Wil Reynolds discusses his experiences with link buying, comparing results from a major project focused on traditional SEO methods to a smaller project that relied on aggressive link buying tactics. He emphasizes the importance of evaluating link buying based on risk and potential long-term visibility and ranking success. The document also provides tips on efficient link building strategies, including the use of directories and leveraging social media platforms, while underscoring the value of industry-specific links over generic ones.

1. Changing the way we get links Wil Reynolds, Associate, SEER Interactive

2. My personal bout w/ link buying Everything in moderation!! I have to start w/ a story

3. My personal bout w/ link buying Who hates the sun? Seriously who’s hatin’ on the sun?

4. No Moderation

5. Moderation

6. My personal bout w/ link buying I worked with 2 direct competitors one on all out SEO – 2005 – 2006 “ Big Project” Another for 3 months In 2008 “ Small Project”

7. My personal bout w/ link buying Big Project Regular link building – guest posts, blog comments, a lot of directories, top lists, DIY tips, etc. NEVER got over #4 for their biggest term (fine)

8. My personal bout w/ link buying Small Project SEER: Tech. on page SEO only Other SEO: Aggressive link buying on 100’s sites, Pattern, typically on geocities-esque sites, Easily discernable pattern #1 for 2 years

9. My personal bout w/ link buying Big Project Today: Top 10 Been Top 10 for 2.5 years Haven’t touched the site in 18 mo. Small Project Held #1 for 2 years Recently dropped from #1 to #50 Haven’t come back from #50+ in 3 months

10. My personal bout w/ link buying Link buying should always be evaluated and implemented based on ability to assess risk. Did small project make enough in 2 years to make it worth not being visible for the next 6 weeks, 6 months, 2 years?? Does big project make out in the long run even though it didn’t get to #1?

11. Questions, Questions, Questions If you are buying links and still have rankings all is not lost, listen up to what you are learning here, get your “ratio” in check and prepare for harder work – moderation!

12. The basics Directory links still work Use directorycritic.com to keep up with the best / newest ones Sort by PR Points Added date Niche Deep link opp

13. What I like about directory link building Obvious If the directory is high or low value, there is no “hiding” Easy to evaluate PR Age of Domain Sitelinks

14. What I like about directory link building Obvious If the directory is high or low value, there is no “hiding” Easy to evaluate PR Age of Domain Sitelinks Cost Acceptance policy

15. Sitelinks

16. Sitelinks

17. Sitelinks Quick Question: When you type in your domain name (w/o .com) do you see sitelinks? If not, you may have some problems You can influence which sitelinks show by using Google Webmaster Tools

18. The basics (Industry) Search for your industry + words like: Add url Submit release (Christian PR sites) News Directory Blogs Bloggers Lists

19. The basics (Industry) Don’t come up with all of them yourself Here’s a Tool http://www.soloseo.com/tools/linkSearch.html

21. The basics (Industry) Do Ego / Industry searches Yahoo Pipes (social media firehose) Google Alerts (RSS) Yahoo Answers (RSS) Twitter search (search.twitter.com)

22. The basics (Industry) General rule of thumb Industry Links are more valuable than generic ones So Go get your industry specific links first then backfill with generic directories

23. The basics (Industry) General rule of thumb Industry Links are more valuable than generic ones Why? Harder to get (no adsense directories) Build a theme

24. Use Twitter to fix people’s problems This summer – Adam launched an idea: Set up a twitter search for people typing in: Broken A/C Broken AC AC Broke Broke AC Set up a bi-weekly contest for a free AC unit for our AC selling client Those w/ broken AC write how horrible their day is w/ pictures post it to their blog, link over to a voting section for the funniest story

25. Use Twitter to fix people’s problems “ Office Freezing”- Portable heaters “ Car overheated” – National Auto Repair Shop “ Dropped iPhone” – iPhone glass repair “ spyware deleted” – Software provider “ Loud office” – Headphones manufacturer

26. Use Twitter to fix people’s problems If you find 500 people for a contest but only have time to contact 50 use twitter grader to see who is most influential / worth putting in your contest? Use the API to pull their followers (or Mturk) & external links to a twitter profile: Yahoo search -linkdomain:http://www.twitter.com/briancarter

27. Use Twitter Grader to find influentials

28. Questions, Questions, Questions Asking the right questions to find link opportunities

29. Questions, Questions, Questions Do you have a Female, Muslim, Af. American or Asian exec? How long have you been in business? Startup competitions / sites Any developments in Macromedia Flex / Silverlight / SCRUM? Who are your vendors (Tech, Marketing, HR, SEO, Web Host, PBX) Do you have a company charity? Do you do charitable matching? Do you use any API’s / do any mashups? (Get highlighted by the sources you are mashing up: Yahoo Search Monkey, Yahoo BOSS) Do you offer your service as an in-kind donation? Are you willing? Do you offer any version of your product / service for free? Who are the thought leaders in the company? Where do they speak?

30. Questions, Questions, Questions Do you hire stay at home moms / dads? Who provides your on site search tool? Do you have an intern program? Do any execs sit on any boards (profit or non-profit)? Do you have venture / angel investors? What is your city / zipcode? Is your publicly traded company’s stock price bucking an industry trend? If yes – interviews on stock picking forums (bank)

31. Questions, Questions, Questions Is your publicly traded company’s stock price bucking an industry trend? If yes – interviews on stock picking forums (bank client) Not successful yet, but we are testing angles like this daily. Has your company decided to insource vs. sending work overseas?

32. The race / gender card

33. Testimonials

34. Testimonials pt. 2 Testimonials pt. 2

35. Charity Pt. 1 Charity

36. Charity Pt. 2 Get interns to be your in-kind donor as part of their training In Kind Donations

37. Questions, Questions, Questions How many of you are working with an SEO Agency or an In-House SEO?

38. Questions, Questions, Questions How many of you have been asked questions like that as part of their link building efforts?

39. Questions, Questions, Questions This is that LONG term view of the industry that SEO’s (in house and agency) should be taking to protect your rankings for the long term.

40. Questions, Questions, Questions 2 weeks 2 months 2 years IT’S COMING!

41. Why Delicious is your best friend Categorize (private) Extremely strong: Tagging Filtering Discovery API API API

42. Get smart on queries Get intern help on categorizing your best queries, like “ Software developer” resources “ Tech companies in” SaaS directories, “Top” SaaS bloggers “ Company list” Philadelphia, NYC, LA Mommy bloggers = NOT NOW, Later (resource lists that are easy to get on)

43. Why Delicious is your best friend Use the API to dump the tags and sites locally Create your own algo to order the list based on other relevancy factors (ajax-sliders) If you are REALLY good you can scrape results from directory lists, blogger lists, etc and have them automatically dump When you get ready to start linking you have a list to go after in priority order

44. Why Delicious is your best friend Use other APIs / “sources” to score each site you tag Alexa (Domain age) Inbound links / .edu Aiderss (frequency) Linkscape (come on Rand, how much we gotta pay?) Technorati (cosmos) Feedburner Pagerank edu links in yahoo or open directory

45. Get Smart about API’s Aiderss – Frequency of blog posts Feedburner - Subscription stats Technorati Cosmos – Blogs linking to a given URL Friendfeed API

46. Why Delicious is your best friend Plugins to allow you to easily bookmark = fast work Delicious Plugin for FF Note feature in Google Reader (drag to browser window) Delicious Complete* for FF - allows for multiple accounts (very advantageous) Subscriptions – Auto Notified Social Networking – Find delicious “librarians” people who index a LOT of quality content on certain subjects – eco friendly, poker, women, video, etc, Arizona.

47. Finding “Librarians”

48. Subscribing to tags

49. Why Delicious is your best friend 1 – Find Sites & categorize sites 2 – Tag sites for your linkbuilding efforts into delicious 3 – Score each link you tag with the above factors 4 – Order your list (testimonials / tech company lists / publicly traded) by importance based on the factors you pull 5 – Now you know the most valuable links, develop strategies to go after them

50. No Programmers, No Problem If you are light on programming resources to pull data via API’s / Scraping – all is not lost!

51. Why Delicious is your best friend Use Mechanical Turk to have people pull subscriber #, PR, Alexa Rank, inbound links, .edu links, (whatever you think is valuable) etc - .15/per action. Have Turkers put data points into an online DB tool like ZOHO DB (which has an API for you to pull data from later when you have tech resources)

52. Google Advanced Queries keyword "suggest url" / "suggest * url" keyword "suggest site" / "suggest site" keyword "suggest website" / "suggest * website" Keyword companies in “city” Keyword companies list Keyword companies directory (ies) inurl:forum / inurl:forums Wildcard “ Top * firefox” extensions – misses top extensions for FF “ Top * firefox extensions” – misses top 10 firefox extension top * firefox extensions – could bring back too many results Blogsearch link:www.competitor.com Search for sites linking to several competitors but not you: linkdomain:copounsite1.com linkdomain:copounsite2.com linkdomain:couponsite3.com

53. Queries + SEO Quake

54. 10 Ways to get .edu links Ok here’s my quick and dirty ways to get them! Guest speak at a class/club on Internet Marketing Participate in the career fair at the schools who link out to participating companies Post your internships on schools sites that link out, make friends with the career services people so you can BEG for that link if need be Find professors who post and link out to the authors of publications in their syllabus. If you can add value e-mail them and see if your case study or whitepaper could be used in their class Offer employee discounts to professors, develop an “education” license or version

55. 10 Ways to get .edu links Sponsor a marketing / technology or advertising club’s event make sure the club’s site is on the .edu and that the university links out to sponsors, there are 1000’s of university groups, from frats to golf club to Spanish club to linux club! Do an advanced search on a local .edu with a word like guest speaker, or internet marketing or career fair, sign up for it in Google Alerts Read the school paper, allow the editor to interview you or one of your executives as a local company or individual doing “good” in business. Does your alma matter highlight graduates AND link out? If all else fails donate money to universities that link out to donor pages – advanced query!

56. Why Can’t We Be Friends? Twitter.com/wilreynolds Delicious.com/wilreynolds YouTube.com/wilreynolds Thinkseer.com/blog [email_address]