Thanks for talking with us, Debra. For those readers who don’t know you, can you introduce yourself, and tell us about your background?

My pleasure Peter. In late 1998 I became a stay-at-home mom with a toddler and one on the way after having worked over 20 years in the marketing department of a Fortune 500 company and the Civil Service. I had little computer experience outside of email but was fascinated by the Internet and decided I wanted to create a directory for organic food and clothing. I had absolutely no money for advertising and even less knowledge about online business so I used my offline marketing skills and promoted the heck out of the directory. Everything I did revolved around bartering space for links on high profile websites.

Pretty soon my little directory was out ranking some well known businesses and people starting asking me if I could "SEO" their site as well. I had no idea what that meant so I researched and found what I needed on the now defunct Rank Write newsletter which was then owned by Heather Lloyd-Martin and Jill Whalen. Between the two of them I got a quick education in SEO and some practical experience when I worked for Jill. With that experience and additional research into the medium, Alliance-Link was launched.

As link building is now an integral part of internet marketing strategy, do you find it harder now to source links than it once was? Is there a perception that links are a valuable commodity; therefore webmasters are now more resistant to "giving" them away?

Securing quality links has always been a challenge but given the current link climate it’s become more so, especially in regards to Google. I’ve never engaged in large scale reciprocal linking or bought site-wide links, my methods are varied and revolve around content generation so I’m not as affected by the recent devaluation of certain links. But…

I am concerned about Google’s deputizing the general public and encouraging them to play spam cop in an effort to out paid links. One man’s paid link is another man’s promotion and with Google not providing a clear definition
of what’s considered paid - it’s all fair game.

So do I think it’s harder to source links? Yes. But it’s not harder just because people understand the value behind the link… it’s harder because people are afraid of the consequences of giving them away.

What could a webmaster do to mitigate this problem? Do you think it’s a case of building more effective relationships that perhaps was necessary in the past?

Yes of course, building relationships is a must but even more importantly, webmasters should focus on ways to capitalize on trust and develop alternative linking strategies.

Yeah I know the trust comment sounds kumbaya-like but it’s true. Building relationships is the first step but in order to get quality links, you need to earn the of the trust of your community.

You also need to think outside the box and look at alternative sources for links. Using directories, article writing, forums and such is fine but it’s a big world and given the emphasis on universal search and personalization, you can’t just link within the lines anymore and expect to continually get the links you need to rank well and build brand. Look for new venues, techniques and create new promotions both on and offline to support your linking strategies.

So in order to get links, webmasters should think more in terms of traditional marketing and advertising? What tactics would you recommend webmasters use?

Yes I think webmasters should look to traditional marketing as a source of ideas, it broadens their playing field and provides more opportunity for links. The Web’s gotten crowded and search engines more aggressive, it’s become necessary to look beyond basic link building and branch out to on and offline advertising sources as a way to generate links.

One of the things I’ve been advocating lately is the use of offline publications as a way to support online linking campaigns especially for popular terms/competitive industries. This strategy works on two levels:

First, people trust and remember what they read in magazines, newspapers, trade journals and the like. Studies have shown people are more apt to buy from an online retailer if they have seen the business featured in an offline publication. Makes sense especially for small businesses lacking brand recognition but playing in competitive markets.

Second, most offline publications have online counterparts which means your ads/content have another venue to be seen in, get links from and benefit from the all important keyword association patterns the search engines use.

Ultimately keyword association is critical in link building given the dependence the engines have on anchor text. Do what you can to associate your company with keyword filled content both online and off.

On the other hand, there are still many less competitive niches that can totally dominate a search result by doing traditional link-to-me-I’ll-link-to-you-directory-article submission type link building. The bond of commonality between all link building concepts is finding solid authority sites to host your keyword filled content. Doesn’t matter if you’re doing link bait, directory submissions, presell pages - whatever. You need clean, quality sites to host your keyword rich anchors and content in order to succeed whether you’re working with phrases like "payday loans" or "purple afghans".

You’ve been focused exclusively on link building for as long as I can remember. Still a great area to be involved in?

LOL… there are days I’d like to scream and there are days I dance around for joy. It’s never boring and just when I think I have seen or heard everything, something new comes along.

What I enjoy most is finding a way to use traditional marketing as a link magnet or stumbling upon an everyday situation that turns out to be a kick-ass tactic. My friends laugh at me because I look for the link opportunity in everything, it’s almost sick.

I read about something the other day I plan on investigating, it was a suggestion to check out the local public access channels most County/City offices have. They look for relevant programming and may be open to accepting a general "how to" video as filler when they have open airtime. It’s a great idea, has potential for a much coveted dot gov link not to mention publicity and media links. Little opportunities like that present themselves all the time and are what makes me dance!

Many thanks, Debra. All the best for 2008!

One of my favorite blogs, Wolf-Howl, is written by Michael Gray. Michael is an expert on cutting-edge site promotion strategies, and often posts about Digg and link-bait strategies.

Thanks for talking with me today, Michael. For those readers who don’t know you, could you introduce yourself and tell us about your areas of expertise?

Sure my name is Michael Gray and I’m an all around trouble maker! Seriously though I started on the programming side of web development in 97-98 for a large specialty retailer in the NY area. I was reponsible for building, maintaining and growing the website until 2004 when I left to go out on my own. Sometime around 2001 or so we discovered SEO which really didn’t have a name back then. I read, watched, learned and applied a lot of the things I read on the forums (there were no blogs at the time) and the company realized some huge traffic and financial gains because of it. Eventually I started to wonder why I was working so hard making money for someone else and began working for myself on the side. After moonlighting for 2 years (often on company time) I went out on my own, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made.

Right now I work on a combination of projects, about 60% of my time is spent client work. Some of the projects are traditional SEO, however the majority of the work I do for clients right now is linkbaiting and blog consulting. I also take a few reputation managment jobs every year.

You write a lot about link-baiting, and there is certainly an art to getting it right. What are some the mistakes people make, and what would your advice be to people on how to link-bait to achieve good results?

People in the online world think linkbaiting is some new concept, but it’s been going on in the print and magazine world forever. Visit any bookstore or magazine stand look at some of the covers you’ll see cover stories like this "5 Bedroom Tricks That Will Make Your Sex Life Sizzle", "30 Day Total Body Makeover", or "Tips to Help You Get Organized This Weekend". They are titles designed to catch your eye, connect with you personally, help you solve a problem, and ultimately make you buy the magazine. I like to think of websites, especially blogs as an online magazines. You publish a series of articles every day/week/month and use the linkbait style posts to get links, and more importantly get subscribers (or as Andy Hagan’s calls it defensible traffic).

Linkbait is a proven method and it’s not going away. People have been using "top X" lists ever since Moses came down off the mountain with a top 10 list of "thou shalts". Radio stations play the top 100 songs of summer every year, every December AFI puts out a top 100 list of movies, and how many "bedroom tricks" do you think Cosmopolitan magazine has published since Helen Gurley Brown changed the format in 1970? People need to get over the "bait" hang-up and understand that in a culture where people have an attention deficit, it’s compete or die.

There are certain elements that you’ll find in a lot of linkbait. A snappy eye grabbing headline, is key. For example would you rather read "Removing Spyware will Speed up Your Computer" or "7 Quick Tips to Remove Spyware and Make Your Computer Run 300% Faster". The danger with a headline is you now have to deliver. If you promised me 7 tips I better see seven real tips. I need to see some content not just links to 7 software programs you’re an affiliate for. Think of the headline as a contract between you and the reader, you need to live up to your end of the bargain if you want links and subscribers.

Another thing you need is a scan able style of writing. Lists are very scan able which is one of the reasons they work so well. If you’re post is more narrative in style, short paragraphs with h2 or bold headers for sections, can really go a long way towards making things easier to read. Pictures or videos are also an important aspect. When you read a magazine or newspaper article you’ll notice the "best" picture is above the article or near the top with the text wrapping around it. Keep your mastheads small and thin and use big eye grabbing pictures at the top above the fold on all monitor/screen sizes for maximum effect, nothing stops a StumbleUpon user from hitting the "next" button like a great picture.

Additionally put links in your linkbait. Link to other articles on your site, link to other sites too, don’t be stingy with the links. It OK is you send some traffic away chances are the person on the other end will notice if you send enough traffic their way, and maybe return the favor in the future. The only site you should never link to is Wikipedia, well because I hate the wiki

Lastly linkbait is never ending process, the more you repeat it the more effective it is. I can guarantee you in almost every issue of Cosmopolitan there is a cover story about love/sex/relationships. New people come online everyday and you want to do everything you can to get their attention.

Right. I think that’s a really important point – know your audience. What is your approach concerning Digg, and other social networks? What have your results been like using these networks, in terms of inbound linking and traffic?

Every social network is a little different and what works well on one may not work well on others. Right now I’ve got a love/hate relationship with Digg, I love the traffic and the links, but as much as I hate to stereotype digg is an ochlocracy run by a bunch of petulant teen apple fanboys who are all about "hatin’ on the man". If you want to succeed on Digg try to find stories that are about a similar subject and use it as a starting point. Also watch the homepage for "non news" stories to get some ideas of what they like/tolerate and go from there.

I love niche sites while they don’t bring anywhere near the traffic of Digg, they can bring you better links and higher quality traffic. For example I had a linkbait article about women in the workplace it did really well on sk-rt.com getting to the homepage. Somebody submitted it to Digg and it floundered with 10-15 votes, because it didn’t match the audience.

Targeting your audience is a really important consideration and I don’t think enough people think about it. General interest pieces are good, but highly focused content that’s matched to a particular audience is better. The worst thing you can do is spend time/money/energy creating the best content for the wrong audience. For example you can have a 5 star chef prepare the most expensive Kobe beef you can buy, but serve it at a PETA rally and it will get an icy reception.

Another big mistake I see a lot of people making is cramming adsense or some other advertising down your throat when you come to their site. Giving people "commercials" when you really want them to link to your content is extremely short sighted IMHO. A lot of people who use social sites have "advertising blindness" and won’t click on your ads. The money that you’ll make from 20,000 diggers will probably not even cover the cost of a happy meal at McDonalds, so you’re better off giving up the $5 today, for the extra links you’ll get in the long run. On a lot of my sites I’ll use programming that "activates" the ads as when posts hit a certain age. It extremely unusual for a linkbait post to be bringing in traffic from social sites after a week, at that point it should only be SE referrals, that’s the time to give them the ads.

In you article “What’s One Digg Worth” you provide an interesting breakdown of the traffic and linking stats associated with a successful Digg. You mention that people also need to take a holistic view when it comes to links, such as “mixing in directory submissions, some traditional link development, content creation, article distribution, and a few other tactics as well”. I’m sure many webmasters find the process daunting – what would be your advice to someone with a new site? What are the essential things you would recommend people do in order to build a successful link acquisition strategy?

If you don’t mind, since it’s been nearly a year since I launched that site I’ll give you an update. Traffic has tapered off dramatically, right now the site gets anywhere from 25-75 visitors a week, all long tail searches most in the 4+ KW range. The good part is it’s completely autogen, I don’t have to touch it. It’s not a highly profitable website, but for zero upkeep that’s ok, and I’ve definitely been able to re-use the programming.

Back to your question, I like to think of link building like a financial portfolio, you want to be as diversified as possible to limit your risk. For example a few years ago it was possible to rank for terms purely on reciprocal links. Time passes, Google updates it’s algo, and recip links get devalued. Then article directories were all the rage, a year or so ago a lot of them lost their value. Directories were a solid bet for a long time, until a few weeks ago when Google took a big swipe out of that market. Right now viral and linkbaiting is all rage, and Google really likes seeing it, but will it eventually get devalued, almost certainly. If you, your company, or your website depend exclusively on one tactic, you put yourself at risk to algorithm fluctuations. However if your linking portfolio is diversified your much less likely to suffer those dramatic heart palpitating ranking drops.

It is a lot of work to try and keep up with and manage, but IMHO it’s definitely worth the time. I know a lot of people are probably like me they’d like to pay some writers for some articles this week, and drop them all out next week, and cross it of their "to do" list. However if you spent any time analyzing the Google patent application of 2005 you’ll realize time/age probably play a role. Getting 500 links tomorrow is not as "good" or "natural looking" as getting 500 links over the next 6 months. So if you want to pay for the content for the articles to syndicate and get them all delivered next week, that’s fine, just trickle them out slowly over the next 6 months. I find it’s pretty helpful to come up with rough game plan or timeline so I don’t forget things, again it is more work, but definitely worth the effort.

The time/age issue is something Ralph touched on, too. You’ve been pretty vocal on what you see as Google’s hypocrisy on paid links. Is this a war you see Google winning?

Ahh the paid links debate, it’s a pretty contentious subject at the moment, but sure lets dive in. I think it might be a bit helpful to use an analogy to help people understand it in real life terms. Let’s say you own a house and to make the math easy we’ll say it’s worth $100,000. A developer comes along and offers you $150,000 on the spot to buy it from. You think wow that’s $50,000 for doing nothing but being in the right place at the right time. You decide to sell, make a nice profit and are pretty happy with yourself. Of course you might feel a little bit different if you discovered your old house is smack dab in the area that Disney World is going to build a new theme park, and you could have gotten $500,000 for it. If only you had known all the facts and the true value of the real estate, you might not have been so happy with the peanuts the developer was willing to give you.

Websites are no different, most people don’t know the true value of the websites they own, run and develop. Many people build them as a hobby and when something like adsense comes along and gives them the ability to go from costing them time and money, to making $200-$300 a month profit, just like the guy selling his house before, they are happy. Of course they are also ignorant to it’s true value. What if the guy running the hobby website finally figures out it’s true value, and instead of taking the adsense chump change, he starts selling text link advertisements and brings in $2,000 to $3,000 a month? That extra money would probably really make a difference in his life, and by the way those numbers are real for more than one website I manage. It’s in Google’s best interests to keep you in the dark as to the real value your website has, as long as they can keep charging the advertisers top dollar, they will sacrifice a few nickels and dimes to you via adsense.

Can Google win the war, I certainly hope not. Google has a big advantage they are smart, organized and well funded. They also cultivate the corporate image of lava lamps, bean bag chairs, and garage startup guys making the world a better place. In reality they are just as cold, calculating, and manipulative as Microsoft, ‘We aren’t competing with Microsoft Office really, that beta presentation software coming out Friday that looks and acts just like power point isn’t a competitor to power point, here have some more free Gmail space to be quiet". Google is also really good at convincing you they aren’t a business competitor. However if you want to sell text advertising in Google’s eyes you are a direct competitor. In fact you are such a competitor they put out terms or service agreements to try and control how you implement it, making your offering that much less attractive. What’s amazing is people blindly follow these statements, like a mob of mind controlled zombies. Can you imagine McDonalds coming out with a terms of service document telling other restaurants they way they were allowed to use pickles and ketchup, would anybody listen to them, why is Google any different?

I’m glad to see conferences are giving equal time on the paid links debate. In the past it was only search engine representatives, who had the stage, fear mongering the audience with their one sided propaganda. The more educated people become the better. People need to ask themselves are they ok following Google’s rules and content getting table scraps in the form of adsense checks every month, while Google makes 13 Billion in profits each quarter?

If Google wins what’s going to happen is the market will go underground. You’re going to have to "know a guy" to get you links. For a lot of people that removes any options, leaving the only option being Google. Does anybody really believe that the PHD’s at the plex haven’t applied any "gaming theory" to this model and figured out this will make them even more profitable? (c’mon we’re googly we’d never do that) Once the advertisers are underground, market forces of scarcity will take effect, and prices will skyrocket. So even if you don’t believe in paid links, you should still get involved in the debate, if for no other reason than to keep the advertising market free and open instead of under the control of Google.

Agreed. Thanks for the interview, Michael!

Looking for a spam-free directory listing? Be sure to check out our directory, Rubberstamped.org. Our aim is to build a quality DMOZ-style directory, without the wait.

Previous link building interviews:

Aaron Wall

Ralph Tegtmeier

I assume everyone reading this knows of Aaron Wall. Aaron is a very skilled marketer and author of the hugely popular SEOBook.com. I’ve known Aaron for a few years, and he’s always impressed me with his knowledge and insight, so I’m very pleased to have the opportunity to ask Aaron a few questions about links.

Thanks for talking with us, Aaron. The issues surrounding links are a hot topic at present. What is your take on Google’s recent comments regarding paid links?

As with any for profit business, I think Google’s views of paid links / marketing / the web in general are self serving in nature. It was an accident when one of their workers revealed on an official Google blog that health insurance companies and HMOs can use Google’s ad network to educate the public to defuse Michael Moore’s Sicko movie, but I think that accident says a lot of how Google views the web. If you buy or sell through Google you are deemed clean, even if you are pushing what appears to me to be ponzi schemes. Operate outside the bounds of Google and you are made to feel like a dirty, vile, unethical, immoral, filthy, slimy, classless, and an evil spammer.

What makes their policies particularly sleazy are not that they suggest that corporations should manipulate public opinion with the Google ad network, but that they prevent individuals from buying ads critical of corporations. Add a bit of uneven "anti-spam" hand editing, while allowing select advertisers to dominate the organic search results and it is clear to me that Google doesn’t think much of independent webmasters, small businesses, or end consumers.

If all that didn’t sound dirty enough, consider that Google removed the ads by Google label from many of their ads, many of Google’s pay per action text link ads are virtually unmarked until you scroll over them, and Google filed a patent for paying people to recommend ad links in their email and instant message clients. Why is it that they recommend publishers blend ads in content and use minimal disclosure (sometimes none) on their ads, while asking everyone else to clearly mark their ads as being advertisements? Probably because that hypocrisy increases Google’s profit margins.

The reason Google is trying to manipulate public perception about the effectiveness of paid links as an SEO strategy is because paid links are so effective. They can’t stop them with algorithms, so now they have to try to dominate the discussion and manipulate public perception. Unsurprising given their ad centric perspective of the web.

I think that’s a great couple of points. One, Google has a competing product. And two, paid links must work, else why would they be giving this issue so much airtime?

Exactly. If you saw me posting every day that seo forums, blogs, and conferences are garbage and my book was the only way to learn SEO then I don’t think you would trust me much. I don’t see why people trust Google on this issue. IMHO, in my experience, Google has proven untrustworthy.

Given this scenario, do you have some tips for our readers in regards to paid links? How should they go about acquiring paid links? Will the practice simply disappear beneath radar?

I don’t see link sales as disappearing altogether. I see more of the deals being done between independent webmasters instead of running through central networks. Also, the central link selling networks are getting more aggressive at protecting their partners and ensuring they deliver value. Text Link Ads has a post level links program that puts links inside of content, and many of the paid blogging services such as ReviewMe and Blogsvertise allow you to buy in content reviews or links.

The other thing I think people will get better at is buying links indirectly, using a wide array of techniques including social interaction, industry gathering sponsorships, awards and contests, buying established sites, hiring people who already have a following in the field, various types of ad buys, etc.

Right. So webmasters need to think strategically. You’ve hinted that contextual is one good option. What is the value of contextual links compared other types of links?

When you buy ads away from content they are easier to algorithmically detect and people generally ignore them. Ads have to be in in the content to work long-term. It is what Google tells publishers to do with AdSense ads and text link ads. To quote Google, here is how they say their PPA text link ads should be used

"Publishers can place them in line with other text to better blend the ad and promote your product. For example, you might see the following text link embedded in a publisher’s recommendatory text: "Widgets are fun! I encourage all my friends to Buy a high-quality widget today." (Mousing over the link will display "Ads by Google" to identify these as pay-per-action ads)."

and here is what they say about regular AdSense ads and regular text link ads as well….

"Ads placed near rich content and navigational aids usually do well because users are focused on those areas of a page."

Even with organic links you can overdo it. A friend has a site that gained links so quickly that in spite of the links being organic they don’t count because the growth rate was so fast it looked spammy. In spite of hundreds of references to that article, it does not rank for it’s own official title, but it still does not matter because sites rerferencing his site do rank, and send traffic to his site.

Getting exposure inside content is not just about getting better at fooling engines, but it is also about capturing attention, driving direct traffic, and secondary citations. The latent traffic mentioned in the above paragraph, and the direct traffic that comes right after a well known blogger talks about you are both traffic streams of great value. That was what made the idea of paid blog reviews so appealing to me, you get the focused attention of a target demographic cheaper than you can with just about any other form of advertising. Unless, of course, you sell beer and have a porn star run nude across the field with your URL on their body at the SuperBowl.

We’ll keep a close look out for the next SEOBook.com Superbowl promotion How do you think Google evaluates the text surrounding the link?

Generally I try to mix up nearby text if I can to make it seem as natural as possible. I know that if your anchor text is too well aligned your site can be precluded from ranking for those terms. I have not tested nearby text as much as some people have, but have noticed a couple sites in unique situations that yielded some interesting tidbits.

A friend has one site which has most of its link equity coming from a document placed on many other sites and he still ranks well. That leads me to believe those links still count, but going forward I think it is a good idea to get keywords in the content near your links as well, and try to mix that up if you can too. Algorithms such as Hilltop (which may not be in use) mentioned using headings near links to help score and categorize the link.

I was sued by Traffic Power a few years back, and for a while Microsoft ranked them in the top 10 for my name. Nobody linked at them with my name in the anchor text and they did not mention me on their site. They ranked for my name due to proximity and co-cition data associated with their brand and my name.

You made a cool post a little while back entitled "How to Buy Links Without Being Called a Spammer" in which you outline think-outside-the-box link tactics. A common theme in your writing seems to be that public-relations style integration is something webmasters need to get a handle on? The approach to link building and SEO in 2007 is a lot more holistic than it ever has been in the past?

My partner, Scott Smith, has said I was an instinctive marketer at birth. I am not sure if I buy that, but many of my current marketing techniques tend to be more about sending stories and ideas mainstream…spreading them far and wide. In some cases people working at the search companies end up blogging about my sites without knowing I have any input in them, and I have also seen friend’s sites on major industry sites without the people writing about them knowing who was behind the site.

You don’t need to be a PR expert to be near the top of the heap if you are really passionate about your topic, early to a growing market, or in a market that is uncompetitive. In almost every other scenario public relations is a key to sustainable SEO. It is important in two phases of SEO

• building enough criteria to rank and get a following
• not having an engineer hand edit your site because you rank better than he likes you to

I had a site with over 95% of its inbound links clean and hand built by my team, in an industry where some banks own a half dozen sites selling the exact same product with the exact same name to the exact same audience. A couple years ago when I bought my site it had a few hundred links from the prior owner. It helped starting out with a couple hundred links, but years later and after about $100,000 worth of public relations a Google relevancy engineer hand edited out all of our link equity because our site had a few links when I bought it years ago, and I am known as an SEO. Is that fair or equitable?

To call the site that was edited out of the search results spam would require ignoring the 10,000+ organic links it got over the last couple years, including some recent ones from the US Coast Guard and a US Embassy.

And if you look at what Google does after they buy websites - what appears to be a rewrite of the algorithm to feature Youtube more aggressively - it isn’t clear exactly why they should burn down a site just because an SEO owns it or it was purchased from another person. Maybe someone was having a bad day at Google or hates SEOs. Who knows, but I do know that they pay an AdSense spammer who has stolen all my content, and ranked his site where mine was.

If my site had a stronger brand and a larger following then I might have been able to shame Google into fixing the issue similar to what Robin Good recently did. Robin blogging about the issue created a meme that Google did not want to spread so they fixed it almost immediately.

While that hand editing of smaller websites is common knowledge, it doesn’t apply to corporations or those with significant influence. In some cases, a large corporation can have ten first page listings, and Google appears fine with that. Why do they get away with it? Because their thin / spammy / duplicate / hollow / mirror / doorway / spam sites are also owned by a large AdWords advertiser and strong market leading brands.

If you are spamming the media directly with public relations Google has no problem with that. After all, most independant webmasters do not have the budget needed to do that, and the Google brand is built and maintained by public relations more than anything else. Google has proven they don’t mind spam if it is on a mainstream media site.

Thanks Aaron!

If you want to read more from Aaron, head on over to his regular blog on SeoBook.com. More link marketing interviews coming soon…

Looking for a spam-free directory listing? Be sure to check out our directory, Rubberstamped.org. Our aim is to build a quality DMOZ-style directory, without the wait.

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.

An advanced link building discussion with Ralph Tegtmeier. Ralph is a highly regarded SEO, and runs Fantomaster.com

Thanks for talking with us, Ralph. For those readers who don’t know you, can you introduce yourself, and tell us about your background?

I was born of German parents in Egypt, my father being in the Diplomatic Service, and spent the better part of my childhood years in Africa an Asia - a multilingual environment that certainly proved a great help when I forayed into that globalized environment we term the Internet many, many years later.

My academic background is in Comparative Literature, English Literature and Portuguese Philology, in which I graduated as a Master of Arts with a thesis on "Occultism and eroticism in fin de siécle literature" at Bonn University in Germany.

Later, I worked as a bookseller, a seminar trainer, a freelance writer, a translator and a publisher. I became interested in the Internet in 1994 and soon discovered its marketing potential. So I have been an online entrepreneur in various fields since Fall of ‘94. It must have been around 1996 or so that I purchased a "top secret" report on optimizing web sites for search engines and tried out the techniques and strategies it expounded - with spectacular success. Of course, in those days it was all mainly about duplicate titles, keyword stuffing your meta tags, invisible text, etc. As Baudelaire was wont to say: "Ah, qu’as tu fait avec ta jeunesse!" (laughs)

Anyway, in 1999 I teamed up with an old school buddy, Dirk Brockhausen, who happens to hold a doctorate in physics and worked as a certified SAP Consultant in both Germany and Switzerland. And so, fantomaster.com GmbH was born. Technically, we’re German expats domiciled in the German speaking (eastern) part of Belgium, just a few meters from the German border.

While we also developed a few nifty tools entirely unrelated to search, we did focus on IP delivery (aka cloaking) applications right away as it was perfectly clear from the start that this was the most powerful optimization technology extant.

Contrary to what many people would like to make you believe, it’s still exceedingly effective, though of course, as in every field of SEO/SEM, you’ve got to adapt to the ever shifting ground that is search technology. For example, nowadays link building has mutated to an all-important component of any serious search marketing campaign with the obvious exception of PPC.

In the past, the focus tended to centre around page content - build “quality” content, and they will come. Would you say that linking factors are the most important aspect of ranking? Has SEO become all about links?

Search ranking technology being an exceedingly complex set of different data retrieval and processing algorithms, with network stability, hardware performance and scalability issues governing a lot of what’s going on, it would be pathologically simplistic to reduce it to any one, single be all and end all factor.

Of course it’s being done all the time. That’s because people will always look for simple solutions to complex problems, it seems to be hardwired into our brains. But of course that doesn’t make such simplifications either true or effective, no matter what any which "guru" may proclaim to be the latest fad of the day.

I’ve never subscribed to the "Content Is King" paradigm as an exclusive, predominant causal factor of search engine rankings. By the same token, I won’t endorse the current craze of reducing all and any SEO to "merely links, naught else".

So I said it’s an all-important component of SEO, and that’s what I stand by. A component being defined as one part of an entire set. But claiming that links are everything would be a gross exaggeration.

Because it’s simply not borne out by real world results. This is not saying that you can’t at all do well with links alone in search under a given set of very special circumstances. For example, many black hat SEOs will auto generate web sites by the ton, and rather than optimizing the content in any particularly sophisticated way, they’ll simply throw a slew of fairly powerful links at them. The result being that very many of these sites will actually perform quite nicely in the SERPs - with a half life, however, that’s generally measured in days, occasionally in weeks, almost never in months.

Is this a feasible business model? As Earl Grey (aka Mick) outlined in the interview Rand Fishkin did with him a while back, it actually can be - provided it meets your personal philosophy and lifestyle. "Interview with a Black Hat Seo" However, I don’t think I’m overstating things if I say that it’s certainly nothing your average Web entrepreneur is likely to embrace.

The really interesting question this brings up, actually, is how we want to define "SEO" these days? For most members of the hard core black hat community it’s a "churn and burn" approach, i.e. an exceedingly short term thing - and in case someone’s wondering, yes, these days they’re quite proud to call themselves "search engine spammers", no holds barred. Not too surprising, when you think about it - after all, the term "punk" used to be exclusively pejorative too until Punk Rock hijacked it.

For a more mainstream, long term approach, links are definitely of eminent importance, too - but there’s a whole lot of other factors to take into consideration as well. So will your SEO efforts work out without building decent incoming links? Certainly not. Will they work out if all you care about are links? No, they won’t - at least not if you’re interested in a modicum of relative stability, taking a long term approach, however shaky your rankings may finally prove to be in actual practice nevertheless.

In your linking workshop, you advocate webmasters build links at a consistent speed, rather than building too many links, too fast. What is the reason for this?

It’s not really about "how many" - the keyline is consistency. The main reason being that you want it to appear as "organic" as you can.

If you can build a thousand good incoming links a day and you can actually keep up that rate for six months or more, fine: go ahead and do it. After all, many news items will generate similar spikes of interest - and that’s what links are supposed to convey: Not a "vote" on how good or bad any given page is, as popular misconception will have it, but, rather, a vote on how interesting (which may well include "controversial") in whichever context people deem it to be.

Thus, there would probably be nothing "non-organic" about such a spike in incoming links if it’s some fairly popular topic. Which, of course, can easily create a headache for you in its own right: What’s a "fairly popular topic" anyway? I mean, if you’re selling teak wood knitting needles, sure, by some lucky fluke they just *might* happen to become the latest craze, with slews of links suddenly pointing to your mega hip knitting needle pages from all over the Net. But then again: How likely is that, really? Nothing you would probably want to bet the farm on, I would think.

Plus, if anything of the kind should actually happen, the search engines are pretty sure to be the first to know about it. After all, they own the entire set of search queries. So to make it actually plausible, you’d probably have to launch a huge network of zombie bots, daisywheeling across a myriad of proxies (fat chance - after all, they’d have to be properly geo targeted as well…) to generate such search queries artificially.

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to realize that for most if not all non-black hat webmasters this is an entirely academic scenario.

So in a real world environment, avoid linking spikes. I’m stressing this because many people find link building a dire chore. It’s arguably the most unloved and thankless SEO task of all these days. It’s extremely time consuming, pretty costly even if outsourced, and very often it can be a decidedly humiliating experience (as in begging for links in unsympathetic quarters). Personally, I don’t know of a single SEO who actually enjoys doing it.

So humans simply being what they are, we’re all too prone to opt for the easy way out: Throw a ton of links at your new sites, be done with it as fast as possible, and move on to more interesting tasks. Which, of course, tends to create linking patterns blatantly shouting "artificial" - and which, in turn,goes against the whole rationale of informed, smart link building.

Can you offer our readers some tips in regard to their link building strategies?

Ok, let’s start off with two very generic recommendations.

One - don’t overestimate link building!

Two - don’t underestimate link building!

Now let me explain this a bit. For the past two or three years, very many webmasters, amateurs and pros alike, have become obsessed about link building. And so have most if not all SEOs.

However, most people being lazy and given to oversimplified i.e. skewed and fundamentally faulty strategies, a link building craze has ensued based on the rationale that link building is the philosopher’s stone of search engine optimization. And it gets worse - oversimplifying even further, people took to letting themselves be hypnotized by some neat free gimmicks such as the Google toolbar and the PageRank (PR) values it displays when you switch it to spyware, pardon me: to "Advanced Features" mode, as our friends in Mountainview, California prefer to dub it. This holds true even for those who should really know better because it’s their daily bread and butter, namely SEOs. But I guess PR as a purported or real ranking factor would merit a hardnosed sober assessment in its own right.. Everything on the commercialized Web being about traffic and conversions, link building should focus on this first: Are the incoming links you are getting worth the effort or the costs, provided you have put any serious effort or money into having them set up? And if they do happen to generate traffic to your site - will it convert sufficiently? If it doesn’t, there’s basically two possible reasons for this you’ll want to investigate: Either your site sucks or your traffic source. (It’s a very rare case when both do, but don’t rule out that remote possibility entirely either until you know exactly what you’re dealing with!)

If your on page factors aren’t up to par, be it in terms of content copy, of usability, of navigation - not to forget the products and services you’re actually offering -, even top quality targeted traffic won’t do you much good.

By the same token, even if your page is the world’s finest in its industry, getting untargeted, non- or low converting traffic won’t help you very much either.

So if you’re really subscribing to the simplistic view that all you’ll have to do by way of Web marketing is throwing a ton of links at anywhich crappy web site, think again. You may be wasting the better part of your efforts and possibly losing lots of money in the process.

In terms of actual link building this implies that you shouldn’t just look for your incoming links’ search engine ranking power - because links simply aren’t everything if you want to achieve rankings let alone traffic and conversions. Sure, they can qualify for a lot of clout if established well, but again: THEY ARE NOT EVERYTHING!

Equally, there’s all the webmasters, and even a few SEOs, who will dismiss links entirely. Not too many of them around anymore, true. And even those who are won’t typically trash links in as many words - actually, hardly anyone in his right mind will pretend that they can totally do without links at all.

Hmm, no - maybe I actually missed a fairly substantial group of webmasters and SEOs when I said that: Because obviously the entire PPC crowd can do very well without links, thank you very much. Well, not quite - they actually go for a hell of a lot of links, come to think of it. Only their links are called ads. Banner ads, text ads, contextual ads, AdWords, YPN (what used to be Overture what used to be GoTo), AdCentral ads - links, the lot of them. And paid links, at that. Only they’re the kind the search engines love. At least those they’ve sold to them in the first place.

So why should these people worry about link building, seeing that they are doing it all the time with a checkbook or an online advertiser account anyway? As long as you’re funded, there seems to be no point in musing over " organic" links, or is there?

The reason I’m mentioning PPC links (ok: ads) at all is that links are all about, well, you guessed it: traffic. Restricting yourself to PPC, while an entirely valid way of marketing, especially when rolling out a campaign, is very much like putting all your eggs in one basket to the point of utter dependence on the PPC networks. You may be losing money that way as well for two reasons: For one, paid click bids have historically appreciated dramatically and currently it seems highly unlikely that they’ll experience any serious slump in pricing anytime soon. Already, a good many SOHO setups simply can’t afford serious PPC marketing anymore, certainly not in highly competitive industries.

Just as importantly, however, there’s a strong indication that organic search traffic actually converts better. The reasons for this are manifold and beyond the scope of this discussion, I would assume. But what it does boil down to is that even as a PPC marketer you should always include consistent, smart link building in your arsenal if only to at least partially offset the perpetually rising costs of paid search marketing.

As for some more technical tips, I’d recommend devoting your attention specifically to your links’ anchor text, i.e. the viewable and clickable part. Generally, you’ll find a lot of advice about always including your keywords in the anchor text. This is essentially quite correct but it doesn’t reflect the entire picture.

Because you will want to avoid blatantly discernible anchor text patterns as best you can. Make it look as organic as possible - a statement that holds true for all of SEO, of course. But how organic does a network of incoming links look to you where every single link is highly optimized for specific keywords? When everything screams unisono: "For the cheapeast teakwood knitting needles, click here"? Ok, so you will want to vary your anchor text, going for long tail phrases as much as for your more generic terms. But that’s not all there is to it, either.

For you see, based on public statements by search engine reps, and backed up by extensive long term research, it is strongly recommended to NOT include keyword phrases in your anchor text for about 50% of the links you’re generating. Instead, make the web site name itself clickable, just like most mom and pop web sites pointing somewhere will do it.

So how do you optimize those links, then? Easy: by leveraging proximity. While this isn’t hewn in stone, my general recommendation is to place your targeted keyword phrases about 3 to max. 5 words removed either preceding or following the clickable web site (or page) name. The reason being that search engines are growing more leery about artificially inflated linkage on the one hand, while relying on contextual analysis to automatically determine what any given text is about on the other.

And let’s not forget "deep linking". While the majority of your links should point to your site’s home page, make sure you throw a sufficient number of links at your important internal pages as well. This makes your linkage look less artificial and will lend more link love to those critical pages as well.

Finally, make your links consistent. If you want to use "www" in your page addresses, fine: It’s the Web standard, and if in doubt, simply go for it. There’s no tangible disadvantage in leaving it out to make your links shorter, however. Just make sure you don’t mix the two - so do it either one way or the other, but not both. The reason being that for search engines (especially Google!) these two links are not alike:

http://yourdomain.com

http://www.yourdomain.com

So mixing the two may cause your linkage to be diluted and it may actually land you in even more serious trouble in terms of inadvertently risking a " duplicate content" penalty.

Thanks Ralph. Part Two Next Week….

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