Advanced Off-Site SEO makes you think about links. Both Scott Hendison and Ian Lurie (filling in for Adam Audette) are masters in the area. The following is a live blog of their discussion at SearchFest 2012:
Scott Hendison:
Scott began marketing in 1999
In addition to links, off-site is all about trust and credibility.
Note – Facebook EdgeRank Is a secondary ranking factor in Google.
It is important to let employees spend time on social, including new tools like Google Plus and Pinterest. It’s like having children, you should encourage them to explore new interests especially if they are going to do it anyway.
Branding IS social. You need to get socialized even if you are not active. At a bar minimum sign up and fill out Google +, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Check it all out on Knowem.com
Branding IS Social IS Credibility
Join reputable associations and organizations. Don’t only think local, but global.
Google wants to be ‘the’ trusted authority, and they want to charge us for the privilege. Their goal is to make money on every search. We are all beta testers.
It is all about trust, brute force is dead. Does Google trust you?
Microdata (schema.org) is very prevalent in search and shows positive signs in SERPs.
Get trusted with Google, as they now have a trust program.
Time to talk about LINKS!
Grade links on a academic school, A-F.
C is for crappy. D is for damn crappy. F is another bad word with “embarrassing” tagged on the end.
How do you really get A & B links.
Imagination, hard work, and creativity are not a bad start.
You are doomed to fail without paid tools.
Majestic SEO Clique Hunter is a simple way to test the top ten versus yourself, so you can target those sites.
Fix your 404 inbound links! All you have to do is use a 301 re-direct. 404 redirected is a WordPress plugin that will redirect 404’s to most relevant pages by algorithm.
Citation Labs has a good new link prospecting tool.
Because of time constraints, we are moving on to Ian Lurie. (There are rumors about a cool tool called scrape box that is in the missing slides.)
Ian Lurie –
Zero people here know what inverted index means, and the formulas of the page rank formula. That is advanced, and not many people know it.
Google: “We Do No Evil” = “We Do Know Evil”
The steps towards advanced are small. For example, who know how to change a tire?
You say advanced, you mean easy.
Be careful about advanced link development techniques. Think about link diversity, you want to build out your number of link domains, not necessarily links themselves.
Do some serious data mining in log files.
Get a bot list. A good tool for this is Fantomaster Spider Spy which gives you the IP’s for all bots that crawl your site. It can be used as a database builder. Long story short get the log files by any means necessary. This is said because people usually think it is a waste of time or hassle, it isn’t.
By running a simple Python Script you can see which links have never been seen by Google within a specific timeframe.
An example. Client X was found to have links from a prestigious university that Google couldn’t even see because it was going to a 404. REBUILD THE PAGE from scratch. All you are doing is changing the tires on this website. Being advanced.
How do we ensure Google heads back to a land that it thinks is dead? Tweet it, post it, bam! Once a link is shared (even by a Twitter bot) it will be picked up by Google again.
Once you have fixed all broken links then move on. These are the easy ones, do it first.
Other methods-
Bribery is good (take this lightly)
Social is a huge and growing ranking factor. Level of participation is equal to the link. That stands for how many people are interacting and engaging.
Mechanical Turk is your friend. You can essentially buy poll answers, tread lightly and think naturally.
250 dollars on M-Turk (from Amazon) resulted in 10% increase in organic traffic as social participation blossomed.
Talking about Google Plus now.
Google is now giving prime SERP Real Estate.
Based on a test from Ian, those who rank in the top ten for response rates (this means users responding to your content) are the ones showing up in Search Plus Your World.
Some good places to buy links-
BBB – 1000 dollars
Business Associations, Industry Associations, YouTube Annotations, Media Sharing Sites, Bookmarking Sites, Local (getlisted.org)
Overview, Get The Easy Links!
That’s it for Scott and Ian, as they gave a ton of good insights. One more presentation to go and SearchFest 2012 will be a wrap. It has been great so far, what more surprises are to come?
