SEOmoz: The Future of Great Links

The Future of Great LinksWhere link analysis is heading and how marketers can win today and tomorrow.

“Essentially, we've been doing the same kind of search now for over a decade, right? It's basically anchor text and PageRankand inbound links, and that's how we've kind of decided what page is best for a particular term… But there are signals beyond this.”
Stefan Weitz, Director for Bing Search
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/director-of-bing-discusses-holistic-search-and-clickstream-data-whiteboard-friday

“One piece of advice I give to SEO masters is, don’t chase after Google’s algorithm, chase after your best interpretation of what users want, because that’s what Google’s chasing after,”
Matt Cutts, Head of Web Spam, Google
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/business/media/11search.html

Link Building Signals Today

Diversity of Domains + Linking C-Blocks
# of Linking Root Domains to URL
# of Links to URL
http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements

Anchor Text
# of Links w/ exact match anchor text
# of linking root domains w/ exact match anchor text
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/business/media/11search.html

Features of Linking Pages
Data via http://www.opensiteexplorer.org

Features of Linking Domains
Data via http://www.opensiteexplorer.org

Topic Modeling / Topical Relationship?
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lda-and-googles-rankings-well-correlated

TL;DR – Quantity & Quality of Links
http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/big-budget-link-building-advanced-analysis-5566731

Link Building Signals of the Future

Social Signals
Page A
646 links from 36 root domains
2 tweets
Page B
1 link from 1 root domain
522 tweets
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-do-tweets-influence-search-rankings-an-experiment-for-a-cause

Social Signals
Page B – the tweeted version – ranks #1!
Page A
646 links from 36 root domains
2 tweets
Page B
1 link from 1 root domain
522 tweets
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-do-tweets-influence-search-rankings-an-experiment-for-a-cause

Social Signals
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tweets-effect-rankings-unexpected-case-study

Social Signals
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tweets-effect-rankings-unexpected-case-study#jtc133590

Author Authority
Danny Sullivan: Do you try to calculate the authority of someone who tweets that might be assigned to their Twitter page. Do you try to “know,” if you will, who they are?
Bing: Yes. We do calculate the authority of someone who tweets. For known public figures or publishers, we do associate them with who they are. (For example, query for Danny Sullivan)
Google: Yes we do compute and use author quality. We don’t know who anyone is in real life :-)
http://searchengineland.com/what-social-signals-do-google-bing-really-count-55389

Brand Signals
Brands
Generics
Have real people working at a physical address
Have authentic, followed social accounts
Display obvious, robust contact information
Register with government/civic organizations
Receive traffic from diverse sources
Generate branded search query volume
Run offline marketing/advertising campaigns
Often exist only online
Rarely have significant social accounts
Frequently use email forms only
Stay “under the radar”
Search is often 90%+ of traffic
Have little-no branded search demand
Ignore the offline world
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-next-generation-of-ranking-signals

Domain Name / Brand Name “Mentions”
http://www.seomoz.org/labs/blogscape

Depreciation/Filtering of Anchor Text
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-recommendation-for-googles-webspam-team

Some Future-Looking Link Building Tactics I Love

Q+A Sites
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/question_and_answer_sites.php

Building Your Own Social Community
http://mashable.com/2010/11/15/biggest-facebook-brands/

Media Coverage
http://www.madetostick.com/excerpts/

Comment Marketing
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/recommendations-blog-commenting-marketing-strategy

Competitive Analysis of Top “Brands”
Where do these brands earn their links?
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org

Investigating Brand “Mention” Sources
Facebook page
Blippr?
Crunchbase profile
App profile on Blackberry
Twitter account
BusinessWeek Profile
Chrome Extension
Mashable Article

Q+A
Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-Founder, SEOmoz
Twitter: @randfish
Blog: www.seomoz.org/blog
Email: rand@seomoz.org
You can now try SEOmoz PRO Free!
http://www.seomoz.org/freetrial

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SEOmoz: The Future of Great Links

by Rand Fishkin on Feb 26, 2011

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