Happy new year, mozzerati! Another year, another 52 Whiteboard Fridays to be had. I don't know about you, but I'm totally pumped to see what the whiteboards have in store for us this year! You may notice a new and friendly banjo-pickin' Roger in the beginning of this week's video, and you'd be quite apt in doing so. Our intro graphics have definitely taken a turn for the snappier this year - let us know what you think in the comments.
As for this week's video, Rand is going to show you some great ways to start the new year out right by getting those links you so desperately crave yet, time and time again, are tragically denied. You can do a lot for yourself by simply making a personal connection, openly communicating with your peers, and making other people's jobs a bit easier. After watching, if you think of any other ways you're able to garner these hard-to-get links, please share in the comments below!
Video Transcription
Howdy, SEO fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're dealing with a particularly tough problem, which is when you've got a link target that's extremely hard to approach, difficult to get a link from. You think to yourself, boy, this is a high-value link target. They've got good metrics, good rankings. The link could send me some good visitors and I want to get that brand linking to me. I think it is a trusted domain, and I that it is going to help me in the rankings. A lot of times those tough few dozen or couple dozen links can really push you over the edge in the rankings for particular things. So, I wanted to discuss some creative ways to get links from reluctant targets.
Now, first off, let me just say that I hope this situation doesn't happen. It shouldn't be the case that you first ask for a link and then get turned down. If you think the situation is going to be tough, you want your first impression, that first effort to feel very natural and organic. In fact, it should be natural and organic. They should link to you because they want to link to you because you actually have something to provide that's helpful. That's exactly what these ways are. So, hopefully, you don't get that, "No way I am linking to your site."
So, first off, some creative tactics. Number one, the testimonial. One of the really interesting things that we've seen on the Web is that people, companies of all kinds are desperate for testimonials, particularly ones that do a few things. Number one, they come with a photo. Someone is willing to send a photo of themselves. They are willing to have their full name, their title, and the company they are associated with. There are so many anonymous testimonials that people have stopped believing in those. They worry like, "Hmm, is that an actor? Is that stock photography, or is this a real person?" They've been hard pressed to find people who will leave them testimonials that answer the specific item that they want. If your company provides online surveys and there are a lot of people who are really worried about security and someone leaves a testimonial that says, "Hey, I'm the CTO at a security company and this survey product I always feel secure because I checked out their stuff and I know that I can feel safe using them." Great. That's terrific. That's precisely the kind of testimonial that you want.
Number two, the social connection. This is the idea that building up a relationship through Facebook or Twitter. Twitter is particularly powerful for this in building professional relationships. So is LinkedIn. By retweeting your target, by following them, by engaging with them in conversation regularly, by commenting on their blogs, by participating in their communities, you can make yourself known and typically build that relationship that will eventually lead to the link. The great part about this is you're getting way more than the link. If you think this is a brand that can really help you, a person that can really help you personally and professionally, this is a great thing to do anyway. That is the case with a lot of these. If you really endorse a brand, being able to say nice things about them is a great way to pay it forward and hopefully get some of that in return. Doing the social connection is a great way to build up that relationship.
The next one, the in-person connection, relies on just the same philosophy and methodology. The idea being that you go to the places where you know your target audience is going to be, the people that you're trying to get links from. You go to those conferences. You go to those events. Even if you think, "Well, they're not customers. They're just sort of people that I want to partner with." If they're people that you want to partner with and get links from online, they're probably people who talk to and mingle with and can help your business in offline ways as well. This is exactly what the search engines are trying to mimic with their link graphs. So, going to these events, going out to dinner, I don't know why it's one of those medieval long tables and they're both at two ends, but yeah, I guess not quite as friendly a dinner as I thought. Picking up the check. These are great things. When two people reach for the check and you say, "No, no, I got this one, but maybe, you know, just link to me sometime on your site." Great way to end a conversation, and the person will always, "Oh, yeah, sure. No problem. A link. Phew!" You pick up the dinner. It is a $25 to $50 link, easy. Well, depends on which bottle of wine you get I suppose.
Next one, the press piece. Interestingly, and probably not surprisingly, when press writes about you, when they say particularly nice things about you and they do interviews of you or they have you on a radio program, they interview you for a blog or those kinds of things, you can mention that third party. Link to the target over here in that blog post where you're getting interviewed. Mention them in that radio interview. Talk about their business a little bit. It feels very selfless to them, and it is very likely to get you that link. The mention of you in the press, whether it is a big press piece or an industry press piece or just a blog press piece, is also one of those things where when you ping them and you remind them, "Hey, we were in this press piece. I talked about you," and those kinds of things, it fulfills that mentality of is this a trustworthy business. This builds enough trust to where the linking target can feel like, "Oh yeah, linking to them is probably a really good idea anyway because they're a solid brand, solid website."
Last but not least, the missing content piece. This is one of the ones that I really love quite a bit for multiple reasons. First off, the idea is that your target probably has content they wish that they had on their website. That could be a report, a survey, a blog post, some infographics, a data set, a tool, whatever that thing is that they're wishing. Right now I'm wishing there were a hundred different kinds of reports and research papers I wish people would publish on SEOmoz and submit to SEOmoz. I know a lot of people do. That's fantastic. But what I am saying is that missing content piece, if you can ID what those are, talk to your contact and say, "Hey, I can write those, build those, etc., for you," when they put that piece up, they're going to link to it well. Externally it will likely get linked to well. You'll have a link from there as the content developer, the author, the builder of that. Now, what's beautiful is two things. Number one, you've gotten a link from your target. Great. Number two, you've built a relationship with the target, also great. Number three, people who are coming to that page, who are externally saying, "Wow, this is a really good resource," you're the person who authored it. They're going to give credit certainly to the company that hosts it, but as the author you'll get some credit as well and you'll get traffic from that. That traffic could be interested in what you do. It could be potentially people who will link more to you and identify you when they link to the initial piece of content.
It is just a beautiful synergy here that is happening, really with all of these tactics. That's why I love that creativity, that outside the box kind of thinking as opposed to a, "Well, you know what, I'm just going to link spam." This methodology just works so much better.
All right, everyone. I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We will see you again next week. Take care.
Video transcription by SpeechPad.com
That's a good linkboard friday. A long time ago, in a galaxy far away i wrote a post on '10 powerful tips to leverage content theft' (google it if you wish to read). This post was featured on the home page of sphinn. It's all about leveraging content theft for link building. Many websites (including mine) are syndicated across the web by dozens of websites which survive only on syndicated contents and adsense revenue. This post may help you to get links from such sites. Another creative link building technique i can think of at present is buying an old blog post (several months or year old) which has earned considerable amount of links on the topic related to your industry. Put the blog post content on your site and ask the owner to 301 redirect the page to your site. This is cheaper and more practical than trying to buy the whole blog which no serious blogger will sell anyways. It also doesn't violate Google Webmaster guidelines as you are buying contents and not links.
Good advices! i completly ok with the first part (buying an old blog post...) but i think the second part (...301 redirect the page to your site) seems "too much" for me. I think it is easy to add a "rel=canonical" in the source code of the old post with a link to your page rather than make the 301 redirect. We've seen good results with this use of the canonical tag with a great boost on positions
I think those guidelines might be changing if anyone at google reads this.
Good tips even if it is a tending to gray ;)
But, you know the old Latin quote: Done the Law, found the trick.
First off, I want to mention that Rand did a marvelous job at performing the "table point" (a.k.a. meet them in person thing) here in Bulgaria. At the SEOmoz meetup, I bet that after that one there's been a 1000s new links and 100s linking domains. I myself wrote 2 blog post on my blog, which is the most fresh & popular SEO blog in Bulgaria. These posts were about how well Rand treated us, just like equals, and long-time friends. Such a down-to-earth guy. So he perfomed this point in person (with the check as well, but only to a few selected people left at the end). So this definately does the trick, you should try it.
Another point that I can confirm was the last one, that he made. About the missing content and being the author to one. SEOmoz is as big as it gets when you're targeting the SEO world. And I got a link from an article, that Rand did on Google Places, just because Paris Childress and I helped him gather the initial data that he needed for his research (https://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-places-seo-lessons-learned-from-rank-correlation-data). This article was a huge success at the end. So this thing does the trick as well.
I rest my case :)
Note to self...if ever at a dinner table with Rand, be one of the last remaining diners.
You did find the essential point in my statement :)
So buying links is ok as long as it's in person over dinner :)
We heard it from the horses mouth!
Have a good weekend :)
Don't forget that it also includes the all important bottle of wine as well Craig. :-P
Roger is awesome - no more to add here ....
Regarding the testimonials I got a little bit confused. You wrote: "If your company provides online surveys ... testimonial that you want." Shoudn't it be like that? "If your company provides online surveys ... testimonial that THEY want." Either you write a testimonial on their website and you got a link back (like it would be usually) or do you mean that you write that testimonial on your website and show the other company the link and get one back? Probably not or do I misunderstood something? Anyway - if it works on both ways - great!
The missing content part is best ...
Great post Rand/
Linkedin is an absolute gem for this exact purpose .
Nice post Rand. I've had a lot of success recently with your last tip on a current project. We identified a niche and built out an infographic specifically for it. Getting a link was as simple as emailing them to share it. It was useful to their readers, and made them look good, so not much convincing was needed. A lot of great links from solid domains.
Great whiteboard Friday. Funny reference about the bottle of wine. The higher value the link, the better the wine to drink I think ;-)
Creating the embed widget for this content is not only a great way to let bloggers share the love and out of the box idea, but what a great link building technique - Can you say "Create the Missing Content on a GRAND SCALE!"
I really love the intro video, you guys are getting insanely talented in this area. Also really good list, I do believe the social connection will become increasingly important as it provides access to people you did not have access to before..
There is a reason why people still use the cliche 'content is king'. If you offer someone something that they want then it basically gives them no option other then to include it on their site and give attribution to the original owner. I have to say that I really like the idea of dinner = link :-)
Rand,
I like it but most people have experienced the let down when their new SEO agency advises them to remove these generous links as part of a strategy to reduce the amount of outbound links they previously had? How agressive is SEOmoz these days with your previous of past reciprical partners in terms of removing old links from SEOmoz?
I do agree the testimonal links can be fairly awesome as they are often included on static pages that are transfered unchanged if they do a site rebuild/refresh. How does those testimonial slide shows impact on the value of the link, does Google see this constant changing link profile as a sign something sketchy is going on?
Is shouting someone dinner a paid link ;)
I want to make sure I understand your questions/comments:
#1 - Agencies will try to have sites remove outbound pointing links to relevant sites added for good reasons because they worry about a potential negative loss of link juice.
My first thought is that this is rather preposterous, unprofessional and unsubstantiated either by data or by messaging from engines (if I recall, Google's publicly said that they positively reward good links to deserving sites and that worrying about number of outbound links or where they go is usually a waster of time).
#2 - Do we at SEOmoz remove links to old partners?
Certainly not from blog posts where we've said something positive/nice about someone, but as our relationships change, our about pages or referrals might shift somewhat (as when we added Distilled's page and link upon exiting the consulting business last year)
#3 - Testimonial links are constantly in flux and this might impact the value of links.
First, I'd say that many testimonial links stay in place for years. And second, I'd say that even if your link profile fluctuates from changes, this is a very natural thing as these are very natural links. You want that type of "organic" profile, not one where every link is permanent and never changes because you've bought and paid for it and the terms demand static pages. The web fluctuates - so should your links and your link profile.
Hope those help!
Matt Cutts commented on rewarding outbound links here:
"parts of our system encourage links to good sites"
https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/
Rand,
Yes that was right on the money, i just wanted to confirm I was thinking sensibly about the issue and not reaching for the tinfoil hat each time I did a detail review of a sites backlinks. Still wondering about if the site is dynamically swapping out testmonials between a few options but agree it's not a massive aspect to be overly paranoid about and too hard to measure.
I know the removal of links does happen, but had always thought that if done it has to be done in the interest of the client.. ie It looks Crap!.
I know I have requested clients remove SEO by X... at the bottom of their site footers when starting a project when the other agency is no longer involved in the project, which I assume is fairly ethical. It's sometimes hard when working through another agency to fight the their temptation to whack a big ugly sitewide link back to their site because they are the new partner.
Regarding Distilled and other SEOmoz partners I did find it intersting that you have always tried to balance the link as to not give too much preference to external parties using sitewide links and linked to an internal partner pages.
But I had always thought lack of understanding was what keeps clients changing SEO agencies every few months... and what keeps SEO consultants moving between differnt agencies?
Enough ranting... good whiteboard friday topic
Discussing link target brands in press releases is something we've done with success in the past - often negotiating the return link up front before the press release has been distributed. It's not such a great strategy for small, new companies but as long as you are as big or bigger than your link target and/or you can convince them that the coverage from the press release will be reasonably good (send over some past examples to illustrate where your releases have been successful) then negotiating the return link is pretty simple and the site owner should bite your hand off.
Excellent stuff as always Rand!This is the kind of stuff that has made my personal blogging efforts extremely rewarding (both financially and socially).
It's just a pity that many employers would rather crack the whip and have you link spamming than relationship building.
That said, I do offer to write a lot of content -content which the other person doesn't want to or doesn't have the ability to write well or quickly. I find that after the first Guest Post, the doors are wide open...and of course, mutually beneficial too.
Great stuff as always. I really liked the idea of taking someone for dinner and picking up the check. It was really funny the way you said "The dinner is on me but give me a link". :)
Great post Rand!
The biggest take away is presenting remarkable content, at Seth Godin would put it, that can go viral. From there all the SEO is done for you without having to do anything further. But also to build relationships online/offline will make your brand heard so other hear who you are and what you're about.
Hope you all have a wicked year. Thought Roger's New Intro was awesome.
It's been great to hear your creative methods to build repor and trust with a reluctant target. Thank you. Keep them coming.
Hey am loving the press piece and missing content piece - really useful stuff.
Hey am loving the press piece and missing content piece - really useful stuff.
nice topic...
The new intro with Roger? The best yet! And the video, lighting and sound quality were fantastic! Y'all have come a long way in improvements. Kudos.
Really great WBF on linking Rand. It's a subject that I have a love hate relationship with. I love the results quality linking brings - I hate working on linking.
That said, I love posts that help make me a better link obtainer. And this is one of such posts.
Thanks goodnewscowboy! We've been working quite a bit on making these videos snappier, and have completely redone our production studio and editing suite. It seems to be paying off in terms of quality! I really, really love our new lightbulb-plugging Roger introduction.
Hope to keep 'em comin'!
These tips are good for dedicated SEOs and agencies (particularly if many sites are in the same niche and you can build up contacts), but for larger companies who need to attract 10,000 or 100,000 or more links a month to stay competitive, I don't know how they would work on a practical level. Even if you dedicate that much time and effort to just the top 5 or 10 highest-quality links/contacts, that's still more than many people have time for. The same is also true for one-man bands who can't afford to dedicate much time to link building. Good for freelancers, good for conference speakers, not so good elsewhere - or am I wrong?
- Jenni
Same idea here: one man band can't reach it all, but definitely solid advices in the video.
It's all about "keeping it real" when it comes down to it. Seems like when you start getting greedy you lose your effectiveness in SEO. Great reminder and encouragement.
Rand, can I buy you dinner. Not old enough to buy wine, but I hear the 2010 vintage of Coca Cola is very good :-]
What you're essentially suggesting is reciprocating link building, although not as crude as "I'll link to you if you link to me". Links = relationships...
I guess its about getting your foot in the door. Seal one relationship. Join them at an industry conference. Meet a bunch of interesting people. Exchange cards and follow up. Blog or write about the conference (with photos and videos. Everyone likes moving stuff).
But what happens when you run out of steam? Science somewhere says you can only maintain some ~200 close, worthwhile relationships... what happens when you're trying to maintain relations with squillions of bloggers, journalists and industry folk? It becomes very inpersonal, very one-way... is that the aim?
When do you stop?
I think cross-site guest articles is the strongest way to give and get links. Is it a lot of work...what isn't in this industry? But because Google looks at surrounding words on a page, you are providing them with a clear understanding on the relationship between your site and the guest writers site. I believe for instance if a site about sneakers has a link to a plumber's site in an article about the new Reebok then Google gets confused. But if the plumber writes an article on the sneaker site and can somehow be relevant to both plumbing and sneakers (I know it's a stretch) then not only will Google gain a clearer comprehension of how the two are interrelated but Google will then move to the plumbers site to further research the relationship between the two sites.
I can't tell you how incredibly refreshing it is to see you continually encourage, real, honest, up-front connections that generate links rather than using many of the spammy, (sometimes effect) but ultimately "grey" tactics that others push and say they'll do for you for only a 'small amount of money.'
You are consistent in your approach to SEO and relationships and that is why you are benefitting online marketing. Perhaps it comes naturally, but it's a rare quality, Rand. Thanks.
P.S. sorry for the sappy comment, but after the week I've had, it's just nice to see the big guys doing the right thing :)