for a book review, send a copy of your book.  Just like many things in life, you’re more apt to get what you want if you stand apart from the crowd.

Last but not least, return the favor.  Again, always be willing to offer a link in return.  As they say, sometimes it is better to give than to recieve.  Simply by giving links, you’re more likely to recieve them!

Nicki Hicks
Link Builder