Daily Archives: August 9, 2011

Bedford Corners NY Real Estate | Link Reclamation Best Practices – The Complete Guide

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Aug 08 2011

Link Reclamation Best Practices – The Complete Guide

Over time, websites change and alter their designs, creating broken links from other websites. Often, back-links may be lost as a result of removing pages and changing URL’s during the website overhaul process. When starting up a link building campaign for a new client, link reclamation is a quick and easy way to help with the search engine optimization effort. 301 redirects will restore some SEO value to the inbound links, but a link reclamation project is the only way to retain the full link value.

Link reclamation is the process of locating, contacting and fixing broken links on your company website and other websites with links pointing to yours. The only tools needed for a link reclamation project are Microsoft Excel and Open Site Explorer. Open Site Explorer is a free tool created by SEOmoz, and it is the most in-depth tool for analyzing linkage on web pages. OSE provides metrics for inbound, outbound, internal and broken links on web pages.

Carrying out a link reclamation project is necessary any time content is removed, URLs are changed, or the website is redesigned. To determine whether a website requires it, investigate the results from the “Top Pages” tab in Open Site Explorer for the root domain of the website. Export the results to a .csv format, and sort them by “HTTP Status.” If any pages have a 404 HTTP status, link reclamation is imminent.

Case Study: TSI

TSI is a precision measurement instrumentation company near Minneapolis, MN. They are a well-known company in the academic and industrial communities because of their aerosol research offerings– which makes them a unique client to build links for. Most of their back-links come from research organizations, .edu and .gov domains. Upon review of their back-links, we noticed several pages coming up as 404’s. Several of these broken links were coming from .edu sites. Most of the broken links were pointing to non-existent product pages from one of their old websites.

Before diving into the project, it helps to create a spreadsheet with the old URL’s, anchor texts, new URLs and locations of the broken links. The best fix for internal linking problems is to manually go to the page with the broken link and replace the URL. To fix broken links from external websites, a 301 redirect campaign along with a link reclamation project are the only way to retain those links. A direct link always holds more value than a redirect, so it would be best to wait a few weeks after the link reclamation to put the redirects in place. After all, why would other websites want to bother fixing their links when you already set up a redirect for them?

Figuring out new URLs for a broken links can sometimes be tricky – especially with a client like TSI. One broken link had “Velocicalc” as the anchor text. Who or what is a Velocicalc? The only other clue was a product ID number in the URL which had absolutely no significance to the current product whatsoever. The web page with the broken link on it came from a climatology research project page for a university – which was full of scientific jargon. After doing some searching on the current website, it turns out that it’s supposed to be pointing to a page for air velocity meters. Using context clues, the correct pages usually can be found. If not, the home page can always be used as the default target.

Once the spreadsheet is built out with the new URLs, the next step is to figure out how many pages are linking to the missing page. To do this, run each URL that came up as a 404 status through Open Site Explorer, and view the “Linking Pages” tab. This will show every link and anchor text pointing to the missing page. Do this for every missing page. This step will make the spreadsheet quite lengthy. If some pages come up as 404’s but there are no pages linking to it, there may be a problem with the old redirects already in place.

Sort the spreadsheet by the linking URL’s once all other steps are complete. This will make it easy to identify websites that have multiple broken links to your company website. The next step is to manually go through the list and contact each of the website owners to let them know about the broken link — and what the correct link is. Depending on the age of the links, the response rate is about 50 percent on average. The older a link is, the less likely a response is. Most people will gladly fix the links because it affects their visitors too. The key to getting better responses is to avoid looking like a bot, and be as informative as possible in the initial contact e-mail.

Not all links can be reclaimed. A few weeks after sending out the initial contacts, the best course of action is to set up 301 redirects for all pages that showed up as 404s previously. Even if the broken links were fixed, it is still highly beneficial to set up redirects for those pages. Google will be able to index the website much more efficiently when all inbound links are clean, direct links to the website.

Written By:

PG

Harrison Jones | Chicago SEO Company

Harrison Jones is an SEO analyst at Straight North, specializing in link acquisition and search engine optimization. Harrison writes frequently about SEO tactics and techniques.

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Chappaqua NY Realtor | How to Avoid the “SPAM” Label

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Aug 08 2011

How to Avoid the “SPAM” Label

If you’re in marketing, there’s something that I think you should know:  the next generation doesn’t like you very much. They’re sick of your TV ads, billboards, and full page newspaper ads. They can’t stand your pop-ups and pop-under ads, CPM, CPA, and CPC ads. They’re sick of ads showing up in bathrooms, on their phones, and especially the internet. Oh, and one more thing – they won’t be asked to ignore them. In fact, many people will go out of their way to avoid advertising.

I believe that part of being a good SEO means sometimes hiding that you’re (in fact) doing SEO. This is especially crucial when marketing in the world of social media. Once users get a whiff that what you’re doing serves a marketing purpose, it doesn’t matter what the quality of the content is, they’ll consider it spam.

So, how can you avoid being called a spammer? The first and most important step is to make sure your marketing doesn’t smell of marketing. You must learn what people are wary of. The following are the most common types of spam you’ll find being called out in social media:

SEO/Link Spam

Anyone who’s been doing SEO for a while has seen their share of spammy links. When you spot them, they’re fairly obvious. A good SEO provides links that are (or at least) look organic.

Even before social media links had been part of the major search engine’s algorithms, they were there, usually from SEO wannabes that didn’t know any better. So, let me warn you: if you’re involved in social media solely for the SEO value of the links from your favorite social media sites – you’re doing it wrong.

Unfortunately, too many people have already abused this area, so much so that now increasingly savvy community members are over-sensitive to it. I’ve seen legitimate content called SEO spam simply because the user couldn’t find another marketing purpose to call it.

How to avoid this label: provide GREAT (not just good) content. In general, the better your content = the less likely it will be considered spam.

Comment Spam

This type of spam needs no description. Comment spam is a major annoyance and usually a sub-category of SEO Link spam. Blogs, Forums, Facebook pages, social media bookmarking sites, and the like all have to deal with this kind of spam.

99 times out of 100 the comment is placed by a bot that drops a link back to the offender’s web site. Occasionally, you might find an actual person making a comment to solely drop a link.

How to avoid this label: 1) don’t comment unless you have something to add to the conversation 2) only use links if it’s relevant to the conversation.

Blog Spam and Linkjacking

These are newer terms for me, and there seems to be little difference between the two. Blog spam is essentially when an unknown blog takes high quality content, like a viral video or images, from elsewhere and hosts it on their blog to attract traffic and attention with content they didn’t create. LinkJacking is a term that means essentially the same thing, only this time, it’s well known/high traffic blogs doing it in order to get traffic specifically from social media sites such as Digg or Reddit.

Another difference between the two is that blog spam takes multiple pieces of content from various sources to hide the fact that it’s spam. Linkjacking usually takes content from a single source and simply adds a unique description so as not to be “duplicate” content.

Blog spam serves little purpose but to rob the original content producers of their due credit. Linkjacking is less unacceptable when credit is given especially if the original source gets traffic that they might otherwise not have gotten. If I had to choose whether I’d rather have my article on the front page of Digg with 40,000 uniques in a day or have a link from gizmodo.com that sends 10,000 uniques (because it was on the front page of Digg) the SEO in me might choose the latter link. But if my original post failed to hit, then the Gizmodo post did, I’d be happy that Gizmodo did that for me.

How to avoid this label:  Original content. Also having a professional looking custom blog design/theme doesn’t hurt.

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is like hitting a “home run” in social media marketing. Having a piece of content go viral gives a number of obvious marketing benefits, especially everyone’s favorite marketing buzz word: branding. That’s why many big brands try to go this route. The problem? It’s becoming harder and harder to achieve. Why? Because it’s been done…a LOT. Not only are users becoming more cautious of this type of marketing, but the content’s becoming redundant.

How to avoid this label: Your content must be or look completely genuine, stir up real emotions, and strive for originality. It’s easier said than done, but not impossible.

Self Promoter

There’s nothing wrong with the occasional self promotion. The problem is when it’s only self promotion with little else to offer, it becomes obviously self-serving and a turn off. When sharing links from your site or blog exclusively and from nowhere else, people consider this spam. Even if it’s super fantastic, neat-o content, you’re spamming people. Even if your blog has no advertising, marketing or business model: you’re still a spammer.

How to avoid this label: Sharing more than your own content not only makes yours better received, but others will be more willing to share it because they trust what comes from you. If you share nothing but your own content, it’s the easiest way to end up in a place like this.

Anything That Makes Money is Spam

This is how most social media users feel. If you get paid to submit links to Digg or Reddit, you’re a spammer, even if the site(s) you’ve submitted make no money from it. If a site has too many ads, too large a call-to-action, or even too prominent a brand message, it might be considered spam. Even well known publications have been known to fall victim to this label. The fact is, if someone has something to gain by content being spread then it probably smells of marketing. And if it smells of marketing, than it probably is marketing.

How to avoid this label: Limit call-to-action and/or advertising. If necessary, hide your main business objective and focus on (first) making sure your content is being spread.  You may even want to consider a second “social promo” design/template for such purposes.  Also, it bears repeating: Great content.

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Anything That Makes Money is Spam

 

Written By:

PG

Todd Heim | Essential Internet Marketing | @ToddHeim

Todd Heim is CEO, co-founder, and SEO manager of Essential Internet Marketing, LLC, an SEM and Social Media Marketing company based in Albany, NY.

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