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
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
I have just started to put in place a directory of UK web designers and yesterday I got my 1st request for a listing:
“Hi there,
Please can you put my design company into your Directory for Yorkshire. We are a newly established business but have a successful record so far! Our website is being built at the moment (funny how you can design everyone else’s website and never find time for your own!).
Our address:
Unit 4 Amber Business Centre, Rawmarsh road, Rotherham, S60 1RU.
Kind Regards,
Candice Link
Managing Director
JEWEL Cre@tive Ltd”
Her last name is link, how awesome is that for link requests? I was so impressed with her last name, I told her she could have a listing immediately, even though I have not properly launched the dir yet.
Candice’s website, Jewel Creative will be online soon.
Posted in Link Building News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
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June 10th, 2008
Over the last week or so there has been a lot of discussion about the Yahoo Directory. 1st Loren Baker over at Search Engine Journal made the following post:
Yahoo Directory Lost Its PageRank : Penalty or Not?
Then Barry covered it and talked about Matt Cutts response:
Yahoo Directory Has No PageRank
And this morning I have just found the following one over at Webmaster World:
Yahoo Directory Gray barred?
All of the internal links in the directory are in a right mess, upper and lower case URLs are confused and there are these weird sub-domains coming into the equation in places. Also some people have said this is not new, but the links on the homepage to the main categories are done via a 302 redirect.
Many of the deeper categories do not seem to have any version indexed in Google. If things do not change, for some sites there could be little, if any real SEO benefit in being listed in there.
Without much SEO benefit, you really would have to question weather or not it is worth the $299.
Posted in Link Building News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
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June 9th, 2008
A month or so ago, one of the sites that I am working on got mentioned in this big fashion magazine. The magazine had wrote an entire article about the client.
I am not going to say which magazine it was, but if they had linked to the client, it would have been an awesome link. There was however no link to the client. The really annoying part is: they had actually placed the client URL in the article, but without linking it through.
I conferred with the client and we came up with a plan to get the hyperlink: this involved us doing our best to get the person who wrote the article on the telephone.
After a couple of days, we did and she said that she may be able to help us out.
To our surprise she sent us the following offering:
And there was a 3 month minimum contract, that is £2,499 (about $5k) to hyperlink a URL that is already on a page for 3 months.
Needless to say, we did not take them up on their offer - We just thought that asking nicely would be enough.
Posted in Link Building News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
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June 4th, 2008
