A little while ago I remember Patrick from Blogstorm saying how he thought that one of his pages went supplemental because it was linking to a page on DigitalPoint.com. I figured it was probably just a coincidence - sites like Search Engine Roundtable link to the forums all the time, these sites would not rank at all if this were true.
However some new evidence has just come to the surface which further proves that linking to DigitalPoint.com could indeed be harmful. Now this evidence is not damming and it could easily be a coincidence, but it definitely made me wonder.
Here are the new PR scores for each of the SEO tool reviews on this site:
Can you spot the odd one out? What do you think? Is this just a coincidence? Or has Google well and truly deemed DigitalPoint.com a bad neighborhood that should not be linked to?
Posted in Search Engine News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
August 2nd, 2008
I have been teased really badly twice recently on Yahoo site explorer. The 1st time was about a month or so ago now:
I typed in linkdomain:seoco.co.uk and up came this URL: http://www.w3.org/Mobile/planet. I got really excited and actually did a little jig thinking that I had been linked to by the W3. But I had not been linked to by them, this guy called Andrew Grill had linked and his feed is displayed on that page. The link from W3 was temporary and pretty worthless.
Today again I was teased whilst checking the links to this site. The URL I saw come up was from Harvard no less: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/planet/idtechtools/, the stuff link building dreams are made of. I really got my hopes up only to once again find that it was a temporary link. This time it was because a guy called Ethan Zuckerman had linked to me.
So there you have it, don’t get excited about the links you see in site explorer until you are sure that they are permanent. The links from Andrew and Ethan are also amazing of course.
On a much happier link building note: a mainstream media site did link to the article on the mainstream media linking out.
Posted in Link Building News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
August 1st, 2008
I have been really busy working this week so I haven’t had chance to do a proper post. There are a few things I want to talk about though:
Advertising
I am now running adsense on the site. Sorry about that. I just like the idea of getting free money, even if it is not a lot. I think if you want your ads to show up on this site you can select it with Google adwords or something, but I am not 100% sure. Other then that I am open to offers, I will sell a banner on the frontpage of this site if the money is right. No text links or anything though - I know it sucks.
According to Google Analytics this site has had 20,833 mainly very highly targeted visitors in the last 30 days. Although admittedly this Watch-Movies.net SEO review has accounted for about 5,000 of those.
Please drop me a mail, if you are interested in advertising on this site.
The Times Got Their PageRank Back
I 1st noticed this yesterday, it is nice to see some good has come out of the authority sites with a PageRank penalty post.
Directory Listings
I have started to make a UK SEO directory and a web designers directory.
The SEO one is already quite comprehensive - I have listed most of the better whitehat-ish UK companies that I know about in there. Please feel free to drop me a mail if you would like a listing, but I am very strict. You wont here back from me either way, if I think your site is the real deal it will be listed.
The web design one I just need listings for - I know different people like different things. I do however have some standards, if your own website has 120+ coding errors on the homepage it does not look good. People like me have to clean up these messes and it is not my idea of a cool Friday night. An error or two here and there I don’t mind and I would probably not reject you purely on bad code, especially if you have good graphic design skills or something. But take note, it is part of the quality score - a bit like Google’s algo. Just send me a mail if you want me to check out your UK web design site.
Buy Linkbait Online
Visit our linkbait services page to buy a piece of linkbait online for £999 through Google Checkout. It says we will take a week to make it, but the truth is we have quality writers just waiting to write some linkbait for your site right now - we will probably have it done in 3 days. We have dropped the price to £999 to try and bring in some sales. Visit the page for details of what you get with the service. We have been consistently getting good results for some time now. For most medium to large sized sites it is well worth it, I had my doubts, but I have seen the benefit now. It takes time, but when well optimised sites start to build authority they can fly.
Awesome Links
I never end up linking to any of the stuff I want to link to, so here are 10 really cool blog posts from this last week - not just SEO.
I will try to get a couple of more substantial posts out next week.
Posted in SEO News By David Eaves, a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
July 24th, 2008
The mainstream media has come under fire many times in the past for failing to link out to sources from their stories. However the problem isn’t with the entire industry and it’s wrong to make generalisations when a good number of online news websites are very good at crediting sources with the appropriate link.
Some websites have adopted a half hearted approach of linking to lots of websites, but only from blog posts - the main articles in the site only contain internal links.
We believe that linking to useful websites doesn’t “leak” traffic - quite the opposite in fact. Offering useful links actually makes visitors more likely to return to see what other interesting websites they might find in the future, a model that sites such as Digg and Fark are built around.
Of course as a blogger it’s sometimes hard to appreciate the fact that mainstream media websites are, with the exception of the BBC, business entities with shareholders and an obligation to maximise profits. It’s understandable that they are reluctant to send valuable page views elsewhere. We spent some time researching the issue to see if there was a correlation between the frequency a site links out and the number of links it gets in return.
The results below might just surprise you.
|
Links out |
|
Links |
| Newspaper |
Main stories |
Blog posts |
Domain Strength |
Incoming |
Outgoing |
 |
 |
|
99% |
29,629,082 |
1,730,000 |
 |
 |
|
99% |
18,415,777 |
970,000 |
 |
|
|
88% |
25,667,372 |
1,940,000 |
 |
|
|
97% |
15,114,877 |
1,600,000 |
 |
|
|
87% |
14,421,388 |
722,000 |
 |
|
|
98% |
11,986,781 |
729,000 |
 |
|
|
99% |
11,867,676 |
1,080,000 |
 |
|
|
97% |
9,968,336 |
1,360,000 |
 |
|
|
92% |
7,862,887 |
254,000 |
 |
|
|
97% |
7,038,634 |
474,000 |
 |
|
|
92% |
5,980,262 |
275,000 |
 |
|
|
83% |
5,434,310 |
357,000 |
 |
|
|
88% |
4,121,583 |
144,000 |
 |
|
|
93% |
3,995,969 |
330,000 |
 |
|
|
97% |
3,709,030 |
1,460,000 |
 |
|
|
96% |
3,667,889 |
169,000 |
 |
|
|
83% |
3,233,951 |
12,600 |
 |
|
|
92% |
3,087,518 |
226,000 |
 |
|
|
90% |
2,452,153 |
211,000 |
 |
|
|
88% |
1,001,791 |
16,800 |
 |
|
|
78% |
552,930 |
196,000 |
 |
|
|
74% |
408,462 |
60,700 |
 |
|
|
60% |
183,570 |
14,500 |
 |
|
|
60% |
164,586 |
3,960 |
 |
|
|
58% |
94,804 |
878 |
 |
|
|
48% |
31,356 |
337 |
By entering all the incoming and outgoing link values from the table above into an Excel spreadsheet we used the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient to determine whether there was in fact a correlation between the number of times a website links out and the number of links it gets back in return.
The resulting figure of 0.842733801 shows that in general there is a strong relationship between news websites linking out and getting links in return.
Comments from the media
In order to make sure this article was as balanced as possible we contacted a number of mainstream newspapers to ask what their linking policy was. The responses are below.
It appears that a number of newspapers have a policy of linking out, but in practice this doesn’t always happen for many reasons.
Tom Happold, Network editor Guardian Unlimited
“It has always been our policy to point our readers to whatever we think is of interest on the web.”
James Montgomery – Editor, FT.com
“What I can say, regarding attribution by the FT to non-FT sources, is that one needs a clear distinction between “attribution” and “sourcing”, journalistically speaking. Citing a non-FT source would not, generally speaking, meet the FT’s required standards of verification. (Just because something is reported by the New York Times, say, doesn’t make it true, however much we implicitly believe what we read in that newspaper - we have to check for ourselves.)
Obviously, we are more inclined to believe some sources (Reuters) than others (chat rooms). Many blogs might be regarded as inherently unreliable because they don’t reveal their sources or uphold traditional journalistic/MSM standards of reporting (eg, double sourcing, on the record or whatever). But there is nothing intrinsically untrustworthy about blogs as a genre.
So when it comes to linking out on FT.com, a link does not constitute sourcing for us. But as a general rule, if we do acknowledge some third party content, then best practice would be to carry a link to it.
For example, if we write: “Yesterday’s statement by the prime minister appeared to represent a climbdown from an interview to the BBC last week in which he pledged….”, then we would link “interview” to the BBC article. That’s a service to the reader, who may want to follow the link to learn more; and a confirmation that we have accurately reported the earlier quote.
Do we also live up to this best practice? No, because of some technology issues to do with persistent hyperlinks in text in our CMS, and newsroom training. But we are improving.
Last, and this is probably what you really want to know, when do we acknowledge third-party content? This is tricky - lots of facts/information/articles written in the FT, or any other publication for that matter, existed earlier somewhere else. But so what? That doesn’t mean we have to credit every snippet of information to another publisher. We do “hat tip” our competition, in print or online, for a genuine clean scoop; and best practice would therefore require a link.”
Drew Broomhall - Search Editor, Times Online
“Times Online has a policy of linking out to third party sites where editorially appropriate, such as products, organisations, reports etc mentioned in articles. Some sections do more than others, it depends on the section’s editor. Our outbound link count might even have been higher before the relaunch, a lot of links were lost due to html being stripped out of inline links when they migrated to a new CMS.”
Credits: Mark Woodbury, Trifecta Tool Set, Yahoo Site Explorer and Live Search.
Posted in Link Building News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
July 16th, 2008
Image credit: too much stumbleupon
Around about a week ago I was happily stumbling away when all of a sudden this warning page came up, telling me that my account had been disabled:
Stumbleupon warning
Stumbleupon has been temporarily disabled, because you have used it too much.
- Stop stumbling and disable stumbleupon toolbar
- Do your work
- Don’t think about stumbling
I feel really stupid now, but I fell for this thing hook, line and sinker. I thought that I had been caught stumbling my own blog too much and that someone at stumbleupon was messing with me.
The page is possibly one of the most popular stumbles ever, it was discovered about 8 days ago and already it has received 351 reviews.
I wanted to find out more about the page and who created it, so I used the form on the website to contact the creator. He kindly agreed to answer a few questions for me, but wishes to remain anonymous:
Question 1: How long have you been a member of StumbleUpon?
Answer: I have used stumbleupon since April 2007, So it is about 1,5 years ago.
Question 2: Did you create the page for fun? profit? Or both?
Answer: It was just for fun, I was bored and playing with new firefox 3 and surfing on the “about:robots” page. I noticed how easily the source of the about:robots page could be copied, I remembered those funny “stop stumbling” images and got the idea. I created the page, uploaded it to my site, added it to stumble and forgot it.
Question 3: How many unique visitors has the page had so far?
Answer: Here are my traffic statistics according to AWStats and Google Analytics:
- AWStats - 101,789
- Google - 89,901
Question 4: Has the amount of traffic you have received surprised you?
Answer: It was a big surprise to me, because I almost forgot the whole page… The last popular page I had: a joke about vista’s source code, only received 9,240 visitors.
Question 5: Have you ever thought about a career in viral marketing?
Answer: Nope.
Going off this page’s performance, I would definitely be interested in taking this guy on for his social media skills. He is not a professional and as far as I am concerned he hasn’t even marketed the page - One hundred thousand unique visitors and going strong.
Here is a link to the warning page and the 350+ comments at SU.
Posted in Social Media News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
July 14th, 2008
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