SEO Blog - UK Search Engine Marketing

Along with the “no future” fable in recent days we have seen another talk of the town or rather the global village: Spreading false information as SEO tactic of link baiting. Now I’m really glad! Finally Google will ban Jason Calacanis for spreading false information about SEO (”SEO is bullshit”) and his web directory Mahalo. Now let me explain the situation.

Matt Cutts in a discussion made clear that using such methods is fraudulent and can lead to a penalty by Google. Why did he say that in the first place? A hugely popular made up link bait article was disclosed as a hoax by the author of it, Lyndon Antcliff of Cornwall SEO. It was too late for Fox News and other news outlets on the British Aisles though, they reported the story as true without checking the facts or sources.

The implications of spreading hoaxes via the press is not my main focus here. It’s really a sign of low quality of major news outlets. That said let’s take a look at the Jason Calacanis case which is very similar to the undisclosed satire piece at Money.co.uk: He repeatedly stated that “SEO is bullshit”. Also he used at least one other version of this statement by saying “affiliate marketing is bullshit”. His “argument” was debunked dozens of times already so I won’t add another one of these SEO primers. I want to stress the undisclosed satire aspect of this infamous link bait.

Mr. Calacanis also is the man behind Mahalo. What is Mahalo according to it’s own definition?

“What is Mahalo? Mahalo is the world’s first human-powered search engine”

When you take a closer look at the “engine” you quickly realize that it’s a not a revolutionary Web 3.0 concept it’s sold as but basically a web directory like any web directory we know since the early nineties. There are no robots or spiders and the algorithm seems to be rather a simple CMS that allows to publish a few thousands of pages.

Now is Mahalo a human-powered search engine? No, it’s not, it’s clearly a static website provided by editors (aka guides) and augmented with some user input. I’m sure the new, yet to be established Ministry of Truth, led by Mr. Cutts, truth expert of Google will quickly find out about that and ban Mahalo.

Also it is obvious that SEO is no “bullshit”. I even did some research on agriculture in this context. Livestock breeding experts agree that bullshit at least stinks. Now as SEO is purely virtual and limited to the Internet it can’t stink, so it can’t be bullshit either. Unfortunately this link bait tactic based on this false information has already spread and other people are using it. Now as Matt Cutts truthfully has spoken out about this problem I’m sure they all get banned. I’m glad. Please Google, ban them all. We really need a Ministry of Truth.

While conducting some link analysis recently I started thinking about the process that Google would carry out to see if a site was building links against their guidelines.
The key issue is that if a site has 100,000 natural links thanks to some tools or articles on the site it is very hard for Google to flag the site as being unnatural if they spot a thousand paid links.

On the other hand if a site has 2000 links and 1000 of them are clearly paid then Google might take a much harsher view.

Having a largely natural link profile allows you to be much more aggressive with your on page optimisation and to use paid links to build your rankings without appearing to be gaming the system.

Just checking through today’s top stories on the Digg homepage and I noticed that Engadget’s story from today’s Apple event in London was followed 2 hours and 50 minutes later with a summary post focusing on the main news from the event; Apple iPhone hits O2 in the UK on November 9th.

While it’s unlikely this is intentional it is a very clever linkbaiting tactic and goes to show the power of a title headline in Digg. Engadget have essentially split the same story into two articles both with a different angle to give the Digg audience what they wanted to read twice, getting double the amount of homepage coverage, traffic and possibly links too!

Lyndon Antcliff has started an interesting (and slightly heated) discussion about how social voting beats directories for link building. In my opinion there are still some good arguments for submitting to quality directories, but I totally agree that linkbaiting is the way to go and if successful the benefits are far greater than submitting to directories. It’s also far more enjoyable to watch how many people vote or link to your content then it is submitting to directories for hours, so that helps!

Linkbaiting may not suit everyone however as it requires a certain degree of creativity and understanding about how the social media systems work and how to manipulate what the audience likes to see, whereas anyone can submit to a directory. I wouldn’t completely disregard submitting to directories as a link building technique just yet and probably wouldn’t go as far to say directories are dead, but perhaps Google’s recent efforts to find paid links could suggest it is dying a slow death! It’s unclear about how Google’s algorithm values paid directories, but I think it’s fair to say that if you are paying for a listing in a directory which will accept anyone, the value will be much lower than that of a listing in a trusted and more selective directory such as Business.com or the Yahoo Directory.

Overall I would suggest gaining a small number of paid listings from quality directories and then concentrating on developing the content of your website, promoting this within the social media websites. The potential gain of incoming links from social media optimisation is much higher, a great piece of content can be rewarded with hundreds of natural, relevant one-way links which would be pretty much impossible to gain using any other method, plus there are tons of social media sites out there now where it’s possible to promote most topics. If it fails the chances are you’ll learn something and if it’s successful you’ll have a nice traffic boost and hopefully a large number of new inbound links to show for your efforts, so why not give it go?

You can’t goto an SEO blog today without reading about Andy Hagans’ Ultimate Guide to Linkbaiting and Social Media Marketing, definitely well worth a read and I’ve used one tip already with my post title!

Here is the slideshow from Rand Fishkin’s 7 steps to linkbait presentation at PubCon in Las Vegas this week.

There are many effective methods of linkbaiting such as creating quality content people can’t help but link to, causing controversy, or as I found this week being the quickest with the latest news. My post last Thursday was the first to report the new Google AdWords account snapshot dashboard, prompting many blogs, such as Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Roundtable, to link to the story. Some of the blog links can be found on Technorati and MSN and the large spike in the Alexa stats graph below shows the increase in traffic from this story.

The Linkbait Traffic Effect

This also seems to have already had a positive effect on search rankings with top 10 Google results for Google AdWords manager, AdWords manager, Google AdWords account manager, Google AdWords account, Google AdWords blog, AdWords Blog, PPC Blog and Google AdWords promotional code.

I find linkbaiting very interesting as it’s a great method of gaining large quantities of relevant inbound links for very little effort, in this case a 10 minute blog post and a couple of forum threads to promote the story. SEO has evolved a lot over the last few years and thankfully linkbaiting seems to have replaced the laborious task of submitting to directories. For this reason alone linkbait is a better use of time, but the quality of links can also be much greater with lots of related inbound links embedded within a blog post as opposed to one link amongst many on a directory listing page which may not be as relevant. Of course there are still some such as DMOZ and the Yahoo Directory which are worth submitting to, but maybe the days of submitting to hundreds of directories for hours is over with the use of linkbait and article writing becoming more common.

With a bit more practice and a few more successes I might be able to offer my linkbait services sooner than I expected!

My post from last week about link bait services has now been cached and is currently ranking at #1 in Google for linkbait services searches. I’m hoping this post will help to strengthen that position with another link and also start to rank itself for link bait services searches once the Googlebot revisits!

Many more SEO companies are now starting to offer linkbait services, TextLinkAds seem to be the latest with linkbaiting services available under a price plan option of $5k or $10k.

While I am very keen on creating my own linkbaiting projects, at the moment I am still in the process of learning about how to create successful linkbait so would not yet feel confident in offering this as a service, as I wouldn’t be able to guarantee successful results, but it’s certainly something I would like to be able to offer in the future.

My main attempts so far to create quality content to promote as linkbait have been:

• Being the first to report about the new Google AdWords account snapshot starter page helped to quickly gain many inbound links from various SEO and PPC blogs including Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Roundtable, this also resulted in a large increase in traffic during a short period of time.
• How to increase StumbleUpon traffic?, which now ranks at number #2 in Google for ‘StumbleUpon traffic’ searches and also made the StumbleUpon Buzz list.
• Articles 10 tips to gettings started with Google AdWords and a day in the life of an internet marketing consultant have also helped to receive many inbound links.

A DigitalPoint forum post today about Google AdWords for link building prompted me to write this post. While the idea suggests that advertising on the Google AdWords content network can add incoming links, which is not true despite some backlink searches displaying some AdSense ad’s, it is possible to use Google AdWords to promote linkbait.

Linkbaiting is a very effective method of creating quality content with the sole purpose of building a significant quantity of inbound links. These are generally distributed by creating a buzz through viral marketing and social bookmarking websites such as Digg.com and StumbleUpon, with the traffic generated helping to attract users who may find your content interesting enough to add a link to an article, for example, on their own website.

Using the same method, you could use Google AdWords to target users with the potential to add natural links to your website by promoting quality content as linkbait. Buying AdWords traffic may sound like an expensive method of promoting linkbait, but with many SEO companies charging in the range of $5,000 to $50,000 for linkbaiting projects I would expect PPC promotion for linkbaiting to become more popular in the future. This can especially be cost-effective if cheap keywords can be bid upon to heavily promote linkbait over a short period of time to help to gain more social bookmarking votes and promoted stories to send even more visitors to your content.

In order to make sure you maximise the amount of traffic from linkbaiting it’s important to careful select your title’s so that the anchor text of incoming links can help your site to rank highly for competitive keywords in the search engines once the buzz has died down. Here’s some more linkbaiting advice from Google’s Matt Cutts.