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Developing Web friends and allies

Posted by Michael Martinez on February 15, 2008 in Intermediate SEO

Every now and then you get a link from an obscure Web site you’ve never heard of. Someone came to your site, found what you have done appeals to them, and went back to their site and provided a link to yours.

We often find these natural links by scouring our referral data to see where the non-search traffic comes from. But you can find these links in other ways, too. You can look for textual references to your site by name or concept in Web search, news search, and blog search. If you post images on your site you should look to see if they appear in Google’s image search. Hotlinking (where people link to your pictures from other sites without your permission) is often responsible for promoting images to the top of Google image search.

When you find that someone else is promoting your Web site, you can make one of three choices: do nothing and accept their attention; link back to them; engage in short-term promotional campaign where you help improve their site’s visibility.

All three options have their drawbacks. Some people would think it discourteous not to link back to another site that has naturally linked to yours. In fact, in the old days (back when search was dominated by Inktomi and Altavista) we would have immediately reciprocated such links because it helped improve search visibility all around. Nonetheless, if 100 sites link to your site this week, reciprocating all those links could be a bit tedious. Also, you have to be careful not to link back to scraper sites (although I am sure the Web spammers would not object if you did link to their sites).

If you do reciprocate every natural link you find, you reach a point where managing the reciprocal links becomes a serious burden. Also, the more sites you link out to, the more likely you’ll be pointing to missing URLs within six months, a year, and too years. I link out liberally from Xenite.Org and I can never seem to catch up with all the dead links the develop because people take down or move their Web sites. When you link out to a lot of missing URLs you look bad to both people and search engines.

And if you embark upon a promotional campaign for another Web site without that site owner’s permission you risk upsetting them. It’s one thing to tell your friends and neighbors about a site you appreciate; it’s quite another to invest resources in a formally managed promotional campaign. Still, if you have the power to help small, invisible sites, there are reasons for occasionally doing some pro bono promotion.

In today’s Web we need allies. No Web site can really achieve success on its own. Xenite.Org grew at a steady, slow rate through my promotional efforts in the early years but its traffic blossomed when other people began recommending the site on their own sites. When news media and popular fan resources began mentioning and linking to Xenite, we became a popular destination in the science fiction community.

The same principle works for all verticals. If you launch a social media site today you want to be mentioned by social media influencers so that their audiences will check you out and possibly begin using and linking to your site. If you launch an ecommerce site, you want people to refer each to your site for purchases. If you launch a news portal you want people to link to your news content as a resource.

If you find a small, interesting, useful site helping promote your own site, you can do more than just reciprocate the link. You can tell people why you like the site in forums, on blogs, and through a writeup on your own site. You can create visibility for someone else and share the value of your opinion. The more selective you are about promoting other people’s sites, the more people will come to respect your recommendations and the more of an influencer you yourself become.

In a relatively short time you can help build a small community of friendly Web sites who may provide you with more than one link, more than one opportunity for visibility, as their content grows and they acknowledge your support and friendship. The advantage for you is that you get to pick your friends, and the friends you choose can be people who just happen to NOT link to your competitors.

By promoting your most exclusive promoters you engage in a subtle type of brand marketing that creates a network of value points to support your site. There are of course no guarantees that your new-found friends won’t start linking to your competition, but you can at least enjoy the limelight of their attention for a while. And they may reciprocate your special attention in ways you cannot imagine.

Devoting a little time to helping improve the visibility and perceived value of sites that extended some visibility and perceived value to your site offers potential rewards greater than just swapping links with business partners.