Unless you’ve been under a rock for the past few months, then you’ll no doubt be aware of the furor surrounding paid links. This furor pretty started when Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Web Spam team, made this post "How To Report Paid Links". Many webmasters beg to differ on Google’s link policy.

So, what is a webmaster to do?

There’s no doubt that if you want to stay within Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, then it is clear that you should not buy or sell links, unless they are clearly marked as advertising. Google states:

"Buying links in order to improve a site’s ranking is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results."

However, Google does make a few distinctions on what constitutes a paid link. For example, Google advocates submitting your site to directories, such as Yahoo!, which requires an annual fee. It would appear that Google does not regard this as a paid link, rather - a paid review.

Says Matt: "If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site"

Having said that, there is a danger in letting Google define your practices. Google are, after all, a business, and their business involves selling links, albeit a slightly different flavor.

In this respect, Google competes with other links sellers for advertisers budgets. It could also be argued that any money being spent improving algorithmic placement for a site is not being spent on Google’s PPC offerings, so Google’s advice and policy could be seen as self serving. What is good for Google may not be good for you.

Webmasters who do go against the guidelines need to evaluate the level of risk they are happy with.

If Google isn’t important to you, then you have no risk. If Google is important to you, and most webmasters would feel this way, then one must obviously tread carefully. On-topic and in context links are least likely to raise flags. The further off-topic you stray, the easier it will be for Google to detect and discount the links.

For those who are overly worried about this issue, I’ve yet to see an example of an outright ban attributed to link buying or selling, so it would appear Google is simply discounting the value of certain links, rather than removing sites althogether.

So, do you need to worry? I’m guessing you already know the answer. If you can’t sleep at night worrying about links, then the Guidelines are your friend. If you can’t sleep at night worrying about your competitors beating you in the rankings, then don’t bring a knife to a gun-fight.

Rand Fishkin made a good point the other day (I can’t locate the link at the moment - if you know it, please chime it in the comments) - say if only 10% of webmasters are even aware that link buying is an issue, and if you’re in that 10% and don’t emulate the tactics of the other 90%, you’re essentially handing your competitors the high positions.

Food for thought.

As an aside, I had a comment on a post I made yesterday:

"Alive Directory Blog - WTF ? Please remove that or Chris paid you for this"

This highlights one of the problems with paid links. What is a paid link? How could anyone tell if a link is paid or not? The truth is that no, Chris did not pay me for the link. The link is one of the best kinds - editorial

Scouts honour, m’lord

Ok, not so big. Yet.

Here’s a list of the blogs and resources dedicated mainly to link building, baiting and link marketing strategy.

I’ll keep this list updated as new link-focused resources spring up.

• Link Building Blog - Patrick Gavin’s blog on text links
• Search Engine Land Link Week - a regular roundup of link building news
• Debra Mastaler’s Link Spiel - Debra talks about link building tactics, tips and trends.
• Linking Matters - a blog about link building and online public relations
• Andy Hagan’s Link Building Articles - Andy is a great read and provides sound advice
• Eric Ward’s Link Moses - Eric has been preaching the value of links longer than most
• Link Building Wiki - a central repository for all information related to link building
• Jim Boykin’s Blog - Jim posts often on links. Scroll down to the bottom to see favorite posts.
• Links Manager Blog - Blog about linking
• Link Bait - A Wikipedia explanation
• Alive Directory Blog - Directory and link building news.
• Justilien.com - Link building strategy.

I’ll also be adding selected article links to our directory, which should make them easier to find for future reference.

I’ll write more on this topic in due course, however Barry has an excellent write-up of the "Are Paid Links Evil" session at SES.

"Matt is up first. Are paid links evil? He says that this is the wrong question. But the right question is - Do paid links that pass PR violate search engine quality guidelines? The answer is yes"

In response, Michael Gray:

"Google developed an algorithm based on links. That is flawed. They expect you to change your business model and implementations to compensate for flaws in their algorithm. Last quarter, Google made 1.12 billion dollars. They want you to sacrifice your profits to keep them profitable. They want you to do that for free….Why Google is opposed to paid links: they work. It’s nearly impossible to rank in any competitive SERP without paid links, except if you’re Wikipedia. Google runs a competitive advertising product and they want to keep it profitable."

The crowd went wild, apparently.

Bruce Clay also has coverage.

Great video, too. Just like being there.

Mahalo is a human powered search service, similar, in many respects, to DMOZ.

Mahalo claims to select the best sites in a given category, and present them in a short, manageable list format. Unfortunately, like DMOZ, and because it has only just launched, Mahalo has little in the way of traffic when compared to search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.

However, where there is a link, there is value, so it can pay to submit your site to Mahalo, if you meet their criteria. In short, you need to be considered an authority in your field and have been operating for over one year.

An added bonus is that unlike DMOZ, Mahalo editors will actually engage in a discussion with you regarding your submissions. They also have a means whereby you can contribute your own pages of listings - and get paid to do so - in the form of Mahalo Greenhouse.

Step One: Create An Account.

Simple enough.

Step Two: Decide On A Category

Not so simple.

Given that Mahalo is new, there isn’t a lot of depth in terms of category structure. In addition, Mahalo doesn’t aim to offer an exhaustive search service. Their aim is to stay focused on the most popular search terms. This policy may exclude you from Mahalo if your site doesn’t fit within this criteria.

I had a look through the categories, and it doesn’t look like this site qualifies. Also, the categories it might fit under, like "Blogs" seems to be closed and not accepting submissions. The sites they do have listed in the blog category appear to be Technorati A-list. Hmmm….perhaps you need to have the right friends to appear in Mahalo?

Step Three: Submit Site

Again, very straightforward and friendly. Provide the name of the site and explain why you like it.

Workaround

If you can’t find an appropriate category, Mahalo Greenhouse might offer you another way in. Mahalo Greenhouse is an open submission process whereby part-time guides can submit a search results page. If accepted, not only do you get a link, you get paid for your trouble.The catch is that Mahalo has a list of "Most Wanted" categories, which are likely to be given precedence.

In summary, a Mahalo submission is worthwhile, if you fit the rather narrow selection criteria. It is highly likely the search engines will place value on any link published, due to the focus on authority selection. As Mahaolo’s traffic builds, then obviously traffic will also flow.

Aaron has a great post on link buying entitled "Buy Links Without Being Called a Spammer".

"The types of link buys that Google has a distaste for are the links that are exchanged directly for cash. Modify your way of thinking just a little and there are a wide array of easy to buy high value links awaiting your purchase. The key to having a low risk profile is to make the link appear indirect"

Many webmasters have become worried about so-called "paid" links after Matt Cutts mentioned that Google may take a harder line over link buying in future.

Of course, this begged the obvious question: what is a paid link? If the deal involved money changing hands, then is Yahoo Directory selling paid links? Does money need to change hands? What about favors? What about business relationships? Did money exchange hands for the very post you are looking at now? It didn’t, but perhaps I’m not being truthful. Or maybe I am. How would a human know for sure, let alone a machine?

This debate has been raging ever since, and I won’t duplicate it again here. However, Aarons tips are great for those looking to gain links, without also gaining the risk of negative attention from Google.

I thought I’d share some of the stats of this site to show how valuable link marketing can be. We’ve been live for a couple of weeks, so needless to say we are getting virtually no traffic from search engines.

The biggest day so far was Friday, with nearly 1000 visits. Not too bad for a brand new, niche site. Most of our visitors are coming from leading industry sites, like Sphinn and SeoBook, which is great, because the users of those sites - pro webmasters, marketing professionals and seos - are our intended audience, too.

We’re getting almost no love at all from the search engines (red), but hey, who needs search engines when you’ve got links? (blue - referring sites)

Many a webmaster has been through the DMOZ experience.

Unless you have friends on the inside, or happen to pick one of the rare categories in which the editor is doing their job, the experience pretty much goes like this:

• Carefully select category
• Submit relevant details
• Wait three years
• Ask politely why your listing hasn’t been approved yet
• Wait another three years
• Give up

However, I thought it would be a useful exercise to demonstrate the correct process of submitting a site to DMOZ, and seeing what, if anything, happens. For the record, Google recommends submitting your site to directories, such as DMOZ, as a valid way to get links.

Step One: Read DMOZ rules of submission to see if this site qualifies. The rules can be found here.

Reading through these rules, DMOZ say they are "highly selective" about sites they list.

Hmmm….I wonder if we are actually good enough to appear in DMOZ?

As I browse through some of the DMOZ categories to get a feeling for the the high standard required, I come across some pretty stiff competition. Sites such as:

"Flickor - Women from Sweden posing nude and having sex".

The target site doesn’t appear to contain women whos nationality could be clearly defined as Swedish, or any other nationality for that matter, as the site appears to contain nothing at all.

It’s a parked domain.

As I flicked through the listings, this seemed to be a fairly common occurance. Some of the active domains I did find were on topic, if a little stale and outdated.

Given we’ve recently been voted to the very top of industry bell-weather Sphinn, I think it’s fair to say that we have independently demonstrated we are useful, topical and relevant, as voted by our peers. Hopefully that should be a sufficient test of quality for DMOZ.

Also, the following rules must be observed:

• Do not submit mirror sites. Mirror sites are sites that contain identical content, but have altogether different URLs. - check
• Do not submit URLs that contain only the same or similar content as other sites you may have listed in the directory. Sites with overlapping and repetitive content are not helpful to users of the directory. Multiple submissions of the same or related sites may result in the exclusion and/or deletion of those and all affiliated sites. - check
• Do not disguise your submission and submit the same URL more than once - check
  Example: http://www.dmoz.org and http://www.dmoz.org/index.html
• Do not submit any site with an address that redirects to another address - check
• The Open Directory has a policy against the inclusion of sites with illegal content. Examples of illegal material include child pornography; libel; material that infringes any intellectual property right; and material that specifically advocates, solicits or abets illegal activity (such as fraud or violence) - check
• Do not submit sites "under construction." Wait until a site is complete before submitting it. Sites that are incomplete, contain "Under Construction" notices, or contain broken graphics or links aren’t good candidates for the directory - check
• Submit pornographic sites to the appropriate category under Adult. - check
• Submit non-English sites to the appropriate category under World - check
• Don’t submit sites consisting largely of affiliate links - check

Fair enough. Looks like we’ve passed the first hurdle.

Step Two: Make sure your site isn’t already listed.

I’m not already listed.

Step Three: Identify the single best category for your site.

Hmmm. I guess I would classify my site as link marketing. Let’s try link marketing.

Nope. No joy there.

Let’s try "internet marketing" instead.

Bingo!

Step Four: Ok, next I click on site description , just to be sure we would be a good fit for this category. The site description page proceeds to tell me what this category is "NOT!". That’s not particularly welcoming or helpful, but onwards.

The guidelines read:

"If you are a site designer, builder, promoter, submission service, even if the words marketing appear on your site or in your business name, this does not make you an Internet Marketer automatically"

It doesn’t? Why ever not? What words would I use - car mechanic?

Perhaps what they really mean is that the category doesn’t list internet marketing sites, even though the title would strongly suggest that is the case. DMOZ goes on to say:

"In other words, a well established company or consultant with verifiable expertise and contacts. Marketing does not happen, every inch is planned with contingencies for every plan. Many of these sites have case studies of current or past clientele"

And who could possibly argue.

I do actually have a fairly robust marketing track record, with real live clients, and took part in endless meetings in which terms like macrosegmentation, strategic window, decision matrix, and off-invoice allowance were thrown about wildly. Sometimes even after lunch. But I have no idea how I would prove that to DMOZ.

Perhaps DMOZ only want agencies in that category? You’d think they’d just label the category "Agencies", but you’ve got to expect this type of arbitrary nonsense when dealing with DMOZ. Needless to say, the category only features three internet marketing agency links, one of which leads to a spam page. In Dutch.

Perhaps I’m better suited to a sub-category. Ah-ha! Perhaps I’m a "Resource".

"You have a site offering substantial unique content (not just commercial offerings) related to Internet Marketing. Sites which are mostly affiliate links will not be listed. Please do not submit sites cloning "Make Your Site Sell" or other similar programs".

I guess that’s a good fit. I don’t know what substantial means, as they don’t define it. We’re certainly more substantial than a few of the existing listings, 4-11 Internet Marketing, for example.

I hit "Suggest URL". I’m almost feeling excited.

I enter my details, careful to ensure that I’m following the rules.

Here’s my description: "Provides news and information about link marketing techniques and strategies. Also features interviews with internet marketing experts".

I check the terms of use. Yes, AOL owns my first born child. Yes, I’m happy with the terms of use.

I click "Submit" .

I’m advised my submission has indeed been received, and that an editor will review it.

Wonderful!

Who is the editor? Turns out, there isn’t one. However, there is an editor for the category above, cmconsulting.

I find with DMOZ, it all comes down to the quality of the category editor. Some are on the ball, whilst others haven’t signed in for months. Many more appear to be arguing in the DMOZ staffroom.

We’ll see what happens. I’ll count the days ’til DMOZ.

This is part two of a two part advanced linking interview with with Ralph Tegtmeier, aka Fantomaster. Part one can be found here.

You recently conducted a study on link networks. What did that study involve, and what were your findings?

We signed up for several link networks, which obviously comes at quite a price. But then again, so do paid links in general and all things considered they’re very good value for money.

They are generally promoted by pitching the number of "high PR" domains they include, harping on the widely adopted assumption that a high PR inlink will help your site achieve to a high PR value itself and, by inference, to improved search engine rankings.

This assumption itself bears some very critical scrutiny because things just aren’t that simple, I’m afraid. Sure, PR will help your pages (not your site - a very important distinction!) get indexed in a fairly sticky manner. And yes, they do seem to contribute to your pages’ rankings, but that isolated effect, if at all discernible, is so minimal it’s practically negligible. I don’t think we can go into that at greater depth here because it would really merit an entire interview of its own. So let’s keep it at that for the time being.

I think I might have to conduct such an interview in the near future, Ralph. Please continue….

All the networks we tested worked with blogs: You get to sign up for the individual blogs and are allowed to post your stuff provided it meets their posting guidelines. Depending on the network you’re in, these will either be topically tightly focused blogs, e.g. featuring financial or education or travel related posts. Others are of a general nature but will typically have a slew of different categories you have to assign your postings to in an appropriate manner.

Posting rules are generally pretty sensible, there’s both a minimum and a maximum of words per post, with only a single outgoing link permitted. Just as importantly, your posts must be readable which rules out most autogen stuff, no Markov chained spam, etc.

Quality enforcement is another matter and a pretty laborious task, requiring human editors: You’ll always find some mediocre to downright trashy posts slip through occasionally, but generally monitoring is pretty strict and efficient, at least as far as the marketing leaders are concerned, which is just as well. Because it’s dreadfully easy to burn a blog by dumb abuse, so they have to guard their investment. In the end, everyone will profit from this policy, so I have no contention with that.

However, don’t hold your breath when reading all that "high PR" hoopla. I’ve brought you two fresh graphics summarizing the two market leaders’ stats in terms of PR. Here they are:

I’m not going to name these networks for various reasons.

For one, I have no beef with them, on the contrary - as I said before they’re very good value for money. Second, there’s no point in "exposing" them in any way - that’s not my intention at all. It would, however, be advisable not to burden them with hyped expectations. And finally, it’s not in our interest to make the search engines wisen up to them, especially not Google in view of their hypocritical policy regarding "paid links" and "linking schemes".

So let’s call them Network #1 and #2.

Network #1 is pretty big, as you can see: Featuring over 500 functional blogs is no mean feat. However, in terms of "high PR" it’s a bit of a putdown if that’s all you’re looking for. (Which you shouldn’t, but I’ll come to that in a bit.) So what’s a "high PR" in the first place? General consensus has it that it should be PR5 or higher. (Note that this is the Google toolbar PR which is metricized from 1 through 10 - there’s many experienced SEOs out there, and I agree with them, who rate toolbar PR as a mere fairy tale.)

Be that as it may, as you can see, the vast majority of these blogs holds PR4 and lower, with PR5+ sites amounting to a mere 2.5%. Yes, there’s a PR7 in the arsenal as well, but that’s reserved for clients who signed up very early in the game and wrote some nice testimonials. You’re also restricted to one single post per day on that one. (In any case, this particular network is a closed shop now so don’t ask me where to sign up.)

Network #2 is comparably small, offering merely 105 blogs as per today, but at least the PR5 sites constitute some 4.5% of the available blogs. On the other hand their number of PR0 sites is almost double that of Network #1.

Another issue to consider is the PR value you’ll actually be getting here. Because all these PR stats relate to the blogs’ index pages only. Now if they feature, say, 25 posts per index page and if you have a lot of people participating, many of them posting multiple times a day, guess how much PR bleed that will give you? Hardly anything - because the post pages themselves, which is what will actually stick in the search engine indices, being absolutely fresh, will have a PR of 0 at least until the next PR update.

Thus, a lot of this PageRank marketing baloney is really nothing but hot air, once you happen to take a long hard look at it. It’s certainly not the reason why we recommend such networks anyway. Because in link building, you will want to get as much legitimate coverage as you can - and from an algorithmic point of view, these blog posts ARE quite legitimate. If Google wants to trash them, claiming that they are capable of judging peoples’ "intentions" when linking to whomever, that’s not an algorithmic thing, it’s an FUD policy of sheer despair on their part. They’ve neatly manouevered themselves into a trap by focusing so much on links right from the start and it seems that they’re having a jolly hard time coming to terms with it. Well, serves them right… (laughs) I mean, it’s not as if they didn’t have the cash to actually do something about it rather than screaming bloody murder at reciprocal linking or implementing that peculiar brand of Web apartheid of theirs termed the "Supplemental Index" no longer so named…

So do we recommend these link networks at all? Most certainly - though there’s still plenty of scope for improvement.

To give you an example. As you know, we’ll be rolling out our own commercial link network soon. It’s dubbed "20 Links A Day" and will offer subscribers exactly that - 20 legitimate (which we equate with "quality") inlinks per day, spread intelligently across our entire set of sites, lots of different IPs and C classes, etc.

However, not only will we restrict the number of participants to a mere 50 in order not to strain the network’s capacity, we’ll also make sure the index pages won’t feature tons of rotating posts that get pushed off into the archive even before a single search engine spider has dropped by to say hello. There’s more which I’d rather not talk about yet, but it will be a pretty powerful and very intelligently structured setup guaranteeing optimal results. And yes, there will be some nice PR sites included as well, of course, but that’s certainly not our main focus. As every practising black hat knows, PR has been vastly overrated for years, and that’s nothing we’ll hoodwink our paying customers with.

So rather than go for the fast buck by shoving hundreds of subscribers into our network, we prefer to build them at a plausible and consistent rate, adopting a long term approach. We’ll only roll out additional accounts to sign up for when we’ve expanded our capacities, and that’s flat.

Thanks a lot, Ralph. I sense a few myths are about to be rethought. And good luck with your network, too

More advanced linking interviews coming soon….

Editors Recommendation: Need Aged Directory Listings? Try Best Of The Web.

Don’t you just hate top ten posts

Don’t you feel a little reluctant to click through to them?

However, I found each of these articles to be very helpful when it comes to link building, mainly because they contain some great new ideas, rather that simply treading tired, old ground.

• Linkbaiting Or Link Building Strategies - SEOBook.com
• Golden Rules Of Link Baiting - Smashing Magazine
• 5 Crafty Outside The Box Link Building Tips And Tricks - Link Building Blog
• Andy Hagan’s Ultimate Guide To Linkbaiting And SMM - TropicalSEO
• Are You A Master LInk Baiter, Or Just A Flasher - GrayWolf
• The Link Baiting Playbook: Hooks Revisited - Stutdbl
• 2007 Guide To Linkbaiting: The Year Of Widgetbait? - SEL
• Rand’s & Steps To Linkbait Success - SEOMoz
• SEO Advice Link Bait And Link Baiting - Matt Cutts
• How To Get Traffic To Your Blog - Seth Godin

Great articles, all. However, is there a problem with the way I presented them?

When you saw the title of this post, did you hesitate for a second? Did it feel like you were being drawn into a marketing stunt?

I think we all know know the feeling.

Part of the problem with top ten posts, or any post that follows a format that has become cliche, is that they are less likely to stand out in a crowd. They’ve lost a quality of uniqueness through overuse. In many respects, that’s a shame, because the format isn’t a marker of quality, or lack thereof.

So what to do?

A common theme of the articles I’ve linked to above is to "be remarkable". "Be unique". "Take a different angle". And that’s great advice. The internet is not short of content, but it is short of remarkable content.

My angle was to skewer the "top ten post" style post, although, secretly, I really do like lists

Or is going meta, self-reflexive and post-modern just another cliche?

Given that this site is focused on links, I want to document my own link building endevours, and what better way to do that than to use LinkJuicy.com as an case study. Hopefully this will provide insights you can put to use in your own link marketing.

I’ll document as I go. Any suggestion, feel free to comment.

Strategy

OK. I have a new site. I have no visitors. At all. I know a few people.

As much as is possible, I want to grow links in an organic way . Hopefully, people will link to the content if they find it interesting. So my main strategy, in the words of Seth Godin, is to try and "be interesting". I think the web is generally a better place if interesting stuff is seen ahead of not-interesting stuff.

However, the problem on the web, as in life, is that being interesting, or having "quality content", means different things to different people. "Quality" content doesn’t rise to the top by virtue of possessing the attribute "quality". If it did, how could anyone explain the singing career of Britney Spears?

So, given a very dense web, I’m also going to need to push content, and pull people here, by way of marketing channels. Hopefully, we’ll find out, along the way, which channels and techniques work better than others.

The desired end result? If you’re wondering about link marketing strategy, I’d like this site to spring to mind.

Step One

All good things on the web start by "being interesting".

To achieve this end, I’m going to be inviting some of the webs top marketers to give their views on link building and link marketing. I started by asking a good friend of mine and highly knowledgeable chap, Ralph Tegtmeier, to do an interview. It pays to have interesting friends.

Publicity wise, I decided to seed from one point: Barry Schwartz of SEL - another good friend and top chap. I consider SEL to be at the authoritative center of the search universe, and they’re very well connected. So, I asked Barry what he thought of the site, and if he found it interesting, perhaps he could tell others. Subsequently, I submitted a story to Sphinn, and posted an announcement on both V7N Forum (at which I’m a moderator) and SearchEngineBlog.com (which is another site I own).

The result? Barry and SEL have already sent a great flow of traffic here. The blog has peen picked up and linked to by a number of SEO blogs. We are the top story on Sphinn - with no encouragement or "networking" from me - received some nice comments, and been Spunn ten over 22 times (and counting). Curiously, StumbleUpon has sent me the most visitors. I have no idea how that happened, but no doubt it is another Barry side-effect.

So, that’s off to a good start.

Lessons learned so far? It pays to know Ralph and Barry Although I knew that already.

I guess the wider point is - when link building, it pays to a) have interesting content and b) to leverage your existing networks.