Creating embeddable content like widgets, badges, or videos can be a fantastic link-building strategy for many reasons. In this video we'll cover some of the big benefits to embed-based linking, as well as some of the challenges you may face in trying to get your embeddable content out there.
SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Embedded Content & Linking from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.
Rand references several embedded content worth looking at, including this set from Twitter, Vimeo's strategy (which you can see in the video above itself) and Zillow's real estate widgets.
Oh yeah, since we mentioned Twitter, I was stuck at 299 followers yesterday, so if you'd like to join the 'Help Get Scott Over 300' campaign, follow me @great_scott. Thanks!
Hey Rand and SEOMoz Community -
Long time reader/first time commenter here, so I apologize if my question is a bit of a n00b one.
In the video, Rand mentions the importance of Anchor Text and Target (#2 of 3).
I understand the idea of the anchor text, but not the target. Is the target the place the link is pointing to? For example, in the Vimeo video above, is the the Anchor Text is "SEOMOZ Whiteboard Friday- Embedded Content & Linking", and the Target "https://vimeo.com/4774912"?
Thanks for any and all help!
parkernow - exactly! The "target" is the page on your site that the embedded link points back to. Many folks in SEO worry that link building is very focused on the home page and that lots of natural, editorial links (even those that refer to deeper content) simply point to the home page. Since it's so important to get deep links to the right pages with the right anchor text, embedded content is a great strategy to achieve this goal.
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Sorry Rand, I had first to read all comments before I wrote my. I saw right now that you already answered my questions.
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Rand,
I'm thinking about such kind of link building last several weeks. I agree with you that it's a very mighty strategy, but I see one potential problem and am not sure what's the most "natural" (what search engines like) solution
Embeding this video you're giving a link to https://vimeo.com/4774912 with an anchor text "SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Embedded Content & Linking". Let's say a lot of sites will embed it. That means a lot of links to https://vimeo.com/4774912 and that's awesome for Vimeo, but the anchor stays always the same and there I see the problem.That don't looks naturally in the Google & co. eyes. Right?
What to do? What would you recommend us to do if someone of us has videos for embeding? I have thought to prepare 5-10 various anchors for every video and to randomize it every time someone clicks on EMBED IT. I hope it's better than to have only one anchor, but are 5-10 various anchors enough to look natural. I don't think so.
Another idea was to put "Write Here Your Own Short Description" as an anchor and let every person/bloger/webmaster write what they find as appropriate, but there is a risk that some of the links will stay with such dumb anchor.
How would you do this without having the text at the bottom? For example if you were to put a map on your site that you felt many people would find useful and rather than linking to your page they would copy it and put it on their site. Could you have a link in the code? I know people are not supposed to do this, but they do.
It is so true that Twitter is making it so hard to get links from good content these days. I wish someone would build a plug-in for WP that pulls in all their tweets and then uses followed links on the WP tweet page, so credit can be provided for those who create good content.
Funny thing is that there are twitter specific websites that now publish streams of "hot", topic driven, or retweeted author profiles (and the twitter links they publish) so they get credit back. How well will these actually attribute a link building effort value? It's hard to say - but somewhat along the lines you mention. I think some of those are:
https://beta.twittervision.com/
https://dailyrt.com/
https://tweetmeme.com/
And the following show trends which are useful when trying to hit a specific "hot" topic:
https://www.populartweets.com/
https://twopular.com/
Hi Rand... best whiteboard in a while, i hope the standards continue to improve :)
I used this strategy to drive juice to my blog a few years ago with a big brother microsite called 'vote em out' it worked well, however i think its key to ensure that your widgets are posted to sites tat are on-topic to get the best, most relevant juice back... its easy if your an SEO putting SEO widgets out there but for other industries its much more difficult to control who gets use.
Grat post as always.
Rand,
Regarding Badges, I notice that you have some of them at the bottom of your right column that says: I Love Seomoz.org;
I was thinking that probably you will have more success if you add something like "I belong to SEOMOZ.org", I believe that adding that belonging feeling (maslow) not only will make other SEOs more into using them but will provide them with that kind of feeling that will make them feel like they are actually from your staff.
Best Regards.
Hey randfish great whiteboard Friday. I am khughesrise on Twitter and really appreciate you taking our suggestions! It is great to hear your advice on linking and it really helps me in my efforts for linking. Keep them coming!
Rand,
I'm wondering about those gadgets that go on your iGoogle home page.
How does the Page Rank they provide compare to a link on someone's website or blog? Are there special tips that apply to gadgets?
Thanks!
Thanks for the great whiteboard, Scott! I linked this article in my first ever blog entry on link building tips from Princess Zelda. I'll be following you on Twitter as well. Keep an eye out for @links4legends and keep the great vids coming!
I'm a huge fan of the CSS replacement badge/widget. As Rand said, it's most difficult to incentivize and distribute. I've tried a few different methods but haven't had much luck getting people to want to use the badges or widgets.
Hey! What about Timmy?! SEOmoz's poor, neglected UI developer asked us specifically during filming to help him get more Twitter followers (and a girlfriend - though we probably can't help much on that front).
excellent info as always Rand. This is great info! I'm interested in seeing how twitter will continue to affect the way people share links and information on the web
Not specifically related to this post, but is anyone else have trouble viewing the WBF Videos in Firefox? I've been having this problem for a few months and have to switch to Explorer in order to get them to play.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.10) Gecko/2009042316 Firefox/3.0.10 GTB5
Maybe its just me:-(
It's just you - my firefox is fine! V3.0.10
Dough!
Video was helpful, though not surprisingly--you put out great, and for the most part, simple stuff. Question, though. You mentioned in the video that it's really hard to build embeddable videos, etc. How would I begin or start that process? Do you---or anyone else for that matter---have any content available related to this? Or can you point me in the right direction? Thanks!
Embedded content is extremely important in terms of seo and has various benefits. It even gives you a platform for implementing links and keywords. - for widgets and flash in particular this is very useful.
Great Video - you have outlined some key points here and I hope that you can continue to further your research in the future.
My complement about the (again) clear video on whiteboard friday.
I actually hoped to see some more technical information about this topic.
I'm not very technical but as far as i can understand all links will point to the site will have the same IP / WHOIS information.
A second question. Is there a difference between displaying informatin via embedding (like YouTube) and using an iframe. Maybe links via an iframe are not counting?
Erikz - I think you're referring to links contained within an embedded iFrame, which is correct. For the links that pass value, you'll want to make sure they're in the HTML code your users copy and paste outside the iFrame portion. The Vimeo video embed above is a great example - and if you go top the video page on Vimeo, you can see the code they embed contains those three links outside of the video iFrame.
Another fantastic whiteboard Friday!
Thanks so much SEOMoz for the shout out (re: @SEOaudiore). Can't believe it took me so darn long to catch up to this WhiteBoard Friday. And it's pronounced either: "S-E-O-audio-r-e" or "S-E-O-ow-dee-oh-rey." Little mentions like this definitely makes the company personalized. As a consumer, I feel more connected to the company and this also creates brand loyalty.
Great advice, Rand. This kind of linking helps out those sites that collect data from their consumers. If you can extract numbers and patterns that your consumers can post on their site stating where they rank in the heap, then you got a viable badge waiting for you! You pose as a 3rd party site confirming the status of that website.
Greetings,
I have the following questions:
1) Does google penalize you for embedding other people's content (images, videos and etc.) on your website/blog?
2) Are there any SEO benefits for embedding other peoples content on your website/blog?
3) Does embedding other peoples content onto your website/blog slow down the load time of your website/blog due to the fetching of content? If so is there a way to increase embed load times?
Thanks in advance :)
Cool strategy!
By any chance do any of you know of a script that lets you put a gallery on your website but also includes the option letting users share that one picture on their own website or blog?
Update: I found one: smugmug pro
Cheers!
Rand, great video. I was thinking about how to utilize landing pages on my site that rank well for lawyers in other states. An embedded content/link strategy may be the way to go. Thanks for the knowledge. Jaba
We've recently implemented something along these lines and got the site penalized. The answer from the big boss was that we did this deliberately to improve rankings. Makes me angry the fact that they are slamming down on hard working SEOs that bring value to the web and reward spammers by failling to act on apalling blackhat methods such as code injection, comment and forum spam and domain hijacking... anyway, my word of advice would be do this but do it carefully and make sure you can persuade the google quality control that this is not only for SEO and has other purposes. Otherwise we might have just had bad luck... *sigh*.
@analogik - Can you please say some more details about it. What you've done to provoke penalization.
Pozdrav :)
I'm so glad I got my request in early, and I wasn't disappointed, thanks very much Rand.
However, there is still the question of 'how' valuable those embedded links will be, given that links are usually considered 'in context' with the content around them.
Perhaps producers should just be satisfied being able to generate with any links whatsoever :-) as long as there aren't negatives then all well and good.
Did I just answer my own question? No - wait, yes I think I did.
All the best: Matt
Thank you for yet another great video Rand.
Question. Is there an alternative to iframes that passes link value? My "widgets" are not videos (embed) or flash (object) but text and images... The only solution is to have the iframe with the link outside?
Yeah - and it actually works very well and is quite common. Just place the link at the top or bottom of the iFrame portion. If you want to be super fancy, you can even use CSS image replacement to make the presentation nice & pretty (this is challenging to do cross site though, so make sure your dev/design folks have carefully thought it through).
We're totally going to build a widget now. I think it was cool what 1-800-flowers is doing as well. I can't believe they put their entire product catalog and shopping cart process in a widget. What a GREAT idea! Keep up the excellent posts. Thanks to you guys, I've gone from 41% to 79% on the SEOMoz expert quiz. Whoop whoop!
For people who may be able to use this strategy (cause its a good one) I'd take a look at using clearspring (https://www.clearspring.com/platform) to help with ensuring the widget is SEO friendly.
Note. I'm not affiliated with this company, however they provide a robust platform for making your widget comptaible across the web, yes, that does include facebook. Not to mention they help track the result of that widget, improtant!
Best,
Jeff HowardCatch Search Marketing
A good video but it could have been better with more detail.
1) Should embedded video have 1, 2, 3 or more links back to the publisher
2) Should some links be hidden as no-script links to avoid removal
3) If the link text is always of a similar format, does Google see it as spammy
4) How should publishers handle embed scrapers (embeds of embeds)
1) Really up to you - the more links you put in, the more risk of a user stripping them out, but so long as they're organic and make sense (as with the 3 links to Vimeo), you should be fine. There's no hard and fast limit.
2) I would not recommend this strategy, as noscript links are easyfor search engines to filter and in some tests, appear not to pass link juice (not 100% of the time anyway)
3) Nope - Google is very accustomed to seeing widget and badge strategies create thousands of the same anchor texts pointing back to a page. Think back to Adobe's PDF download or RealPlayer - these things have been around on the web a long, long time.
4) I'm not sure what you mean here, but if it's just scraper sites picking up and re-publishing their embeds, that's usually a good thing (as they link back).
Thanks Rand for all the extra info.
Scrapers take the embed code, republish the embed, keep the links at the bottom of the video but point them to their site!! An example is vodpod.com
Check out the links below the videos on this page as an example:
https://videoontheweb.wordpress.com/2008/11/11/youtube-contest-challenges-users-to-make-a-good-video-the-onion-americas-finest-news-source/
As always, a pleasure to see your whiteboard video.
And I think the effort of widgets and badges is clear but the big problem stays: what are the readers still missing?
But this has to fight out everybody for himself.
And jus wanted to mention, I'm getting a real fan of your videos!
Will there be ever be a roundup with all videos together? I hope so...