There are TONS of questions and complaints heard around the SEO community. This post touches on three biggies:
1. How can I get more links?
2. Where did my rankings go?
3. Why isn’t Google indexing my pages?
How can i get more links?
Every website wants fast links, but the quality kind that Google likes. Anyone can outsource linkbuilding and have a company fetch 1000 links overnight and most likely get your site penalized a short time thereafter. So how do you get quality links?
Webmaster Tools provides two ways to get link value that is being discarded by your site. The first is through the “Not Found” page that lists a 404 report. It’s normal to discover 404 pages and they’ll show up for a variety of reasons:
1. Some pages were left out of a site relaunch.
2. Old news articles, case studies, or white papers have been taken down.
3. Products or services pages were taken down because they are no longer offered.
4. URL structure of the site was changed.
If it’s a number above or any other reason, make the most of the links that were pointing to these pages. There could be dozens of links that need to be 301 redirected to an updated page or the homepage that are currently being wasted.
The second way Webmaster Tools can give your site link love is through the settings tab. It’s here you’re able to select your preferred domain, either the non www or the www version. While it’s recommended that this be done through a 301 redirect, sometimes this request is further down on the list of things to do. Why wait a month to pass on link value that is currently being split? Selecting your preferred domain will pass on the link juice from the non www to the www or vice versa.
Where did my rankings go?
Many of you have woken up one morning to find your rankings dropped significantly. There are many reasons why rankings can fall and it’s usually difficult to pinpoint exactly why it happened. It’s especially difficult to pinpoint a reason why some keywords for a site fall while others have not moved at all. Taking an Edison approach to the problem is one of the best ways to figure this out:
“If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.”
Eliminating areas that could have caused the problem is one of the best ways to narrow down a working solution. Webmaster Tools can help with this issue in two ways.
Pages returning timeout errors & 404 errors are listed in the Overview section. Google states at the top of the page “We had problems crawling the pages listed here, and as a result they won’t be added to our index and will not appear in search results.” If pages are showing up in here and rankings have fallen, you should dig further into defining what caused your site to have a timeout or another type of error.
The second way Webmaster tools helps determine why rankings fell is a little less common, but still something that should be checked. Google reports on all pages being blocked by your robots.txt file. Using robots.txt is a great way to keep Google away from pages that are necessary, but you won’t want the engines to index them. These might be secure pages, pages that create a duplicate content issue, or development/test site pages. If you’ve recently implemented a robots.txt file, scroll through this report in Webmaster Tools to make sure you didn’t accidentally block the engines from accessing pages you are targeting. The answer might not be there, but why wouldn’t you want to eliminate the possibility?
Why isn’t Google indexing my pages?
This can be a big issue for newer sites. For a good way to monitor how well Google likes the flow of your site, Webmaster Tools suggests running a site: search on your domain.
Watch how many pages Google is indexing every few days. If this number is not growing, check to see when the last time your site was cached, then jump into the stats in Webmaster Tools to see if there are any errors. New sites can take a long time to be cached on a regular basis. If you are seeing pages indexed in Google, but not Yahoo, jump into Site Explorer to monitor how many pages are being indexed. Another helpful resource is Autocrat in Webmaster Help. He lays down a number of other reasons why your site could be having trouble getting indexed.
Webmaster Tools is a great resource for the above complaints, but also for solving a host of other issues. If you’re unfamiliar with Webmaster Tools, it’s easy to use, so dig around to find possible errors and opportunities for your site.
This post was sparked by this tweet from my buddy and amazing social media marketer – Brian Chappell (pronounced chapel).
So it got me thinking, why was he so surprised I was sharing such detailed insights into how we do linkbuilding? To me it is pretty natural to let it all hang out and hold nothing back. I think many others in multiple disciplines operate the same way, so I figured I would follow that mantra and share with you all the pluses and minuses of literally sharing everything you know on a subject matter.
Positives (in order)
1 â It forces me to innovate, get better, and be on top of my game. When anyone who has deep knowledge in an area shares that information he/she immediately has given their “competitors” insights into how they do things, meaning the person sharing that information must go back to the lab ASAP and work on the next new thing or they’ll be behind.
It makes you hustle more when you share everything you know, you are constantly giving up what many would consider to be a competitive advantage, so you gotta go find a new one.
2 â When you give out GOOD stuff you get links, leads, interview requests, traffic and rapport, I don’t promote my own stuff very much, you won’t see me asking for RT’s (re-tweets), I let it roll, post it to my twitter and internally link stuff like any good SEO would, but asking for sphinns and RT’s of my stuff is not my style. I have probably asked for fewer than 5 ever. If I write something good with a little promotion it’ll catch, if its not great it won’t get so much traction and I gotta get back to the lab.
3 â It creates karma. I often refer to building up my “karma bank” which is a core belief of mine. If I share everything I know with you and try my best to help you out with no motive, I think that there will be times when I am in the trenches and need help and I think others will come to help me out as well. This is precisely why I have NEVER taken a DIME to refer someone, our company is built on referrals mostly by people who never wanted a cut, it would pollute the system if I started asking for a cut. We just want to see our clients and colleagues get connected with great individuals and companies to help them succeed. Not to mention, many people with a conscience who don’t share everything will feel guilty when they get so much from you, and at times will share one or two of their secrets that they don’t make public. After a recent presentation with Rae Hoffman where I shared an idea or two, she came back and improved on it with some really smart queries. This is an example, you give stuff out people will come back to help you or improve on your idea.
4 â Video has created a crazy and very unexpected byproduct. When I speak and share slides on slideshare, like this linkbuilding tutorial one from the Affiliate Summit (where I will be speaking in August in NYC) or SEO videos on YouTube, it has helped break down the “sales guy” approach of selling our service.
Because my style in presentations is to give it all out, and be helpful I will spend as much time as I can helping people – when people who have used the tactics I share on YouTube get frustrated or just decide they don’t want to do this themselves, who are they going to call? Very often they are going to call the guy who gave them tons of advice and answered their e-mails with no motive 6 or 12 months ago.
On that initial call people feel like they already know me, and that helps break down barriers in the sales process where so often prospects are “on guard” because they expect you to be “salesy”.
Negatives in order
1 â Time â As my buddy Rand Fishkin of SEOMOZ said earlier this week, the issue is that sometimes, the desire to give freely and help everyone who comes across your path can kill your time, or result in some people feeling like they got the brush off. Sometimes you want to just veg at a hotel bar and put on some Lily Allen and someone comes up and asks you a question, and its my style to put the music on pause and try to help that person. It’s a time killer for me to spend 30 minutes with someone on the phone who has a 1,000/month budget that is lower than our minimum, but I take the time and try to educate them on how to find an SEO and then I’ll go one step further and try to find a TRUSTED referral source. While this builds the “karma” bank it kills my “me time” bank. I’m 100% ok with that, but the more you share the more you should expect to have me time killed at conferences, shows, and the like.
2 â Abusers â Its not in my nature to be rude, but at times you have someone who just won’t believe you and wants to argue after asking you for YOUR advice to THEIR problem. These are the people who you just walk away from, if you don’t like my advice that’s fine, or if you have substantive counterpoints that it great b/c I learn form you as you do me, but sometimes people will ask you a question or two and then continue to ask you one more question for months and months. Respect is a two way street.
3 – You can’t answer everyone, I try my butt off to say thank you to anyone who takes the time to listen to me, subscribe to my youtube channel, etc. (Not on twitter b/c I don’t follow everyone back there, check out Matt Leonards post on twitter following to get my perspective, but that approach just doesn’t scale, so I don’t get to respond to 100%, but I think I respond to about 85% of subscribers, commenters, @’s on twitter etc. I have a rule that I try to follow which says, you can ask me anything, and I’ll answer it but just might take me 4,6,8 weeks to get back, but I will get back, again sometimes this rule gets broken, but I try, and I let people know to expect an answer in 2-3 weeks so they aren’t left hanging, if you need a quicker answer get a consultant. You should set expectations so people don’t go around thinking you are a jerk b/c you didn’t respond to their request in 24 hours.
4 â Lateness â This may happen to you regularly where you get so into what you are discussing that you forget other important things you told people you’d get to. Very often I run late to just about everything once I start talking SEO it kinda consumes me (sorry to my mom and Nora for the times when I run an hour later than expected).
5 â Expectations that you’ll always have the answers â once in a while people think you know it all, and when they ask you a question, like “hey do you have a favorite SEO plugin for drupal” and you say something like “actually I don’t” â they think you are holding out on them and catch attitude.
In a previous post on using other web sites search data to understand industry trends and your competitors trends, I touched on how many web sites are putting their search box data out there for all to see.
This time I am going to talk about how to turn that search data into a link magnet. I will use ESPN.com and shopping.com (no longer active) as examples, but before I do I would say that this strategy works a heck of a lot better on large sites that get a lot of searches done, like publishers, than for a smaller site like our little SEO Blog
Ok now with that out of the way, lets look at how espn.com uses their top search data vs. shopping .com.
First Espn.com’s “Top Searches” page has over 1000 links (many are from their own site, I know) but shopping.com’s “Top Searches” page has 3 links, see captures below from Yahoo! Site Explorer of both sites
How can this be? How can two web sites both share search data on hot topics and one can get 1000+ links while the other gets 3? Lets break it all down:
ESPN.com Smart Move #1 â Add Value
In the image above the first thing you’ll notice is that this is much more than a list, ESPN takes time to add value to the trending topics, this probably requires someone to also babysit trending topics just to make sure everything that shows up is family friendly. Shopping.com just throws up top searches with no rhyme, reason or value added. In my opinion adding value to your top searches list (whether you do it monthly, quarterly, or annually) is what makes this link strategy a link magnet and not just a web page with hot topics.
ESPN.com Smart Move #1.5 â Add Value = Reporter interest
So let’s say you are a reporter and you want to see what’s getting hot to help you write your next story, this is a great place to go to possibly get a spark, and maybe a link back to that initial spark.
Would a reporter ever go to the shopping.com site? Maybe, but its going to be pulling teeth to get any value from this page in its current state.
Yet they are saying, hey if you are press and want to contact us, call us! How about you create some value on this page first?
Brent Csutoras recently mentioned at IM Spring Break how promotion on Ballhype led to a story that ended up on Yahoo sports, reporters read this stuff for ideas, but I’ll get to social promotion opps later.
ESPN.com Smart Move #2 â Archiving
Another way to turn that search bar into linking gold is to archive the hottest topics for each month / year. Looking at Yahoo! Site explorer I found that the 2007 archive has 10 deep links pointing to it, not KILLER, but why not archive your trending topics from previous months / years? It might take a day or two of someone’s time to write it up and aggregate it all, but heck you get a chance to get links, why not take the 1 or 2 days? Making this just part of what you do is critical, then you know that every month you aggregate top searches, then every year you take them all and publish an all out year-end post. This is critical to do, just make it part of the process and eventually you’ll see how it becomes a self feeding linkbuilding machine.
Missed opportunities by both #3 â Social Promotion
I dug really hard to see if there was any real social promotion about these and didn’t see anything for either. Take a look for the comments section on this page on ESPN.com: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/news/story?id=4029957
3 missed opportunities here on ESPN.com’s part to help this get more buzz and links
1 â The comments link is TINY and close to a banner (which people tend to not look at)
2 â When you find that tiny link if you want to leave a comment it goes to a new page and a new subdomain altogether
3 â Social promotion buttons, where are the buttons for Digg, Yahoo Buzz (www.yahoo.com/buzz), Delicious, Stumbleupon and the all important Ballhype (http://www.ballhype.com)?
Without much effort Espn.com is already doing something great with how they are using search, some small tweaks to a formula that is already working could make this go even further.
So your homework is simple, can you identify large publisher sites you work on that could use this strategy?
This past Affiliate Summit I had the pleasure of speaking on linkbuilding, and many facets of it.
In the video below I basically touched on Twitter (I’m at @wilreynolds) and how you can really use Twitter to do linkbuilding in a very natural and positive way. It is similar to my post on the linkbuilding tips no one talks about. Which is simple, just try to help people. I think there are tons of opportunities to just help people out and by helping them out you’ll gain followers, re-tweets, and even links, so in this video I go over some ways you can search Twitter to find linkbuilding opportunities for your SEO efforts. If you like the video please subscribe to my Youtube channel!
