Posted by Laura Lippay

Music selection to enjoy with this post: The Unforgiven (Metallica)

In October of 2007 I was standing in front of a full house at the Yahoo Sunnyvale headquarters. I was on a mission to try to explain, with very little actual evidence, that SEO is more than just site “optimization”. I could see what was coming down the pipeline loud and clear. SEO isn’t SEO anymore, it’s different. SEO (especially for enterprise-level sites) equals a damn good product.

Here’s a slide from the presentation:

See the point here? It’s the epic frenemy battle of SEOs vs. Search Engines that whittles the SEO techniques down to what eminently points to no other option but to have a great product. What is a great product? It’s a site that people want to go to, return to, share with their networks, email their friends, etc., (aka building natural links and “buzz”). Get it? Great content and natural links and buzz = the new SEO.  But it’s not actually new, it just hasn’t always been adopted very well. 

Until now. Remember what it’s like when an algorithm shift changes the rules of SEO? Of course you do.

Since this timeline I threw out there in 2007, not a lot has changed on the “spammy methods” side of things (and doesn’t that just tickle the “SEO is dead” funny bone). But wait, do you know what popular widely-preached tactics since 2007 are missing since this chart?  C’mon, think Panda/Farmer update. In the current days of black-hats-gone-grey, what’s the spam tactic to be battled at this point?

If you’ve ever bothered to follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines or anything that Matt Cutts has ever said anytime in the last x years, you’ll see that you, my build-content-for-search-engines friends (I still love you, you tried), have had warnings sitting out there as clear as day. Might I show you a select few?

And I quote: “Great content has to be the foundation of any good site, because mediocre content tends not to attract exceptional links by itself. And if you’re trying to get exceptional links on really really crappy content, you’re going to be pushing uphill.”  “You want to have a well-rounded site, and one of the best ways to do that is to have fantastic, interesting, useful content, great resources, great information, and then that naturally attracts the links.  And then search engines want to reflect the fact that the web thinks that you are interesting or important or helpful.”

But I build exactly what people are looking for in search, how can that be bad?

There’s a difference between building content to attract your audiences and building content to attract search engines. But, your audiences are doing the searches in the search engines, right? So what is the difference? Someone asked me recently why ‘content-rich’ Suite101.com was on the Farmer update loser list. Here’s exactly what I sent back to him in an email:

1. Its obviously created for *search traffic*, meaning the company goal isn’t to invest everything into creating something rich and meaningful for their audiences, but instead the primary goal is to create content for search traffic, THEN maybe throw a little investment into the rest of the site experience.  That’s a Google no-no.
2. When there’s "shallow content", the site likely isn’t the best resource for anyone researching something through search. Do you want your search results for how to cope with your depression to be this article plastered with ads from Shauntee Jackson (mother of two rambunctious toddlers in Ft. Worth, TX) who even says in the article "I’m no expert in depression" or would you rather have a site that not only has experts dedicated to helping you learn about and cope with your depression issues, but also provides hotlines, medical information, community support and resources, maybe even tools for diagnosis or self-treatment options.

Get what I mean?  Suite101, like every client that says their number one company goal is to get search traffic, is doing it wrong.  Their number one goal needs to be providing value to audiences.  Which in turn provides valuable content for search results. And on top of that, it provides a cleaner, less spammy and more useful web overall. Leave it to Google.

Learn from past mistakes

You’ve heard about the “quality content” mantra, right? If you’ve been in SEO for ten minutes you’re preaching it. So where did we all go so wrong? How can an entire innovative, on-the-ball SEO industry have let this go right over our heads? How can the warnings of the Do No Evil Silicon Valley giant have been so blatantly ignored as if nothing would ever come of them?

If you sit back and think about it (and if you’re old enough), you might get an eerie sense of those dotcom bubble burst days when millions of investor dollars were thrown into internet companies with no staff, no experience, no plan, and only existed as an overblown trend-following idea on paper. Some people had some new ideas and made some money online and all of a sudden everyone’s building online businesses, with dreams of (being) sugardaddies dancing in their heads, forgetting a very basic, fundamental core of a good long-term business model – providing actual value to their audiences. Shallow much?

The 2011 spin on quality content

This is the deal. We know that search engines want to provide sites that people (aka audiences) find valuable. We know that they use signals like social mentions and influence, and clickthroughs from search, and potentially dozens of other buzz-measuring indicators that go into determining if a site is something that people are really into or just some shallow content hanging around the web trying to feign legitimacy like Snooki at a Mensa convention. How to be one of those sites that people are into, that seeps of naturally linkable, sharable, emailable, tell all your friends, come hither, and come hither again content is fodder for another article. But as you create any content online ask yourself this question: “Self? How will this be more valuable to my audiences than what my competitors are doing?”  If you are lucky enough to not have any competitors, then just take that part off the sentence.

But I don’t have to tell you that, because if you’re listening…

…Google already told you so.

Stay tuned for my next post on how this update doesn’t just change an algorithm, it changes the web.

xo, Laura

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Posted by Everett Sizemore

There are tons of ways to build links into the home page or blog/article pages of an e-commerce website. But most e-commerce SEOs suffer from the same problem: It’s not so easy getting links into categories or product detail pages (PDPs).

The e-commerce SEO’s conundrum: The pages that generate revenue are the ones you hope to rank highly, yet they’re the ones to which nobody wants to link. Of course, you’ve already done all of the interlinking from your most linked-to pages into your product and category pages right? So now it’s time to take the next step and get external links directly into products and categories.

The first thing I want to mention strategy-wise is that you don’t always need to go after the keyword anchor text for which you want to rank. While that text should play a significant role in your link profile, I often purposefully build a few "click here", "domain.com" and other types of non-keyword targeted deep links. We get those types of links quite readily into our home pages, but since most of our deep links aren’t coming to us organically, they tend to lean too heavily toward keyword-text. Make your link profile look natural, even if it isn’t.

The second thing I’d like to mention is that you should also build links into category pages. These are the pages that pass page rank into your products internally. If your category pages have high page rank and lots of quality external links, it will be much easier for you to rank for a newly launched product even before you’ve had time to build links directly into the new PDP. Putting static content on these category pages, and paying attention to best practices when it comes to pagination also helps.

The List of Ways to Build Deep Links Into E-Commerce Pages

Product Reviews

This is one of the easiest ways to get a link into a PDP, and often includes the product name as the anchor text. In the end, it would probably cost you less than outright buying a link, and is not only safer, but does a better job of expanding your brand recognition, reaching new customers and getting feedback about your products. Not all reviews are going to be glowing recommendations, but I have found that (assuming you have a good product) anyone who gets a free thingamabob from you is going to at least give you a fair analysis – more often than not, it’s a darn good review. Don’t "ask" them to link to your PDP with any specific keyword text. Nine times out of ten, they’re going to link to you anyway. Every once in awhile they’ll use an affiliate link. If that happens, just make a note not to send them anymore product to review (if an organic link was your goal) and move on. If they don’t link at all, it might be worth a quick follow up to give them the PDP URL "in case you’d like to provide it as a convenience to your readers" or something like that. Assuming you sell BBQ grills, here’s an example of how to find those opportunities:
BBQ grill inurl:review

Sponsorships

Is paying to sponsor an event the same thing as buying a link? My personal opinion on that matter is that it depends on what you’re sponsoring. For instance, it is not unreasonable for you to sponsor a marathon and have your logo on the marathon’s sponsor page linking back to your running shoes category. As an example of how to find such an opportunity:
Marathon inurl:sponsors

Or you could go local and search for Denver Marathon inurl:sponsors which would be doubly-relevant if you owned a Denver shoe store.

People will no doubt comment that having "sponsor" or "review" in the URL (or title:) is a "footprint" and will advise against building links this way. They have a good point, but so far I have not seen this to be a problem. There are many legitimate sites out there linking to other legitimate sites organically from pages called links.html, sponsors.php or product-X-review/. In the end, it is up to you as to what you see as a risk, and whether you are willing to take that risk. Obviously, you don’t want to take any link building strategy too far, or make your link profile rely too heavily on it. Here’s a post I did awhile back with even more queies used to find such opportunities.

Guest Posts

Writing high-quality content for other websites is one way to get deep links back into your own. When first building a content distribution relationship with another website, avoid dropping the links directly into the body unless they have already said this is acceptable. Even then, one or two links is the max. I usually start by just putting one deep link into the footer. The article will be on a topic that matches what I’m linking to (e.g. "Preview of the Hottest Sneakers for 2011" linking in the bio to the sneakers category). As you develop ongoing relationships with other sites, they may be more amenable to having one or two links put into the content (if appropriate and not forced) instead of the bio. Personally, I’d rather it be this way on my sites because giving the author a bio makes it apparent that it’s a guest post and sometimes I’d rather it just seem like I wrote the content. I use MyBlogGuest regularly, and recommend getting the pro account so you can upload your content to the articles directory. This makes the job of getting it placed on other sites much easier to manage. The quality of sites varies, but you have the choice to decline an offer to post your content if you don’t think the site is worthy.

Type-A Parent lets you post on their site and connect with parents. Think of the possibilities if you sell anything to do with kids and/or parents.

One last tip on the guest post thing: I know it’s tempting to keep all of your best content for your own blog. And in many ways that makes sense. But if you’re going to get into guest posting, don’t try and get away with writing ehow-level content. This is only going to get you placed on inferior blogs. Many PR 5+ blogs out there accept guest posts, but none of them accept the kind of junk you can pay someone on Mechanical Turk to write for $5. I will easily spend three or four hours researching and writing a guest post if I have a specific host blog in mind. In the end, it’s still cheaper than buying an equal-caliber link with cash. In fact, most of these tactics are cheaper and more effective than buying links. They just take some elbow grease and thought.

Putting Linkbait on PDPs

While this won’t work with every kind of linkbait, there are certainly opportunities to use a PDP as the landing page for a piece of linkbait without taking too much away from the actual selling of a product. I’ll give a few examples to illustrate:

• A really cool product demo. We’re not talking run-of-the-mill product demonstration here. One of the best all-time examples of this is the WIll It Blend series by Blendtec. While they created a separate site for that series, showing the videos on the blender PDPs would have been a great way to get deep links into those product pages. I would have just given them one.
• A free download. Who says your downloadable eBook, game, app, etc… has to be on it’s own landing page? If one of your best-selling products is a wooden toy truck, hand-made in the USA – why not offer a downloadable eBook on that page that discusses how to test for lead paint on toys, or the dangers of BPAs in toys, etc… ?
• An Infographic. You obviously wouldn’t want this to be full-size. And if you just give a link to the full-size version, the links you’ll get back are going to go to the full-sized URL. Instead, use a small preview size and then show the full size in a Jquery modal window or some other visual effect that keeps the user on the product page.

Give More Details Than Your Competitors

Anyone can describe the product in a few paragraphs, but sometimes there’s more to it than what can fit into a typical product detail box. Using tabs in your product description area allows you to fit a lot more content into the same amount of page real estate. This opens up the door for you to make a PDP into a real informational resource. It all depends on the type of product, but here’s one example: You sell solar panels. Provide an "Installation" tab on the PDP that goes over how to install your own solar panels. It would include all of the hardware you need (of course, with links to the places on your website where that hardware can be purchased) as well as step-by-step instructions and maybe a video showing how to install the product.

Give-Aways & Contests

The idea of co-sponsoring a give-away on another website is very similar to the review and sponsorship opportunities, but can be expanded upon to get more bang for the buck. Back when I was working for a company that sold eco-friendly household products we were having trouble getting direct links into a product page for a rug made from recycled plastic soda bottles. Instead of just giving the rug away on our site, we gave one away on a popular green-living blog. And instead of "just" giving it away to anyone who commented, we required them to visit our website and come back posting something they learned about this product, or about the company in general. In this way we introduced all of those people to our brand and actually got them to spend time exploring our website and products. Most of them came back with very positive things to say about our brand, products in general, or this one product in particular. One of them came back with a question about the product, which helped us improve our product description and keyword use on the page. The blog owner gave us a great keyword-rich link, and lots of other people posted about the give-away on their blogs, always linking to the green living blog’s post, often linking to our PDP as well. Then there were social media mentions and some direct sales too. All of this costs less than the price of a crappy link on a PR-2 blog that may get discounted a month later.

Ask Your Brand Evangelists for a Link

This one sounds simple, but it’s surprising how few merchants actually do it. The idea of cultivating evangelists or ambassadors isn’t new. In-fact, it’s how pro athletes make a good deal of their money. But you don’t need to hire a professional ball player for millions a year; Get the people who already love your brand to share that love, especially when it comes to their favorite products on your site.

A good example of this is the Lululemon Ambassador Program.

Also see Rand’s Headsmacking Tip on Linkbuilding via Confirmation Emails

Make Your Holiday Landing Pages Evergreen

I can’t count how many times I’ve seen a URL like this www.ecommercesite.com/category/top-gifts-2008 . These are inside pages that often get a lot of links. So why start from scratch again every year? Put the year in the title and the content, where it can easily be changed, but keep it out of the URL. This way you can use the same page again and again without dealing with redirects. Speaking of this type of landing page, if you don’t have them for Christmas, Fathers Day, Mothers Day, Valentines Day, etc… then you should (if appropriate).

Crowdsourcing

Create a social media crowdsourcing campaign around a product. Let’s say, for instance, that you’re going to change the design on a T-shirt. Why not let the community submit their designs and vote on their favorite one? Be sure to mention the URL to the current design (i.e. the PDP) to give everyone a starting place and product URL to which they can link.

This is part of Threadless‘s "submit a design" page. If the community is scoring my design for a t-shirt, I surely will be linking to the page from my blog, Twitter, Facebook, etc!

Keep The Links You Have

There’s an old saying about how much easier and cheaper it is to keep a customer than to replace them. The same is true of links. Be sure to 301 redirect the URL any time you remove a product from your online catalog (especially if it has external links). You may think this one is a no-brainer, but it happens all the time because the merchandising team responsible for choosing which products to show isn’t always in communication (sometimes not even in the same building) as the SEO team.

Likewise, it may be easier to do link reclamation than link building when it comes to product pages. See Tom Critchlow’s post on link reclamation queries.

Local Links

If you have brick-n-mortar locations, like a kiosk or store in the mall, build a locations page. It isn’t quite the same as getting a link into your categories or PDPs, but it is a deeper link than your home page, and is an easy win in most cases. For instance, every mall, local chamber of commerce, local directory… is a potential source of links into this page.

On-Site Hosted Affiliate Pages

The health supplement and real estate industries have been doing this for as long as I can remember, although most of them do it the wrong way. The idea is you let affiliate (mostly brand evangelists) have their own co-branded page on your website. It will be an easy URL that they can put in their business cards (maybe you even send them a pack of 100 free business cards with the URL pre-printed after they sell their first $100 of merchandise) and link to from their social media profiles. You could offer this benefit only to a select few evangelists, or you could open it up to anyone. You could let the pages be public (if they each have enough unique content) or you may choose to add a robots index,nofollow tag in the header. I suggest the latter since you’ll be paying the affiliate commissions on those sales. A note of caution: Pay attention to how these people are building links and promoting their page. If they get the bright idea to start leaving a bunch of spammy blog comments you could end up with a problem on your hands. That is one reason you may consider opening it up to a select few (especially celebrities or personalities in the industry) people instead of everyone. And you would need a clear TOS that they must agree to, which forbids them from marketing their page in certain ways.

Here is an example from BeachBody.

Make Your PDPs Shareable

Here’s another no-brainer that most sites are already implementing these days, but may be going about it the wrong way. First, let customers review your products, and show those reviews on the PDP. When a customer’s review has been posted on the site, send them an automated email with a link to their review (using a # tag on the end of the URL that jumps to their review) so they can share it. You may go so far as to put sharing buttons in the email as well so they can quickly post to FB or Twitter. Second, make sure the product itself is sharable. But understand that you’re not going to get anywhere sharing a product on Digg or Reddit (there are some exceptions to this rule, but very few indeed) so try to stick with sites like Twitter, Facebook and social shopping portals like Kaboodle if you’re going to put social media links on a product page. They may not be followable links, but they’ll help get the word out.

Do a PDP-focused Link Analysis on Your Competitors

Most of us are analyzing our competitors’ backlinks, but it may be necessary to filter the data a little more to show only backlinks going into your competitors’ category and/or product detail pages. There tends to be so much noise from links going into their home page and blog that these deep links don’t even show up on our radar. For instance, one of their PDPs might only have one external link going into it, but that one link is a high-quality, deep link with good anchor text. When you’re looking at a report showing thousands of links, it is quite easy to miss links like these unless you filter out the noise. You can do this by reasearching backlinks using OSE and just looking at results from other domains linking in with the word "product" or whatever it is that appears in the URL of the competitor’s PDPs.

Advertise Product-Level and Category-Level Discounts

Having a "Discounts" page or an "Outlet" category is a great way to build links and increase sales on overstocked items. However, most of the links will go to this page, not the product page. And most of the discounted products tend to be either poor sellers (thus overstocked) or soon-to-be discontinued items. It is a good idea to put up some deep discounts on your more popular products from time to time. Instead of "Free shipping on all orders over $75" try "Free Shipping on All Blue Widgets" or "$10 Off Acme Blue Widget". Put up an offer display on these PDPs or categories and always link to that page when advertising the offer, such as in Facebok ads, PPC, display ads, email, social media posts, blog posts, or on your home page. As long as you’re not creating special "sales" landing pages and are using your main PDP for that product, most of the links will stay active even after the sale is over.

Obligatory Grey Hat Tactic – Bait N Switch

As long as the campaign landing page was on-topic, it is not unreasonable to 301 redirect that page to a category or PDP several moths after the campaign is over. Let’s say for instance you run the campaign above where you crowdsource T-shirt designs. The campaign runs from April-July and you announced the winner on that page in August with a link to the new PDP for that shirt to show off the new design, and prove that you actually did put it into your catalog. You’ll probably get few more links through August, but by October everyone has forgotten about the campaign and the page isn’t getting anymore links, and very little traffic. Now would be a good time to redirect that page to the T-shirt design’s PDP. You could go darker shades of gray with this tactic. For instance, you could 301 redirect a social media hit (e.g. and infographic about famous ball player’s shoes that went popular on Stumbleupon and Digg) to your basketball shoe category several months after the hubbub dies down.

Widget Links

This one is iffy, but it is my opinion that it’s still a good idea if done right. For instance, don’t buy a link for "Cheap Hotels" on a widget showing movie times. In fact, don’t "buy" links on widgets period. And don’t make a widget that is totally off-topic and link back to one of your product pages with highly specific anchor text. Hypothetically speaking, if I were going to make a widget for linkbuilding into an eCommerce site, I would want the widget to be distributed from my site and relevant to my site. For instance, the widget could be as simple as converting shoe sizes between the US and UK, and the bottom of the widget could have a followable link that says "Data provided by MyStore.com" with a link to your shoe category.

Sourcing Unique Products

Even though these may not turn out to be best-sellers, they’ll usually hold their own and generate a lot of deep links into their respective PDPs. One of the most linked-to product pages on a site I used to work on was for a sink made to replace your toilet lid so that you get to use the clean water from the pipes to wash your hands before you flushed. If it’s a product that makes you laugh or blush; that you can’t believe people actually buy (but they do); or that is otherwise unique – it will generate links. An alternative tactic is to have one or two products that are just outrageously expensive. Who knows, you might actually sell a couple!

Good Ol’ PR Footwork

I have yet to find a replacement for good old fashioned PR – the kind that requires you or a PR company to contact magazines, news stations, morning shoes, and major online publications to pitch a story. EVERYONE has a story to pitch. Maybe it’s something easy like "Top Ten Fitness Crazes You’ll See in 2001" with some blurbs/quotes from your CEO thrown in to make it easy for a journalist to use them. The trick here is not to try and pitch a story about "you" or your products (unless you truly have something unique at the time, like Groupon did earlier this year) but to pitch a larger story idea about your industry, and offer yourself, or your CEO, PR person, public face… up as an "expert" who they can quote. This usually only gets links into your home page, but if you work the story angle right you can get deep links. For the above case, maybe you have an infographic timeline of fitness crazes from the 70s up through today. Want to get started on this type of thing but don’t know how? A good first place to look would be Help a Reporter.

OK, I think I’ve about exhausted my ideas for the day. Maybe there are a few more floating around in there, but the coffee wore off a long time ago so I’m leaving the rest up to YOU! What did I leave out? What other angles can be taken on these ideas? What are some potential dangers that I failed to mention? Everyone has a few tricks up their sleeve so spill the beans!

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Read other posts by this Author: Everett Sizemore

Posted by randfish

During my first few years in the SEO field, half of the sites I’d visit – those my SEO brethren in the forums or over email owned – were what today we’d probably call “over-optimized.” They tended to have features like:

• Keyword after keyword stuffed into the title element of every page
• Overly-lengthy and keyword rich URL strings
• Page filled with “SEO’d” content that was never intended to be a focus for visitors
• Backlink profiles that lacked a single high-quality, “editorial” link

At its best, our profession is about making amazing things that people are asking to see (via their search queries in the engines) and then marketing it in the most optimal ways. At its worst (excluding the crap-hat junk that doesn’t even deserve to be called “SEO”), it looks like this:

There’s a gigantic gap between this type of “SEO” and the industry’s best practices, but the individual recommendations and changes are so subtle that it’s not surprising many practitioners go a bit overboard. After all, the process of starting SEO often looks like:

• Week 1: Notice in your analytics that search sends awesome traffic and start optimizing some meta tags (since you heard that’s what SEO is about) by putting more keywords in them
• Week 2: See that those changes have had no effect, so begin doing some light reading on the topic
• Week 3: After you’ve glossed over a few SEO resources (perhaps not necessarily the best ones), start “optimizing” pages by filling the tags you’ve heard were important with your keywords, changing your internal links to be keyword-rich, placing more keywords on your pages in every conceivable tag and location, maybe even optimizing for some wholly bunk metric like the average keyword density of the top 10 ranking pages
• Week 4: Possibly see a bump in some rankings and, tragically, inheriting confirmation bias, convincing yourself that the strategy has worked and that it needs to be repeated.
• Week 5-20: Struggle with and eventually give up on SEO, or skate by on the fringes with equally poor quality linking practices that get many/most of your pages penalized but maintain rankings on a few

This pattern (or some similar variation) has played itself out in 9/10 stories I hear about folks who’ve jumped into the waters of SEO haphazardly – and honestly, it’s hard to blame them. The engines provide just enough information to keep webmasters curious but unsatisfied. Many of the sites and pages that rank well do actually employ pretty spammy SEO tactics, making it hard for those trying to learn SEO by reversing their competition’s success (temporary though it may be).

This doesn’t just apply in the on-page world.

If you haven’t yet read it, this thread from Reddit – My Job Was to Game Digg – and this one on Hacker News about it, are excellent examples of the perception problem that social media pushes for SEO have caused. This comment, in particular, stood out to me:

As you can see, the web’s social voters and contributors have a passing tolerance for the “right” kinds of optimization, but a zealous abhorrence for those that violate their sense of propriety. Even if Google doesn’t worry about “off-topic” linkbait, linkbaiters themselves should have cause for concern.

The engines aren’t going to take it.

More and more, though, the engines are fighting back against this through changes like the Vince update (and subsequent focusing on brands as a way to sort out the web’s “cesspool”). We’ve also recently seen a dramatic increase in the aggressiveness with which Google will change your titles, descriptions and negatively alter the rankings/visibility of sites that step over this line.

In the long run, it’s hard to imagine Google allowing poor results to flourish – especially those who garnered rankings through manipulation. Those sites and pages that follow every single optimization tactic, from internal links to massive keyword focus to “perfect” anchor text in their off-site link building are going to stand out like sore thumbs to the engines. Sites that build pages designed to attract links with little to no relation to the host site will struggle against the biases in the social media world.

And sites/pages that abuse these practices (both on and off-page) are going to have a terrifically hard time earning “natural” links. The organic sectors of the web tend not to link out to those types of sites/pages if they can help it.

It might sound ironic, but there’s an art to under-”optimizing” in order to achieve true “optimization.”

p.s. Some folks noted they were hoping for a link to some good “best practices for on-page optimization” – here you go!

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Posted by randfish

Today, Yahoo! formally announced that it’s fully transitioning its search engine backend to Microsoft’s Bing. While this is good news on many fronts for marketers (simplification of advertising platforms, a bigger competitor for Google, etc), it’s a big loss to webmasters who relied on some advanced link data available from Yahoo! Search that’s now unavailable.

While Yahoo! is maintaining their Site Explorer service, the use of advanced query parameters on searches using the link: and linkdomain: operators will no longer return results.

For the query above, Yahoo! previously showed pages that pointed to any page on SEOmoz.org from sites with the .edu TLD extension (these now return no results)
_

Webmasters and marketers will no longer be able to use advanced parameters on link: and linkdomain: searches such as inurl, intitle, site, etc. breaking many data sources for software tools and limiting link research abilities. However, there are several worthwhile solutions/replacements, including tools from SEOmoz (though I’ll also cover a few others).

#1 – Linkscape Advanced Reports

SEOmoz PRO members now have unlimited access to Linkscape advanced reports, which can apply filters through the UI in much the same way one could with Yahoo! link searches.

Using the filters and search capabilities, I can add nearly all of the filters previously possible through Yahoo!, and many others unique to Linkscape.
_

This tool is available at www.seomoz.org/linkscape

#2 – OpenSiteExplorer CSV Exports

Another methodology without quite as many bells and whistles, is to use Open Site Explorer. While Linkscape offers filtering right inside the interface, Open Site Explorer is built for speed, meaning you can see lots of links, but only in the views directly ported from our API. To get into the deep filtering, you’ll need to use the CSV export + Excel (or your favorite spreadsheet program).

The filters in OSE are more limited than Linkscape, but most reports take <10 seconds to generate
_

When I export the results to CSV and open in Microsoft Excel, I can easily filter for the .edu links (or any other modifier I’m interested in). OSE also shows up to 10,000 links per report vs. Linkscape’s 3,000.

Using the "find" command in Excel is the simplest methodology, but you can do all sorts of awesome filtering using more advanced techniques
_

This tool is available at www.opensiteexplorer.org

#3 – Majestic SEO

A UK-based search engine built using distributed crawlers, MJ-12, offers an SEO tool for backlink research. The index varies slightly to how major search engines and Linkscape build – instead of new indices built from regular crawls, MJ-12 adds new links and pages as they’re discovered to an ongoing index. This means a much larger dataset, but not always the same level of freshness and limited de-duplication/canonicalization. However, many SEOs like this project a lot, and MJ-12 enables the same filtering available in Linkscape:

Many cool filters and ordering are available via MJ’s tool and reports typically return fairly quickly
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This tool is available at www.majesticseo.com

#4 – Yahoo! Site Explorer CSV Exports

Just as CSV exports from Open Site Explorer can enable link searching, so too can exports from Yahoo! ‘s Site Explorer. The big limitation is the 1,000 link limit (1/3rd that of Linkscape and 1/10th that of Open Site Explorer). Previously, SEOs would use modified queries to make requests and get more link data from Yahoo!, but with this switch, the only remaining option is to request links for many pages on a single domain to help get a better sense of sites with greater than 1,000 external links.

The "Export first 1000 results to TSV" button + Excel filtering option enables marketers to do research, but is limited in quantity
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This tool is available at search.siteexplorer.yahoo.com

#5 – The SEOmoz API

For those with some programming skills, SEOmoz offers a free API for link data with up to 1 million calls per month, as well as a larger, full featured link data API starting at $500/month. This is the same API that powers both the Linkscape tool and Open Site Explorer, as well as integrations with Conductor, Hubspot, Flippa, Brightedge and many others.

The APIWiki offers lots of information and examples on how to make calls to the service and integrate with your own softare or practices.
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This API is available at www.seomoz.org/api

#6 – Use Yahoo! in Other Regions (Temporarily)

It appears that while Yahoo! Search in the US has been replaced by Bing, these commands can still work in other regions, such as Yahoo! India and Yahoo! Italy. However, this is likely a short term solution, as Bing will be rolling out to power Yahoo! serach in these countries over the next 1-2 years.

Hat tip to Himanshu in the comments!

#7 – Other possibilities

In addition to these sources, there are a few other options, albeit with less fully functional or open systems. These include:

• Google’s Webmaster Tools (which enables you to export links, but only for sites you own/control)
• Bing’s Webmaster Tools (with similar limitations, and fewer link options)
• Exalead (a European search engine with limited link command functionality)
• Blekko (a new search engine with a comparatively small index, but interesting link functions – though it’s still in private beta)
• Alexa (which contains a limited set of link data for some sites)

Other sources may yet emerge, and certainly players like Majestic and SEOmoz are working hard to improve their coverage, quality and functionality. It will be interesting to see how this change affects the link research landscape – hopefully Bing is working on something valuable to help replace this functionality and to serve up data when Yahoo! Site Explorer is also retired (currently scheduled for 2012).

p.s. If you’re hankering for more information on link research and training on SEO tools, we’ve got just a few tickets left for next week’s PRO Training in Seattle.

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Posted by MikeCP

There’s no such thing as a free link. Whether it was the time taken to craft that blog post, the cash used to film that viral video, or even just the opportunity cost of thinking about how to build links, there is an investment involved. For my first post here at SEOmoz, I want to talk about how a small business might approach the investment into link building.

To make this post a little less hypothetical, we’re going to set a budget of $2,000 and/or 60 hours. This isn’t to say that one needs $2,000 to build links, but for the purpose of this article it helps to keep things in perspective. And for those big business readers out there, I’m sure you could just ratchet up the investment by whatever order of magnitude you’d like.

The Budget is Set

So let’s imagine your client or boss (if you’re in-house) has promised to commit some time and money into a link building campaign. Huzzah! Finding yourself in a position to invest in SEO both financially and resourcefully is a great place to be, and these opportunities don’t grow on trees. So it’s tremendously important that this sum of money (and time) is invested wisely and provides a return, or else that “crazy SEO wizardry” might never make its way into the company budget again.

♫ If I had $2,000…I would send Matt Cutts some flowers ♫

So how best to go about spending this money? That, of course, depends on a lot. There are different kinds of link building strategies for different kinds of businesses in different stages of their SEO development. Answering some of the following questions may help with the “Who am I?” questions your website is surely asking itself (your-site.com/existential-crisis).

1. Have we done any link building in the past? In other words, how low are the “low hanging fruit”?
2. What is a reasonable goal here? Increasing overall domain authority and maybe increasing long tail traffic? Or boosting a specific page in the SERPs?
3. How does the competition stack up? How much work needs to be done to overtake the competition?

Directory Submissions

We COULD invest $2,000 pretty easily with directory submissions and it wouldn’t have to take anymore than 5 hours. The better strategy would be to invest a bit more time into the research phase before throwing $2,000 into a bunch of spammy directories.

Some of the big paid directories are a given; Yahoo!, Best of the Web, Business.com and JoeAnt have established themselves as strong, link juice-passing options. Assuming our web site is not found in any of these directories we’re looking at almost $800 already, and that isn’t considering the annual renewal cost of most of these top-tier directories. This leaves us with around $1000 for submissions to niche and local directories that are deemed worthwhile; Rand discussed the litmus test for identifying these worthwhile directories in a recent Whiteboard Friday.

Who should do it?

In most cases, anyone that is not currently listed in the top-tier directories should make the investment. You do NOT want to be submitting to directories if your site is of low quality, as your site could be declined and you won’t get that money back.

Investing in directories is a good idea early, but I wouldn’t suggest shelling out $2,000 in directories and declaring “mission accomplished”. The better plan would to be to submit to paid directories slowly over the course of a few months, supplementing directory submissions with some more creative link building strategies. Also, don’t forget that a sudden spike in backlinks followed by a lull of no new links is sure to set off a red flag or two.

Outreach (PR for links)

Outreach can be an inexpensive undertaking in terms of cash spent, but the real cost is in the time it takes to do it right. Commissioning under-worked call center staff or interns to call or email relevant site owners can be a great use of “found” time to generate links, but they’ll still need some guidance. I find its a great idea to craft a quick “SEO 101″ document, including bits about how search engines value links, anchor text, and other best practices. You might do well to give a primer on how to quickly evaluate a potential linking partner (say, only target sites with a domain authority over 55?), so your minions don’t go wasting their time on spammy worthless links.

Where outreach can get costly is in offering products, discounts, or other financial incentives to acquire links. Of course, we’re getting a bit close to grey-hat SEO here, but is there really anything wrong with offering free product samples to generate interest? I suppose the white-hat method of product samples/discounts/etc. is to not require a link back, but if you ask me this is where the whole distinction gets kind of silly.

Can you spot the difference? Regardless, I am infinitely clever.

Your odds of acquiring links through outreach get a lot better when samples or other incentives are involved. B2B? No problem. Incentives could include a free trial, a demo or white paper. If you do your homework, you’ll know who to approach to make sure your not just giving away hundreds of dollars of product without any hope of acquiring new customers.

Your overall outreach costs could get a bit fuzzy, and measuring a return will require some serious tracking in most cases. Some tracking ideas include:

• Utilizing separate coupon codes for every outreach target
• Sending visitors to a mini-site, landing page, or tracking URL
• Making use of custom variables in Google Analytics to track the long term value of the campaign

Who should do it?

There’s not much of a disadvantage in spreading the good word of your company around via public relations, so really every business should do it. Your SEO mileage may vary, however, if your business’s website is not finished, a complete mess, or an otherwise unattractive linking partner. No matter how attractive your pitch, no one will want to link to a one-page or “coming soon” site.

No matter what, you’ll want to make sure you’ve got all your tracking ducks in a row, so that you can report good things to the big boss (wo)man.

“But what’s the lifetime value?!”

Buying Links

Buying links is sort of like the elephant in the room. In one hand, we have 2,000 dollars, in the other, we have a mouse that can easily point its way off to a link broker network. We can spend 10 hours max and lock down $2,000 worth of links and have them all live by COB. Do those links lead to better rankings? They might. BUT! The likelihood of these links ceasing to pass value in the near future is extremely high.

Who should do it?

Almost no one. Investing $2,000 into paid links, especially from a link broker, is not liable to provide a long-term return on that investment. While I agree with Rand in his post about the somewhat discouraging amount of webspam making its way into the index, the optimist in me is hoping Google’s just working on some super spam detector and soon all the white-hats will be rewarded.

Linkbait/viral marketing

Call it what you will, but the name of the game here is content. Whether its a blog post, an infographic, a widget, a video, a funny 404 page, a comic, and so on, if its done well, there’s no greater way to invest in link building.

There are tons of great examples of linkbait that have cost less than $2,000, but the most recent campaign that went hot was the whiteboard HOPA girl. After conceptualizing the project, theChive put out a job listing for a “girl next door” model at a rate of $400 per day. Even if the shoot took 2 days, theChive probably paid no more than $1,000 to make it happen.

This image brought to you by Comic Sans™.

Who should do it?

Most anyone. With a great idea, $2,000 is plenty of money to build some great links via content marketing. Of course, the important part is the great idea. This is where your 60 hour allotment of time may come in handy for brainstorming. If the idea can’t be executed in-house, tap your network for a good resource to help, or use services like oDesk, guru, and eLance to find a freelancer.

One caveat here is that your link building campaign can only go as far as your (social) network will take it. Before hitting “publish”, make sure you’ve got a good seed of retweeters, rebloggers, and likers standing by.

Reporting Your Results

This is arguably the most important part of your SEO campaign! Keep an eye on your website’s organic traffic and mark any upward trends. Can this be attributed back to your link building campaign? If so, this is no time to be shy.

Best of luck!

And now a quick introduction! My name is Mike Pantoliano and I work for Distilled in the US. I would love your feedback on my first post and I hope you get something from it! Follow me on Twitter @MikeCP because my complaining about having to wear shoes is absolutely vital to your SEO success.

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Posted by randfish

For the past few years, I’ve given numerous presentations introducing SEO to new audiences of marketers, engineers and executives. With the end of SEOmoz’s consulting business this past January and the completion of our final contract obligations this Spring, I thought it would be wise to share the 190+ page deck to hopefully help those of you who are tasked with introducing SEO to your companies, agencies and colleagues.

The deck is updated as of August 2010, but I hope to update it again in the future. Along with the Beginner’s Guide to SEO, this resource should help those seeking to learn SEO or catch up on key points from the past few years.

You can find the download link via Slidesare here (I normally use Scribd, but couldn’t get it to display properly in all browsers, so switched).

Feel free to use it or any elements inside. We always appreciate attribution, but even if you can’t (which I understand happens), go ahead and make use of it or the images/contents. We love to introduce new people to the magical world of SEO, and if this resource can be of help, it’s done its job!

p.s. We’ve been murmuring about a BIG launch for SEOmoz coming up in the next couple weeks. Launch day is still a bit up in the air, but should be nailed down in the next few days, at which point we’ll share a bit more. The new web app has proven pretty popular, and folks here are working many, many overtime hours to keep those reports running smoothly and fixing bugs (a big thanks to everyone who’s sent us feedback so far!).

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