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Spoking About The Perfect Hub Strategy

Posted by Michael Martinez on August 28, 2007 in Intermediate SEO

Every now and then the SEO community falls in love with “hubs” again. It gets a little old because the hub effect has never really been fully appreciated by search optimizers. They only think in terms of links, which constitute about 10% of the search engine optimization picture (don’t get all huffy with me — content is only another 10%).

Jon Kleinberg proposed the “hubs and experts” concept that has since become the core of Ask’s algorithm (through their purchase of Teoma). Google has never employed a hub-centric algorithm, but you wouldn’t know that from reading SEO blogs and forums.

Yahoo! did once have a hub-centric algorithm but it was very different from Ask’s algorithm. Yahoo! originally built its search service out from its directory. In fact, there was a time when optimizing for Yahoo!’s Directory Search was more important than optimizing for any particular search index.

Directory search is pretty limited in what it can do. You get four elements to work with: listing title, listing description, page URL, and listing category. Some novel directory services might have allowed people to add some keywords. Yahoo! and other directories also offered occasional tweaks, like “Editor’s Choice” designations.

There was a time when domain names and trade names were chosen on the basis of where they would appear in Yahoo! category pages. Now, in the early years Yahoo!’s category pages were important for traffic. If a category bled into a second page the people on the second page got almost no traffic. But as Yahoo!’s directory grew more and people had to use the search tool to find listings.

For about two years I argued strenuously with many people in the SEO community that they were optimizing for the one aspects of the Yahoo! directory. They kept trying to come up with variations on “AAA A Good Company” so their sites would appear first in the category pages. I kept arguing that building relevance (keywords) into your listing titles, page URLs, and listing descriptions was more important.

Yahoo! also imposed the requirement on Web sites that their listing titles match their actual root URL titles (or masthead trade names). Convincing business operators who couldn’t see past the Yahoo! category list to name their Web sites something useful and meaningful rather than “Psychedelic Illusions” was a major task. Keep in mind that if there is a way to blow your relevance out of the water, I’ve done it with Xenite.Org. I have made nearly every mistake I preach against.

Xenite used to have 10 listings in the Yahoo! directory, which is almost unheard-of for a single domain that doesn’t provide Webhosting accounts. Now I think we’re down to about 6 listings. I haven’t checked in a while. There was a time when having unique content was more important for a Yahoo! listing than having a unique name. Think about that. If you have 10 listings in Yahoo!, you don’t really need to appear on the first page of any category.

Yahoo! became a hub for my one domain in spite of my ignorance about Kleinberg’s “hubs and experts” theory. And that experience taught me something about how flexible true hubs are.

People in the industry look at hubs as directories and they wrongly believe they need more than one hub. Don’t get me wrong. If you can get 10 directories to send you traffic and pass value through their links, that’s far better than just getting one directory to send you traffic and pass value through links. But a directory is no more a hub than a page on a blog (and vice versa). That is, a hub is not a directory because it’s a directory. Nor does a hub have to be only a directory.

Every HTML sitemap you create is a hub because it acts as the central connecting point between all your pages of related content (on one domain). A directory category page on Yahoo! may or may not be a hub. If none of the pages linked to on that category page link back, the Yahoo! page is not a hub. It’s not a central connecting point.

To be a hub, a directory category page needs to be linked to by most of the pages it links out to. Does that sound familiar? Yes, it’s a reciprocal linking pattern, but it’s a relevant reciprocal linking pattern. Similar pages are linking to the central connecting point that joins them all in a family of related Web sites. So reciprocal linkers can rejoice in the knowledge that Yahoo! was reciprocating links with Web sites years before Google existed. In fact, it was once common for Web sites to link to their category pages on Yahoo! as a way of expressing credibility.

And credibility is an important aspect of hub-and-expert reciprocation. If you just maintain a “reciprocal links directory” somewhere on your Web site, you’re not assigning credibility and value to the position your listing has on the other sites you’re reciprocating with. In the old days, many Web sites proudly proclaimed they were listed on Yahoo! in such-and-such directory. Some sites even made a big fuss over earning a pair of sunglasses from Yahoo! (at the height of my own Yahoo! glory I had earned two pairs of sunglasses).

You naturally identify the hubs in your industry by how big a fuss you make over your listings on those hubs. If you make no fuss, you’re not reciprocating with a hub. It’s that simple. Call it the Fussy Hub Test. If your client comes to you and says, “I’ve got links in 300 directories” (a very common claim these days), ask the client how many of those directories they link to from the front page of their Web site. I doubt many people would be willing to link to even one.

But people rarely have a problem with putting a link to Yahoo!, Google, DMOZ, Ask, etc. on their front page. Not that most business sites would choose to do that, but if I were optimizing for local search you’d better believe I’d be pointing people to the local search resources that favor my content. Remember one of the key principles to search success is to teach people to search for what you have but you also want them to search for your content where you’ll be found. So tell people what to look for and where to find it.

The credibility you extend to your search sources determines their status in your network of hubs and experts. If you link out to a search tool in your blog posts, white papers, and feature articles, the odds are pretty good you’re doing so to help your readers find specific information. Even if you use “rel=nofollow” you’re extending credibility through your links because ultimately you’re providing those links to the people visiting your site. Hence, if you have listings in 300 directories, you need to ask yourself which of those directories you want to refer your visitors to when you are trying to be helpful.

If you choose not to send your visitors to any of your linking partners, none of your partners are hubs. You are always the hub for your hubs. Your hubs are experts in your content (remember my 10 Yahoo! listings). You are connecting all your hubs together in a family of directories about your content. You should actively promote your linking partners as legitimate sources of information. If you cannot feel comfortable doing that, then you have a problem with the way you choose linking partners.

A student’s term paper listing 10 Web sites about wine making is a much better hub than 300 “SEO friendly” directories if all 10 sites the student lists link back to the term paper. And the neat thing about treating non-directory pages as hubs is that you can easily find them in your Web referral data. Find out who sends you traffic and then make a list of those sites. Which sites are linking out to several similar sites? Do any of your competitor sites link back to the linking site?

Counter-intuitive as it might seem to link to someone who is linking to your competitors, if you don’t help build the credibility of the hubs you want to support you, no one else will do it for you. And you can establish your place as a leader in your industry by creating hub nurseries. Be the first person to link to a potential hub page from your site, but don’t stop there. Recommend it as a great resource whenever you have the opportunity (either through links or through personal communication).

When you go beyond mere linking to recommend a Web site, you lend it credibility that cannot be purchased or manipulated. Most people won’t personally recommend a site they don’t control unless they really think it’s good. But most people will link out to a site they know nothing about just because they like the layout, or because the site links to them, or because they don’t know there are better sites availalble. Links by themselves never have been and never will be recommendations or endorsements but where you place a link and how you embed that link in your copy determines whether the link is an endorsement.

If you want to create a hub nursery then pick 5 Web sites that link to your site and at least 9 similar (competitor) sites. You want Web sites that don’t yet have many links pointing to them. Create a blog post or feature article on your site that tells people about each of these 5 sites, why they are valuable resources, and link to them. Promote your blog post or feature article prominently on your site. Make sure you have good internal linkage to it.

Now go tell people about the 5 baby hubs. Be honest. Don’t be spammy. Find opportunities to help people who are looking for information. Don’t just volunteer references to Web sites that no one has asked about. Find ways to help other people by pointing them to your baby hubs. If your competitors start linking to those baby hubs, they’ve achieved enough visibility and credibility to join your family of hubs.

You want to manage your hub relationships and nurture them in as many ways as possible. A search engine like Google or Ask can be a hub about SEO theory if enough sites interested in SEO theory link to their search results for “seo theory”. Even Yahoo! can still be a hub for SEO theory. It doesn’t matter if your links for search results are crawled and indexed by search engines because hubs are not necessarily crawled and indexed by search engines.

While that might seem contrary to the concept that empowers Ask’s algorithm, the truth about hubs is that they are independent of search engines. They influence visibility, they drive traffic, they build credibility. Hubs are true partners in the enterprise of bringing information to other people. If you only look at hubs as linking sources you’re not looking at hubs, and you’re definitely not doing yourself any favors.

You can also create your own internal hubs. These are the pages on your own sites that connect all related content. A large content site needs internal hubs. Any ecommerce site that doesn’t use internal hubs is hurting itself. Just because you bought an ecommerce system doesn’t mean you have internal hubs. In fact, true internal hubs don’t come from templates and databases. They come from your unique, distinctive articles. You have to tell people in your own words what the most important pages on your site are for each topic where you want a hub.

If you want to build a hub that helps people in general and attracts some links, you need to link out freely to truly useful resources. But now you don’t want to link out to reciprocal linking partners. Instead, to build a hub of your own you need to find information that isn’t well-linked but which may eventually link back to you. You cannot link out to onlne news stories in a hub because the odds are pretty good they won’t link back to your site. They’ll never recommend your hub. Hence, they are not the experts you need to partner with.

A true hub doesn’t need to be accompanied by emails. You don’t need to let anyone know you’ve linked to their site. They’ll find your hub in the search results, see that you’ve linked to their content (or see the traffic from your site), and they’ll link back to you without your asking. That’s a hub. People link to it without being baited, paid, asked, bribed, or cajoled.

People link to bubs because they provide value to a community of Web sites.

People recommend hubs without linking because they provide value to a community of people.

People are proud to be listed in hubs because they value the information those hubs provide.

You cannot manufacture a hub through reciprocal links. You can only build a hub through shared credibility, shared sense of purpose, and shared interest. Hubs and reciprocation go hand in hand, but reciprocation produces relatively few hubs. If you need to exchange links with a site it will never be hub. Nor will your site.

The difference between a hub and anything else is that the hub is a true resource that provides value. It doesn’t have to be a directory. It doesn’t need more than a handful of links. It doesn’t have to be the hottest site on the Web or featured in news stories. All it does is provide great information about Web sites with similar content.