Link tales from the trenches
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Some myths and mindsets busted in Link building after 20 years in the game. A talk at the LRT conference in 2019.
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Link tales from the trenches
- 1. Tales from the Trenches Dixon Jones The Only Link Conference in the World – for Charity
- 2. Perspective
- 3. 1: How many links are there on the Internet? (“Mine’s bigger than yours”)
- 4. Crawler Priority Paradox Crawling New Links Recrawling Pages
- 5. 2: SEOs (and especially agency SEOs) are overly prone to depression Source:99medialab.com Giphy.com
- 6. 3. People Pay Lip Service to the Tech
- 7. 4: Nobody seems to pay attention to how outbound links on a page.
- 8. 5. Measuring Authority at the DOMAIN level is a critical error
- 9. 6. People block Ahrefs/MJ12Bot /RogerBot to hide their PBNs… But…
- 10. People block Ahrefs/MJ12Bot /RogerBot to hide their PBNs… But…
- 11. 7. You cannot always tell link authority just by looking at a site
- 12. That’s it – I’m out! • @Dixon_Jones To Get the whole deck: Email: talk@dixonjones.com With “Vienna” in the subject Giphy.com
Editor's Notes
- Thanks for taking the time to listen to me. My past My retirement Chance to reflect 7 takeaways from the Trenches
- PERSPECTIVE I did run an agency, but last 10 years I have seen links from a similar perspective to Google Majestic’s (or any search engine’s) main objective is not to deal with the manipulators, it is dealing with the scaling issues. Because we look at things at a global scale, we sometimes see things very differently to the way SEOs see them. (Slide on perspective… montage at Birmingham station) Here’s X things we see differently to link builders.
- 1. How many links are there on the Internet / Who has the biggest Index? It wasn’t in my interests to say this when I was FT at Majestic, because we were reporting the highest numbers… but that’s an advertising stunt: Actually the link counts are many magnitudes more than reported Actually the number of valid URLs on the Internet is easily infinite. (Slide shows why)
- This creates a paradoxical question for crawlers… how to prioritise crawl budget Crawling new URLs vs Revisiting URLs
- 4: SEOs (and especially agency SEOs) are overly prone to depression Months 1-3 you improve the rankings Then EVERY DAY you wake up and you wait for the drop… 7 algo changes A DAY… You WILL be screwed, but until you are, you can only wait. That means you are not in control of your destiny That is OK for a bit, but unsustainable long term At Brighton, I moderated a session on stress… it was packed. I do not know how you can get around this as an SEO, but it is important to find marketing strategies that do not rely on rankings… which is of course bollox for “true” SEOs. So my coping strategy was to go toolside. That worked for a decade.
- . Most people pay lip service to using the technology Gamification in technology is not just helping you use the software.. It is tracking you! We learnt loads when we added Gamification Mostly that you don’t use the tools properly The people on stage preaching are often the worst Make sure you do at least look at the vidoes/help promts/ onboarding when you try out tools… but be wary of people espousing a tool from the podium. Many are incentivised to say good things (like me!) Many haven’t actually USED the tool they recommend If they have, they usually got it free or use the free version. This also applies to analytics in general. Tracking is bloody hard and very few companies do it in anything like a reliable way.
- 7: Nobody seems to pay attention to how many outbound links are on a page. PageRank is divided by the number of outbound link That includes outbound links to internal pages PageRank is now (we believe) skewed by the Reasonable surfer patent.
- 6: Measuring Authority at the DOMAIN level is a critical error We all do it (even all the tools) Examples of why it sucks.
- 3: People LOVE to block Ahrefs/MJ12Bot/RogerBot to hide their PBNs… but… Robots.txt is a voluntary protocol, so people use .htaccess. This is still voluntary… Slide shows tools that can change user agent on the fly Then slide showing how blocked content can be seen without even going to the blocked site:
- 5: You cannot always tell link authority just by looking at a site The Pagerank Algo is still in play. Measuring a page’s search visibility is NOT the same as measuring authority Thinking a page is authoritative because you trust it / the brand is an example of correlation <> not causation. You are using a bias that a full index doesn’t suffer from Montana real estate authority does NOT get traffic. DOES give legitimacy.