My Links Are Better Than Your Links

Bit.ly says that the half-life of a non-Youtube link is anywhere from 2.8 to 3.4 hours. They are looking at a LOT of link data so there is no reason to dispute their math.

Still, every now and then you see a link that seems to come back to life. It sends you more traffic. What’s up with that?

I have noticed a couple of tricks that marketers are using, both of which seem to have been pioneered (or perhaps popularized) by Fantomaster.

First, you repopulate the link in the stream. That might simply mean reposting your original message or it might mean posting a new message with the same links. (ADDED ON EDIT: Danny Sullivan calls these “second chance” Tweets.)

Second, you replace the link with a new link — but both links point to the same destination. This might be a failure of the URL shortening services to keep up with the destinations their links point to. I know I can generate a lot of Bit.Ly links pointing to the same article.

But some people seem to use multiple URL shorteners. It seems to me that this may be the result of aggregating RSS feeds in their Twitter streams or reporting other people’s content on their social media accounts. It could just be that some people are intentionally mixing up URL shorteners to point to the same destinations.

Depending on how you define “social media” (and that discussion is too long for this post), SEO Theory has (I think) a pretty good social media visibility index. Several hundred Websites send traffic to this blog every month. T.Co has displaced Bit.ly as a major source of referrals (in fact, it seems that you folks post about my articles before I do, so my Bit.ly links aren’t helping me at all — or else Twitter’s shortener is usurping Bit.ly’s glory).

I could not possibly begin to seed several hundred Websites with links so I have to assume that many of these referrals are natural. But a lot of them come from third-party aggregation sites like Alltop. Some of the referrals also come from blogs where I have left comments.

Despite the fact that I have settled on SEO Theory as the Website I habitually include in my blog comment profile, I don’t have a link building plan or strategy for this blog. I have done some link building experiments in the past but for most of SEO Theory’s history I have relied on natural link attraction. I guess you could say I have been testing a statement Rand Fishkin made about me on SEOmoz a few years ago.

Rand felt compelled to defend his decision to invite me to write for SEOmoz against unnamed critics. He listed three points that he felt justified keeping me on the blogging team. Point number 3: “Brings in links”.

I was always amused by that bullet point. To me, writing for the Internet is as natural as standing up in a room full of people and telling the speaker why he’s full of crap. It’s what I do. I was made for this. I’m opinionated and not afraid to share my opinion or whatever facts I can quickly round up.

Many years ago, when I was still learning the basics of promoting Websites, I looked at a LOT of people’s personal Websites. There was one in particular, a personal Website for a graduate student, that had attracted only 6 views (according to the on-page counter) in 2 years. I drove that view count up to 10 or 12 before I stopped looking at the page.

The graduate student’s profile was not exceptional. I forget what her specialty was. I don’t even remember her name or picture. I just remember that page and how much I felt sorry for her because no one was looking at the page. It was not an ugly page. It wasn’t an empty page. She had a respectable curriculum vita. She had created her page when the World Wide Web was still young and people would look at just about anything because it was all so new.

I compared that profile to other profiles for graduate students and after pondering the mysteries of the universe for a while I came to the conclusion that the only thing she didn’t do that other graduate students had done was get links from her friends. There was a total of one link pointing to that profile. It was an institutional link.

One should hope the lady wanted her privacy and that she felt no compulsion to promote herself on the Internet. But that Web profile taught me a lesson I have never forgotten: you’re nothing on the Web without links.

Does that sound like the Contrarian Extraordinaire Michael Martinez you have come to know and love/hate through the past 13 years? Am I not Mr. “You don’t Need No Stinkin’ Links?” Actually, I’ve never said that. In fact, I have always said the exact opposite — that you DO need links. It’s just that I have always criticized and opposed the awful link-based strategies that most SEOs have developed and pursued.

When you’re marketing on the Web you have to divide your time between three basic activities:

1. Creating content
2. Telling people about your content
3. Using your content to tell people about your content

Social media has made it immensely easy and simple to tell people about your content through your own content. If you want to do this in a formulaic way, just find as many forums and blogs as you can where you feel compelled to sit your lazy butt down and write the longest damn “articles” you are passionately driven to write. Spill your heart, guts, and soul. Share your life experience and the lessons you have learned from it.

You’re not dropping links when you do this. You’re adding to the community, building discussion, creating value for others. You’re also making a reputation for yourself. You will most likely find a few people in each discussion community who disagree with you. If you generously seek to help people, you will generate more resentment than if you just sit around and pick your nose with all the other dumb rednecks.

People resent anyone who (in their perception) makes them look bad. We may conclude that someone else makes us look bad if they disagree with us or fail to support us. This “us and them, you or me” mentality leads to the natural collision of ideas in communities all over the world, both online and offline. The Internet accelerates the process, though. Studies indicate that there is a lower threshold to bullying online than offline. Many of the childish spats and insults that SEOs toss around at each other help prove that.

People don’t care about how badly they behave online because they don’t have to face the consequences of their bad behavior. People meet you in real life and they say, “Wow! You’re not at all what I thought you would be like”. I hear that all that time, and I don’t even try to bully people. I just don’t like to take crap from the self-appointed bullies of the Web.

And what does all that have to do with links? Everything. People sometimes link to factual data. They will almost always link to opinion. You cannot challenge or question factual data (unless you want to look stupid — actually, some people do that quite a bit). You can always recommend or disagree with someone else’s opinion. So attaching yourself to someone else’s opinion is a way of standing up in front of the crowd and participating in the discussion.

You add as much value to the discussion when you explain why you think Mr. Dippety-Dum helped you as when you tell everyone in the room that he is full of crap. If you’re trying to win friends and influence people you can do what the bullies do, which is go around kicking people in the teeth and running away whenever someone takes your foot and shoves it back down your throat. The formula is simple. You post a lie about someone on a forum or your blog and wait to see if they take the bait. If they do take the bait and you get your flame war, you look stupid. If you’re lucky they lack the skill to show you up for the flaming fool you are.

Flame wars don’t attract many links but the initial attacks that bullies make on other people DO attract links. Why? Because they are standing up in front of the crowd and expressing a contrary opinion. It’s not that the opinion is valuable (studies show that most people will forget what the opinion is rather quickly) — it’s that the expression of the contrary opinion upsets the status quo and forces people to think.

You earn links by making people think. You don’t actually have to change their minds. You just have to make them think. If you look back at Rand Fishkin’s article you’ll see that he says my articles on SEOmoz didn’t get him to change his mind, but they did get him to think.

If I could point you to that graduate student profile that garnered only 6 views in 2 years, you would quickly realize that except for the oddball like me it failed to do one thing: it didn’t give anyone a reason to think. The graduate student wasn’t expressing any opinions. She was just sharing facts about herself. Only the fact that I was studying Websites and looking for patterns of success and failure led me to visit that site and revisit it a few times over. Yes, I was thinking about that site but I was predisposed to think about sites like that. So far as I know, I never linked to the site. I left it intact, sort of like an archaeologist digging up a set of bones, examining them, and then replacing them in the ground.

The articles on SEO Theory that receive the most repeat traffic from social media links (and repeat links from social media accounts) are the ones that challenge conventional opinion, that express my opinions well, and that inspire people to think about what we are doing in the SEO sphere.

That doesn’t mean I am writing this article because I think it will attract links. I never know until after the fact which article draws a lot of links, and usually it’s the ones I write when I’m half asleep that I think won’t attract any attention that turn out to be the most popular articles. In other words, thinking about all the links you’re going to get tends to depress your ability to get the links. You’re too excited, too wrapped up in the pursuit of recognition.

We tend to be recognized not for our self-aggrandizing efforts but for our legitimate, sincere, passionate commentaries. It’s when you leap up from your chair in the middle of the auditorium screaming out “This is the greatest thing since sliced bread!” or “You’re so full of crap I’m turning in my membership RIGHT NOW!” that people are shaken from their inertial prosaic habits and forced to re-assess their own opinions.

They may not change their minds, but they will acknowledge that you shook their world and for a moment at least you inspired them to actually stop and think about something a little more intently than they were disposed to.

I never set out to make people think. I’m just really passionate about some topics. I also write some incredibly boring articles that attract no links. You would never know that, however, if you only visit SEO Theory because someone else links here.

For my part, I’m just a guy trying to say something interesting. It has to be interesting to me. It has to be something I would want to read again in 2 years. After 30+ years of writing, I’m starting to get the hang of that.