ELWsoftware.com

Yahoo has an excellent command you can use in their search engine called linkdomain, but Google doesn’t have it.  This command will let you see all of the sites Yahoo has found that link to your website.  This command is very useful, but Yahoo doesn’t crawl the web as thoroughly as Google.  Your results using Yahoo will be missing many of the links on the web to your site.

Google has a link command, but experience suggests that it doesn’t work very well at all!  Think about that for a while, since it doesn’t make much sense.  Why wouldn’t Google want you to know what sites link to yours?  I don’t have an answer.  You should be asking Google.

You can still find out pretty easily who is linking to your site with Google.  You might just have to get a few bogus results included.  Do an exact search for your domain name like: “elwsoftware.com” and see what comes up.  Hopefully your site will be the top result, or you will need to do some more SEO work.  Among the list of search results should also be all the sites on the web that have your domain name somewhere in their text.  This might not include all the sites that link to yours, since who knows what people use for anchor text.

If you want to remove your site from the search results above, you can use Google’s site command like this:

“elwsoftware.com” -site:elwsoftware.com

Now you have a list of every site Google has found that includes your domain name.  It isn’t quite as good as knowing who links to you, but it is close.  If your page titles all have your domain name included (look at the top of your browser when you visit your site) the search results could include many links to you from scraper sites.  These sites scan the web for information, then they post it on their sites.  Usually it is just a summary of your article, and a link to the original.  It is often done to make it look like a site has more content than it really does.  It can also be a good way to get some good links to your site if you approach it carefully, but that is a subject for another article.

I just watched the movie “Funny People” where one of the characters made a funny cat video that got hundreds of thousands of hits.  He then linked the video to his website.  Of course doing this kind of thing doesn’t necessarily get you the type of traffic you want, but it definitely does work.

Generally, you aren’t going to get a followed link from a site like youtube where anybody can post things.  There are opportunities for followed links on video sites, but I won’t go over them here.  The point of getting links isn’t always to increase pagerank.  99% or more users won’t even know the difference.  You should be interested in traffic generated by people watching your video.  If you can get thousands of views on a video you post, you should be able to get a small percentage of them to come to your site!

It is very easy to become a recording artist these days.  If you have any talent you can probably publish your own songs or comedy for download.  Have you ever noticed when you type in the title of an old song, the first search result is usually a wikipedia entry?  Have you ever looked at the wikipedia entry?  The cool thing is that almost all wikipedia entries for songs have a list of who has covered the song including a link!  Again, this probably won’t be a followed link but nobody will notice.  Anybody can edit a wikipedia page.

The point of this article is that people become so obsessed with getting followed links, that they ignore opportunities for nofollowed links that will likely get them better traffic!  You need to expand your link building horizons.  Every single link can be clicked by interested people.  Keep your eyes open!

The cool website idea of the day is to make a link stock exchange.  This website would allow webmasters who run a successful website to sell links on their website to the highest bidder, or to anyone they choose.  The website would also allow those of you looking to improve your search engine rankings to find affordable sites to get a link.  I know that similar sites exist, but sometimes success depends on careful execution.  Feel free to discuss this idea in comments, since the possibilities are endless.

If you are interested in having ELW design this website for you, we would be glad to help out.  Contact ELW for a free consultation about this website idea or an other ideas you might have!

One of the best responses to an article on this blog was a theory that Google was manipulating search results to fit some political agenda.  This has got me thinking about both sides of the conspiracy.

1. What would be involved in maintaining a conspiracy to manipulate search results?
2. How could a conspiracy theorist benefit from understanding more about SEO?

I think the first question almost answers itself.  Manipulating search engine rankings using human effort for some political agenda would probably be very costly.  That would have to be a very important issue to get that kind of work done.  I just don’t think Google would care that much.  If Google really has teamed up with intelligence agencies to do their dirty work, it would still be unlikely.  Think how much information about everybody needs to be stored just to find a few bozos searching for bomb-making instructions!

I think the second question is more interesting and fun to write about.  A conspiracy theorist could benefit greatly from understanding SEO tactics, and some tricks.  First, we need to understand the motives of the conspiracy theorist:

1. Get people to ask questions that eventually reveal the truth.
2. Provide information that the conspirators don’t want made public.
3. Provide for an open exchange of non-obvious ideas.  The bad guys often hide behind the fact that their methods don’t make sense, or sound crazy.

Number 3 is the most important for SEO!  History is filled with true stories that sounded crazy while they were happening.  The trouble with these situations is that real conspiracies don’t use a language that is appropriate for search engine optimization.  We don’t have a set of words that adequately describes what is actually goes on in a conspiracy, so we are left with slang phrases.  These slang phrases are also used for not-so-big affairs.  We need a set of phrases at our disposal that will accurately describe the evil plans, and that is easily searchable.

The real benefit to using SEO for conspiracy-related articles is in catching conspirators before they commit too many crimes.  By getting an article about a conspiracy a better search engine ranking, it can be found more easily.  What can conspiracy theorists do to improve SEO?

1. Make the titles of your articles as accurate as possible.  Don’t use slang phrases like “in bed with” or “affair”  or “___gate” since these keywords almost guarantee a terrible SEO situation.  Don’t waste headline space on slang!
2. Remember to clarify exactly what is suspected, who is involved, and what evidence you have.  People likely won’t find your article when searching for the names of those people involved.  They will almost certainly find you if they search for the people involved in combination with the suspected crime.  If you actually have evidence like a video or picture, make sure it is also mentioned in the text.  Say it clearly: We have photos and pictures of X doing Y during Z.
3. LINKS! Linking to good content is what makes SEO work.  Links to good evidence is what will bring down a real conspiracy.

Keep up the good work!

Today’s SEO trick is concerned with links, in case you couldn’t tell by the article title.  Bear in mind that having the same keyword repeated 3 times in the title is probably not good SEO practice.  Sometimes you just need to get your point across!  How about getting 3 tips about SEO and links in one article to make it fair?

1. Get as many good inbound links as is practical! A link from another page to yours drives traffic to your site.  Links from very good pages are always beneficial, even if they are rarely clicked.  Don’t go overboard trying to get links by spamming unrelated blog comments.  Spam is spam, and your reputation matters.
2. Most links are nofollow, but just as good! 99% of the time when you are able to link to yourself on blog comments or larger posts, the nofollow tag is added in the html code.  This tells the search engines that the link does not represent any trust in your site.  The cool thing is that nobody else cares, and the link looks and works the same as any regular link!
3. Links work best when they are unintentional! If you look at the inbound links to your website, you will probably notice that many of them are accidental.  You had nothing to do with getting the link!  This is a good sign that you are generating content worthy of a link, and you should keep doing whatever works for you.

Don’t get too obsessed with inbound links.  It is often very easy to get on the first page of results for major national stories without a single link.  You just need to write articles in a timely fashion and carefully choose your title.  How about some bonus SEO tricks?

• Temporary links are good too! How about a craigslist ad for yourself that includes a link?  It is probably nofollow, and will disappear within a week or so, but it will always generate some traffic for your site.
• Forget pagerank! If your are focused on only getting links from high pagerank sites, you are missing out on some great opportunities.  After reading this article, I want you to do the following experiment:  Go over to slashdot.org with its 54 million inbound links, and look at what the pagerank is for the articles on the front page.  Unless some miracle has occurred, the pagerank as shown by your SEO toolbars will be zero!  You need to go pretty far back in time before you see an article with a decent pagerank.  This should tell you something:  You don’t get any pagerank benefit until weeks after people stop reading the article.  So if you want to get a link to yourself on the article now, nobody will see it!  Think about it like earning interest, and try to get links to yourself early.  Go for traffic first, and pagerank later.

The pagerank system used by Google is a major factor used to determine the quality of a page, and correlates well with how it is positioned in search engine results.  The pagerank number is supposed to represent a measure of the probability that a person randomly clicking links on pages will land on your page.  There are a few enhancements to pagerank that prevent dead end pages, and loops of pages from getting infinite pageranks.

The pagerank calculation is designed so that the average pagerank of all the pages on the web is 1.  Achieving higher pageranks is accomplished by having inbound links from other pages.  Pages with higher pageranks pass on some of their value through these links.

The obvious question is whether you can increase the pagerank of a site by creating more pages with links to it.  The obvious answer is YES.  The problem is neither Google nor any other modern search engine uses the pagerank algorithm as it is intended.  This would be too easy for spammers and anyone else to fool.  You could just make a million pages and link them to any page you want.

The actual algorithms used by major search engines consider many other factors:

1. Are the incoming links all from the same page?  The same site?  The same IP address?  A good search engine can tell the difference.
2. Is the content all from similar pages?  A million pages linking to your site would be nice, but not if they all have the same content.  Doing this might get your site banned from the search rankings.
3. Not only is the content used to determine whether pages are different, it is used to help match up with the search phrase.  If all the pages linking to yours have text related to yours, this will help your page.  This is how a good search engine works to prevent a major site from dominating the search results on unrelated queries.
4. It has been confirmed that user behavior affects search rankings.  This means that major search engines are no longer viewing pagerank and similar algorithms as an approximation of how a randomly-clicking user navigates.  They are more likely using actual behavior instead of random behavior.
5. Link location and visibility matters to varying degrees.  A prominent link at the top of a page, or within an article, counts for more than a link hidden by making its color the same as the background.  This also means that a link at the bottom of a long page is not as good as one at the top.  Major search engines have done a great deal to make their algorithms correlate with what a user actually sees and clicks.
6. If your page visits only last for a split second before the user hits the back button on their browser, this has an effect on ranking.  For a link that is followed by a user who quickly backs out, the algorithms may view this as a mistake by the user.

In summary: Adding new pages does increase Pagerank, according to the Google patent.  The problem is that nobody, including Google, uses the actual pagerank without modifications.  Focusing on increasing Pagerank may help you, but it is better to focus on generating new content that people will want to read.

Search engines use inbound links as a measure of a page’s quality.  Higher quality pages usually have more inbound links, and also usually appear higher in search engine results.  When your page shows up higher in search results, you get more traffic.  Getting more traffic to your website will make you more money.  It’s that simple!

Getting started with link building can be difficult, and you might want to hire an expert.  If nobody visits your site now, it is hard to imagine somebody linking to your site.  The good news is that link building campaigns are very effective, and worth the time.  Here are a few link building tips that you should consider right away!

1. Use a blog to generate content regularly! Effective link building campaigns should always focus on producing relevant content.  If you have a regular old web site with no new content, you are in trouble.  No new content usually leads to very few links.  Blogs are easy to use, and allow you to write new articles as easily as sending an email.  No html code is necessary!
2. Link to other good sites! You would be surprised how often people follow different paths to reach what they are want.  If you have the best list of links on one of your web pages, people actually end up using your site instead of going directly to their destination!  Other webmasters notice this, since most good sites have tracking that shows where their visitors came from.  If they see that people came from your site, only good things can happen.  Don’t be afraid of linking to other sites! This is mostly Google’s fault with their pagerank system.  Some people think that linking to another site helps the other site, but hurts you.  It doesn’t!
3. Asking for links is a part of link building! Most likely, if a webmaster has never heard of your site, they won’t give you a link.  Ask as many relevant sites as you can, and see what happens.  Even in the worst case scenario, this strategy produces traffic when other webmasters look at your site to see if it is any good.
4. Link baiting works! Link baiting means producing content that generates attention for your page.  There are many specific methods for generating attention, and most of them fall into the category of publicity stunts.  As a link building strategy, link baiting has a few different goals.  Perhaps try running a contest, where contestants need to visit your page!
5. Add your link anywhere you can! You can post classified ads using Craigslist, Backpage, or others.  If you are trying to hire a new employee, include a link in the ad.  Generally these links will be nofollowed, which means that search engines aren’t supposed to improve your site’s search results position with these links.  Who cares!  They still look like a regular link to 99.99% of people, and they will still go to your site.

Stay tuned for more ideas on the subject of link building strategies.

Page or pagerank sculpting is defined by controlling how you want certain pages in your site to be higher ranked in search results than others.  Obviously you don’t want administrative pages showing up in search results.

One example would be sites with tracking software that shows you who visited to your site.  Some of these software packages put a link to whatever site referred visitors to your site.  Presumably this is so you can more easily click the link and see where they came from.  The trouble with this approach is that anybody with a tiny bit of programming skill can beat the system.  They can write a program that visits a bunch of sites automatically, saying that the visitor was referred by a link on any page they want.  This means that they can run the software overnight, and in the morning the tracking pages will have links to the fake referrer.  You should at least nofollow a link to any tracking page on your site that does this.  It is preferable that you don’t use tracking software that produces links at all.  Ask ELW about how to do some really serious tracking, and we would be glad to help.

As far as search engine optimization goes, pagerank sculpting using nofollow is a dead idea.  Matt Cutts at Google explained how thing have been different since at least 2008.  Here is the idea:

• If you had nofollowed some links so that other links would pass on more value, this no longer does so.
• The link value passed through followed links is the same regardless of whether other links on the page are nofollowed.
• Adding nofollow to links doesn’t save their link value to be passed on via followed links, it basically just throws it away.
• A decay is used on every page to prevent “loops” of pages from saving up any value passed in from an outside link.

Yes, this is not that shocking.  This policy prevents pagerank sculpting from doing anything useful.

This policy makes using rel=”nofollow” completely useless from an SEO standpoint!

Here is my opinion on the issue:

• Google is free to use whatever “mental-model” they want in their algorithm for any reason they wish.  I won’t join in with others in saying how the new system is wrong.  I personally like it.
• Nofollow is solely a way to cast a vote saying you don’t trust a link, but it is still a vote.
• If you don’t trust a link from your page, don’t use a link!
• WordPress by default will nofollow any links in comments to your blog.  I don’t consider this a solution to the problem.

Here are a few hints on how to take advantage of this new model:

1. Don’t allow any links in comments at all! It really is that simple.  It’s your blog, and you decide who’s graffiti should go there.  Blogs that are more busy might have trouble keeping up, but in my opinion it is worth your time to delete useless comments.  Even if you nofollow links in comments, they still deteriorate the value of real links from your blog entries.
2. Google can’t help it. Google currently requires links to differentiate itself from the other search engines.  No, wait, it isn’t 1998 anymore: Every decent search engine uses links!  I very sincerely suggest not changing your page sculpting techniques because of Google.  Nofollow might actually be working as it should on other search engines. (hint!, Google might secretly be trying to get you to make changes that only benefit Google!)  Don’t risk your search results positions on Yahoo and Bing just because Google thinks you should change your “mental model”.
3. Use the decay calculation to your advantage! Pages that take more clicks to reach through links means those pages are eventually passed less pagerank value.  So the obvious solution is to place links directly from your most often visited pages.
4. Links are meant to be clicked! Followed or nofollowed, a link is a link.  People will click on it if enough of them see it.  Don’t burn off too much mental energy worrying about links on pages that not too many people visit.  Pay extra attention to what you link to on your most visited pages.  Presumably you want visitors to read more of your articles, or at least go somewhere that benefits you.  If you don’t link to outside sites, it takes extra effort to leave.
5. Link location matters! A link at the top of the page is more likely to get clicked than a link in the footer.  Seriously consider how many people will click on a link that appears under pages of comments like “Great post! I agree with you”.  Here is a mental model for you to employ: If no human sees your link, no human will click your link.  If you optimize your pages for bots, your page will get traffic from bots.

Adding a video to your website can improve your bounce rate.  This means that people who visit your site from search engines will stay longer before they leave.  Professional SEO work should include finding who links to your competitor’s sites.  We have several ideas for sites to obtain new links for free.

The basic idea is that a video with good information will get watched by people who never would search for your site through regular search methods.  Some people just want to watch tv.  If your videos are popular, your website should reap the benefits.  Currently Youtube, and Dailymotion, and others do not allow you to put followed links with videos you post.  This means that you can have a link in your video description, but in the html code the link will be rel=”nofollow” so it shouldn’t influence search result placement.

Try the following video sites which have followed links:

1. Mixx
2. MetaCafe
3. Blip.TV
4. VideoBomb
5. Viddler
6. Ovi
7. WonderHowTo
8. GUBA
9. Graspr

Link baiting is a term referring to putting content on your site to obtain inbound links.  There is no magic formula, but there are a few good rules of thumb:

1. Are people searching? Just like any other content:  If nobody is searching for you, nobody is finding you! One good way to find out what people are searching for is to look at what questions Google suggests when you type in a phrase like “what does” or “why do” and produce an answer for them.  My favorite source of ideas is myself.  Every time I use a search engine to answer a question, I consider providing a summary of my answer.
2. A repeated problem? Does the problem you solve happen over and over again?  This is important, because nobody links to something they never intend to use again.  Free online tools are an excellent choice if you know how to write some code.  Mortgage and insurance calculators and similar items are an excellent example, but they have been done to death.
3. Are you the only solution? If you are the only person providing a solution to a problem, you will have a monopoly for a while.  If you have competition, try to at least be better than the alternatives in some way.  Make your solution look better, work better, have fewer ads, etc.
4. Relevance? Are the inbound links relevant to your site?  A million inbound links won’t help your law firm or church’s reputation if your link bait is about a bigfoot sighting or alien encounter.  Then again, maybe it will.

Stay tuned to this blog for 10 practical link baiting ideas you can use today.