Ask the SEO Guru

Question for the Week of July 25th, 2008

Hi SEO guru. I read your blog about more link success rate with good interest. I’m not doing well for linkbuilding and yours is a good thought.

I assume you are referring to the post last week about Think Link –how  to hit 50% + success rate with email link requests

Here’s the thing,  that process is not about how many links, it is about building a value rich, authority destination in your niche.

We do have a policy of guaranteeing a minimum of 20 inbound links from industry leaders but as I said the value to you is not in 50 or 100 or even 1000 links. The value is that by following the process of posting interviews from industry leaders, you build something solid, unique and something that other people interested in your niche WANTS to link to. That is what being an authority site is all about.

Once you structure a section of your site the way I described, it is difficult to duplicate by your competitors, it is questions asked by you of the people you, (and others in your field), respect and admire, and it gives your site a trust factor that I know of no other way to gain so quickly.

If you approach the process strictly with a set number of inbound links as a success metric, your heart won’t be in it, you’re coming at it from the wrong perspective and you’ll very likely be disappointed.

If on the other hand, you have us do the work that actually turns your site into an authority website, you can expect incredible returns for a long, long time.

Best of Luck

Massa

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  The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority.   Kenneth Blanchard  

I love that quote. Especially as it applies to what “my” idea of an authority site is. One little problem though when it comes to discussing authority sites. My idea of what they are may not match yours.

Ahhh, such is the nature of the SEO beast.

No one needs look far to find another SEO blog or forum post advising his readers to get links from authority sites. Authority sites are crucial to search engine placement. Always go after links from authority sites.  Authority site, is one of those terms used in SEO circles that is taken for granted that we all KNOW what it means. 

In reality, if you were to ask 10 different seo’s to define authority site, you’d likely get 10 different answers. The sad part is they would probably all be right but that doesn’t really help you to know where to look and how to determine this authority site is more authoritier than that authority site.

Today, the guru is going to illustrate one good way to know enough about what an authority site is to be able to build your own, fast, easy, cheap and for the long term.

First, let’s take a look at what others say it is

Here is the definition of “authority site” from Google.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define%3A+authority+site&btnG=Search

Definitions of authority site on the Web:

• a measure of the quality (in the all-powerful opinion of the search engine company) of a given site, gauged by some combination of size ...
  www.abelgraphics.co.uk/glossary.php
• A site that is deemed by a search engine to be authoratative in it's chosen field of subject matter. ...
  www.denialdesign.co.uk/glossary.asp
• Jon Kleinberg, an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, wrote a paper that described a means of identifying websites that ...
  www.corporatewebsitemarketing.com/search-engine-marketing-glossary.html
• Authority site is a term the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) community coined to refer to a website that dominates search results for a specific ...
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authority site

NOW it’s clear as mud huh?

While pretty vague and self-serving let’s not the glaze over the incredibly revealing view of themselves within the confines of parentheses in the first result. True, it may sound overbearing and more than a little ominous, but that doesn’t mean that at the end of the day, that is not the only REAL definition.

In fact, you may notice as The Guru did, a running theme through all the 4 results. We can read all the great posts from all the great minds and mouths of the ignoratti, but we can all see here that the search engines believe an authority site is whatever they say it is at any given moment. And can one argue the validity of that?

So, that’s what Google says it is, but what does Debra Mastaler, http://www.alliance-link.com/, say it is?  (one of the very best link builders on the planet BTW. If anyone knows what an authority site outside of a search engineis, it would be Debra).

At the SES  NYC conference in April of 2007, Debra kind of got left holding the bag for the link building session as reported by http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/2007_04.html. In that session, Debra had the opportunity to describe an authority site as such:

What is an authority site? It is a site that ranks well. They are linked to by other quality sites, they are well-known in their circle, etc. This happens for a reason - co-citation process that exists on the web. They typically have higher PageRank scores. (Disclaimer: This isn't definitively the way it has to be. It changes all the time.)  

She actually does a good job of helping people to understand but when we talk specifics, I’d like to point out a few terms that indicate the need for subjective clarification. I bolded those terms that I felt needed help because within this definition, we also need to define “THAT RANKS WELL” – “OTHER QUALITY SITES” AND “TYPICALLY” --  “ETC”

My point is that this is one of the better, less vague definitions I have found, but still it makes it pretty difficult to take this information and say, “I’m going to build my own authority site so I can rank well using the criteria set forth in the above definitions.

I also found this one at http://www.theinternetdigest.net/articles/building-authority-sites.html

A fairly comprehensible authority site definition was put forward by Jason Dowdell of Global Promoter. Jason defined it this way: "Authority sites are sites that have been linked to and referenced on other web sites covering the same subject matter and they also will have hundreds if not thousands of pages covering that subject matter and nearly every facet of it."

That definition is one man’s opinion, albeit a good one, but let us go directly to the source. Many search engine optimization and search engine marketing experts believe Google has derived their primary algorithm from a document titled, "Hilltop: A Search Engine based on Expert Documents."

The PageRank formula as we know it today was derived from this paper, and the authors, Bharat and Mihaila, define an authority site in the text below:

"We believe a page is an authority on the query topic if and only if some of the best experts on the query topic point to it. Of course in practice some expert pages may be experts on a broader or related topic. If so, only a subset of the hyperlinks on the expert page may be relevant."

 

So, there we have definitions from no less than 4 people who could easily be considered authorities, (there’s that word again), in their fields.  But I’d be willing to bet toenails to tophats you still don’t have a very clear idea of how YOU would go about building your own authority site.

Be that as it may, if you are wanting organic search engine placement for a very broad range of related terms the whether you realize it or not, you DO want to build an authority site.  And the Guru’s gonna tell you how to do it. Well, at least one way to do it. There are other ways but this has turned out to be the best by far that I’ve found. We started testing this seriously only about 3 months ago but already, there is no question of it’s power to dominate the results!

 

Link Fishing

Amish, our VP of SEO Production, coined a great term for the process. Link fishing. I liked that name because while the process is capable of literally producing thousands of top quality links very quickly, there is not really any way to determine just how many links within what timeframe. This is why I had to answer the Question of The Week as I did. We only guarantee a minimum of 20 authority, (there’s that word again), within 60 days or we keep repeating the  process until we get a minimum of 20, but again, it’s is much more likely to get more like 200!

OK, so how does link fishing build an authority site?

When you follow the process I laid out step-by-step in the post :

LinkThink – Hit 50% + Success Rates With Email Link Requests When Targeting Killer Links

What you are doing is establishing a repository of comments and observations expressed by the thought leaders of your industry. That is unique, that is value rich, and that ,when coupled with the links those thought leaders and their comments generate is as good a definition of an authority site as any other you will find!

Build it with success assumed, build it with quality, sincerity and honesty and you will win! Try to find the shortcuts, insult the intelligence of your targets,  and don’t give a damn about your visitors and you will eventually fail believing there was no value in what the Guru just shared, BUT you would be believing that still not having an authority site.

 

Peace y’all

G

 

HEY –SOMEBODY BRING ME SOME TOILET PAPER!

HELLO—ANYONE OUT THERE? HELLO

Sometimes it is better to remain silent and have others wonder about your true abilities than to speak and remove all doubt.

Donna Fontenot is one of my favorite people I’ve met online. She has a unique perspective on the seo community and articulates it well at Seo-scoop. This past week she wrote an impassioned post about the negative aspect of the new world social media and her decision to remove herself from it.  I Refuse To Participate In The Vicious Nastiness Going On In Our Industry 

While I applaud the attempt at raising the awareness of social responsibility in others and admire her having the intestinal fortitude to take a stand, I doubt it will have much impact on actually decreasing the daily drama such is social media.

Don’t get me wrong, there will be plenty of support from her readers and passer-bys who are attracted to the theme of the post as they feel the same way, at the moment at least.  A lot of people all agreeing that yes, it is a problem and they are happy to see someone speak out and maybe even wish they had said it first.

You see, it’s easy to champion a lofty ideal as long as it is from a detached position because we all know it’s the way it SHOULD be. That’s cool and all but I still don’t see much changing. Probably not for the reasons you may be thinking though.

Moments after publishing her mini-rant against the vicious, nasty cr@p blogging, (Donna’s words,not mine. I love the way she can make her descriptions almost eloquent  in their brutality), someone promoted it on Sphinn, http://sphinn.com/story/60431 where it quickly went hot and gained several supportive comments. One of the comments I felt summed up the general attitude of a lot of people not actively involved in any dispute perceived to be referenced in the post. The comment was:

We're destroying and abusing the very nature of social media. Which is ironic when so many of the articles we produce ourselves describe processes to leverage social media.

 

I tried to post a comment myself but somehow my comments keep getting cut off after just one or two lines.

{planting tongue firmly in cheek }
I’m probably banned and only allowed to post two lines because my posts are too long. That would be discrimination and I’d like to do the research to prove it but I lack the time and motivation that Mr. Lewis has to make my case The Sphinn Exposé
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What I was wanting to say was simply this:  

"It isn't a thing that "we" can destroy. It is what it is. By definition, it is the actions and reactions of humans being in a social environment.

It simply reflects what it is that makes us human. I think that is sad and more than a little scarry but it simply is what it is. When you say “we’re destroying the very nature of social media”, the thing is that the entire topic of this post IS the very nature of social media."

We all have the right to choose to participate or not and Donna has publicly announced her decision. I applaud her and desperately hope it helps to raise the bar on online social etiquette ---- but I doubt it.

The Lord of the Flies wasn’t so much fiction after all. Backstabbing, false accusations, hateful comments used to make a weak point, those things all live within the realm of human emotional responses. Now, couple those human frailties with perceived anonymity AND an element of promotional value and ------- HELLOOOO  ugly underbelly !

For me, I choose not to participate except in very rare cases, (and those cases usually offer an opportunity to benefit some goal or objective of my own), but rather observe, accept and use the data to formulate strategic plans to capitalize on the cause and effects.

When you see vicious, nasty cr@p, publicly displayed online, what you are seeing is what we all really are. At least online no one is actually getting physically harmed and personal property isn’t being destroyed. It is all just emotional responses. And I never forget that it is emotional responses that sells things. Not search engines, not blogs, not twitter.  People being people is what makes it all happen and when it is ugly, I always try to remind myself that ugly can be a stimuli as can beauty and both can make a sale.

You see, no one wants to be made to look foolish. No one wants to be hurtful for no good reason and no one wants to see themselves as “bad” people.

BUT, we DO all want to be respected, validated, rich, powerful, happy, satisfied, oh yeah, and we all want our link bait to work like a charm.

While the guru completely agrees with Ms Fontenot’s choice to not participate, the Guru also suggests you remember:

#1. Your words online represent who you really are

#2. Other peoples words online represent who they really are

#3. Once words are published online, they follow you probably forever

#4. As much as we’d like to believe in the ultimate goodness of mankind, there is a dark side in us all and that dark side is as strong a motivator as the light.

 

Peace Y’all!

 

G

 

If ya cain’t say nuthin good bout somebody ----- make sure ya cover yer ass!