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.
When you do the interview job
how many links do you guarantee?
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
**************************************************************
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:
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."
"In such cases
the links being considered have to be carefully chosen to ensure that their
qualifying text matches the query. By combining relevant out-links from many experts
on the query topic we can find the pages that are most highly regarded by the
community of pages related to the query topic. This is the basis of the high
relevance that our algorithm delivers."
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