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How to build long-lasting trusted value-passing links

Posted by admin on February 8, 2007 in Link Building, Link Theory, Supplemental Pages

With each algorithmic update Google moves closer to providing less and less trustworthy search results because it continues to apply an arbitrary standard of trust that is neither documented nor understood. What Google has publicly stated and what it has clearly done is move away from a blind trust in the Web’s mythical democratic process of choosing “high quality” over “low quality”.

That process never existed, but don’t hold your breath waiting for Google to admit that Larry Page and Sergey Brin were wrong to assume it ever did.

In today’s Google many thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of good quality content sites have vanished from the main index into the Supplemental Results Index. While many Webmasters feel extremely anxious about seeing their pages labelled as “Supplemental Results”, for about a year it wasn’t really all that big a problem. Throughout 2006 Google frequently displayed Supplemental pages next to Main Index pages in top search results.

Since December, that really hasn’t been the case. Being in the Supplemental Results Index is essentially the kiss of death for a page (for now). Matt Cutts has assured people that Google recognizes a problem and they are working to improve both the crawling frequency and the visibility of Supplemental Results Pages. More specifically, he wrote:

supplemental results aren’t something to be afraid of; I’ve got pages from my site in the supplemental results, for example. A complete software rewrite of the infrastructure for supplemental results launched in Summer o’ 2005, and the supplemental results continue to get fresher. Having urls in the supplemental results doesn’t mean that you have some sort of penalty at all; the main determinant of whether a url is in our main web index or in the supplemental index is PageRank. If you used to have pages in our main web index and now they’re in the supplemental results, a good hypothesis is that we might not be counting links to your pages with the same weight as we have in the past. The approach I’d recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g. editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit).

Let me be blunt: most people don’t know enough about “solid white-hat SEO” to pull that off.

The best links you’ll ever get for your Web site are the ones that hang around forever, don’t break, pass value, and help increase your visibility. What amazes me is that so many people agonize over how to get those links. They think the solution to the problem is “out there” somewhere, perhaps on some blog that shares tips and techniques.

But the definition of the problem is the real problem. People don’t understand that they have made the acquisition of links an unnecessarily high priority. It’s not all about links. It’s supposed to be about marketing your Web site. You don’t do that through links. You cannot do that through links. How many “link marketing experts” do you know? Link marketers buy and sell or broker links; they don’t boost search engine rankings or market Web sites.

The problem has always been, and will always be: how do you increase visibility, traffic, and conversions for a Web site? Age of the domain has nothing to do with the solution. Number of backlinks has nothing to do with the solution. To be honest, even the quality of content has nothing to do with the solution.

The solution is a marketing-based solution. In fact, marketing is the solution, from engaging in the basic research to identify the target audience and the messages that audience will respond to all the way through implementing the promotional campaigns that create visibility for the Web site. Search engine optimization may be a part of that solution. It may not. But I’ve never seen a Web site that could not benefit from a non-SEO marketing push.

I’ve looked at many thousands of commercial Web sites. Many of those sites were operated by people who chose to make search engine optimization essentially their only marketing plan. I don’t know how many of them are still around, but through the years I’ve gone back and looked at a few of them and those that survived usually did so by embracing a much broader marketing strategy.

But here is where you want to know why I wrote my headline. Is there a way to build long-lasting trusted value-passing links? Absolutely. But as I noted above, the answer to the question is not “out there” among the blogs and forums with their “top 10 ways to get links”, “best linking sources”, etc. discussions. Let’s look at a few of the failed approaches so you’ll understand why I say that.

1. Directory links (DMOZ, Yahoo!, GoGuides, JoeAnt, Looksmart, et. al.)
2. Press releases
3. Article distribution directories
4. Link farming
5. Reciprocal linking
6. Link dropping (in forums, on blogs, classified ad sites, etc.)
7. Free profiles

For reasons I don’t need to share, I’ve done all of these things. I have, through the years, advised people to do all of these things.

These ideas have come and gone. Some of them are very spammy techniques. They still work in a limited fashion, but most of the sites that rely on these techniques have been taken offline or are languishing in the Supplemental Results zone. Google doesn’t say you can’t or should not engage in reciprocal linking, but they do warn people not to engage in “excessive reciprocal linking”.

“Excess” is the key to Google’s woes. Google is so easy to manipulate through links that people who are desperate for high traffic-passing rankings today will usually stop at nothing to manipulate the search results so they can have that traffic now. Google today is as easy to manipulate through links as it was five years ago. The only difference between today’s Google and the Google of 2002 (with respect to ease of manipulation through links) is that today’s Google makes it harder for you to find links you can use to manipulate their search results.

We know that Google won’t take responsibility for the problem it has created and solve that problem by discontinuing its practice of allowing pages to pass link anchor text and PageRank through its database. They could easily fix a LOT of their spam woes by turning off the one feature that has made them a laughing stock among search engine optimizers for years. But despite the fact that their link-value approach is subject to manipulation they have nonetheless built a multi-billion dollar revenue model. Money blinds people to the simplest of solutions.

So Google’s corporate greed is the root of spam and you won’t see people stop trying to spam the search engine with links. But that makes it really, really difficult for honest Webmasters who just want to create a little visibility for their content to get fair recognition.

Okay, enough chatter. You want the meat, so here it is:

Trust begins on your own site. I still see today many large, well-funded entities that refuse to promote their own core content in an effective, high visibility-achieving manner. Sometimes the failure to trust your own site is as simple as not having every page link back to the site map, or having every page link to your root URL with the word “home” instead of your most important keyword (which should accurately describe your brand, not chase whatever queries you think are popular).

Internal linkage is so squandered and wasted by idiots and fools who prattle on about “hoarding PageRank”, keeping visitors on their sites, and controlling where the user wants to go, they deserve to be stuck in the Supplemental Results zone. In terms of your own site navigation, you should be liberally linking to your most important pages and building multiple paths to your less important pages. If you don’t trust your own content, why should anyone else?

Let me put that another way. Do you pay for PPC advertising? How many “landing pages” do you have on your site? How many of those pages are accesible through your on-site navigation? If you’re using duplicate or near-duplicate content on your landing pages or if you’re relying on third-party auditing software that requires “unique URLs” you’re doing it wrong.

That’s what server logs are for. If you can spend $1000 a month on PPC ads you can spend $50 a month on a dedicated server that gives you all the tracking information you need in a raw server log. You’ll know exactly who visited your pages, where they cam from, and even which ads sent them there. Do you have to get better software to analyze those logs? Sure. But you’ll also get more complete information than you receive from your third-party services.

Not that I expect to win that argument. People have been demanding that we make it easier for them to shoot themselevs in the foot for as long as I’ve been involved in search engine optimization. I don’t expect sanity to sink in any time soon.

But if you are expanding your Web content without adequately linking to it, you’re telling the world you don’t trust that content. And how you treat your own content is usually an indication of how you treat other content. You overlook the value other Web sites can pass to you (I’m not talking about link anchor text and PageRank). One of the most common objections I hear from the business community today is, “I don’t want my Web site to be associated with those Web sites.”

You’ll never guess in a million years which sites are those Web sites because, frankly, it’s never the same group of sites and quite honestly it’s never the obvious spam sites. Web site snobbery robs many people of the trust they might otherwise be entitled to.

Which is not an argument for being a gratuitous link swapper. In fact, Web site snobbery has nothing to do with exchanging links. It’s just that many business people tell their SEOs not to submit requests or content to certain kinds of sites. Those kinds of sites, the kind that they don’t want to associate with.

Here’s a clue: If you divide the Web into those sites you want to associate with and those you don’t, you’re putting your site into the second category for many other Webmasters. Being a snob isn’t the same as being a member of the elite sites. Until you reach a point in your Web career where you set the pace for a whole community of other Web sites, you’re still one of those sites to many other people.

Snobs kill themselves in Web marketing.

People have often asked me if I would accept a low Toolbar PR link, a nofollowed link, or a link from a “bad neighborhood”. My answer has always been the same: If the link is meaningful and sends me traffic, absolutely. The search engines can de-index me if that’s what they want to do just because one of those sites links to me. I don’t need search engines; search engines need me.

Which leads me to the next point: Your site is only as valuable and trustworthy as the value and trust you place in your own content. If your site isn’t worth anything because it doesn’t show up in search engine results, your site isn’t worth anything. Think of the proud parents who take their newborn baby around to all the neighbors and relatives. They show that kid off — no matter how ugly his face may be — like he was made of platinum, gold, and diamonds. That’s your Web site, Boo. Show it off. Tell people about it. Don’t worry about who thinks it’s ugly. You love your baby.

If you hide any part of your Web site, you’re saying, “I don’t have anything of value.” But it’s duplicate content only intended for PPC advertising! you say. I say: So what? You shouldn’t be using duplicate content. Now, of course, there are plenty of “city guides”, “local service directory” sites, etc. that offer a page for each city. Yeah, that’s exciting content I’d just love to recommend to everyone. After all, it’s only been created for the sake of advertising.

Hey, you know what? Many newspapers and magazines exist only because their operators want to make money from advertising. It’s okay to exist for the sake of earning some advertising revenue. Just give us something of value. Believe in your custom city pages enough to put a little extra effort in to them. After all, I can already go to other people’s custom city pages and find all sorts of content. So hiding your custom city pages because they are just “landing pages” don’t cut the mustard.

Either strut your stuff or get off the street because no one is interested in your ugly baby anyway if you insist on keeping it covered up.

Trust and value begin at home in many more ways. For example, remember those sites that you don’t want to be associated with? Your little shoe-repair shop site should be linking to them. Take pride in your community. Link to your friend’s custom mailbox site. Link to your uncle’s arts & crafts site. Link to your girlfriend’s costume-design site.

Are these ugly sites you cringe over every time you look at them? Tell people. Be honest. “Hey, the site may not look like much but you can order a custom mailbox for $20 that whistles Bruce Springsteen songs every time you drive by.” Someone wants that mailbox. They won’t care if the Web site is ugly. Clearly, your friend builds mailboxes not Web sites.

The point is that you create value when you tell people what you think is important about someone else’s site. Cut through the ugly HTML and get to the value your girlfriend’s costume site offers: she is an award-winning costume designer who will do custom projects on spec. People will see your site as a resource, they will trust your site as a resource, and they will see the value and trust you place in other sites.

Don’t just link to your friends’ sites: be proud of them. Tell people about them. Create content. Build value and trust. Understand that simply asking people to give you value and trust makes you look cheap, scummy, and undesirable. You will always have one of those sites if all you do to market that site is ask people to link with you, swap links with you, etc.

Yuor friends are your ugly babies too. Take them around. Show them off. Let other people oo! and ah! over them. Uncover those hidden pages and let people see what you have to offer. If you’re not offering something of value, you should not be offering anything at all.

Every landing page is a potential organic entry page. Every landing page is a potential converting golden page. It’s your site. Do whatever you want with it.

I can’t force you to be more effective. But that’s how you build long-lasting trusted value-passing links. You’ll find the link love is there when you take the first step. I’ve been doing that for years and I’ve never had a reason to look back or change my foolish outlinking ways.