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SEO Secret - Search engine link and SEO link building

Posted by Michael Martinez on February 25, 2008 in Seo Myths

The most popular myth being passed around the SEO world is that “it’s all about links” or, to put it another way, “links are more important than content”.

The difference between ignorance and incompetence is that an ignorant person generally concedes to being ignorant; incompetent people who forge ahead despite their ignorance don’t acknowledge that they are unable to do the job.

Or, to borrow an old saying, “Those who can, DO. Those who can’t, write SEO blogs.”

People are searching for “SEO secret” in greater numbers now than a year ago. They want to know more about “SEO link building” and search engine link. I’m not sure what search engine link is supposed to mean but if anyone who finds this blog post using that expression would be inclined to explain what they are looking for, I’d be grateful.

SEO link building is the type of query I would expect people to use when they are looking for an seo secret. After all, every SEO on the Web is busily planning his or her next blog post about links (okay, according to my limited research, I estimate that approximately 25% of SEO bloggers are preparing posts on how to write compelling content, optimized content, link baity content, or comment-worthy content; another 10% are preparing to write a post rebutting some post they don’t agree with; and the rest are preparing yet another yawn-inspiring lecture on why links are important, how links help you, and where you can get the links from).

Some people have the audacity to question — even challenge — my statement that 90% of all SEO tips, tricks, and techniques are burned out by normal, average, every day SEOs in six months or less. Then again, maybe some people see value in explaining the idea from their own perspective.

Greed and stupidity are the chief reasons for why average, every day SEOs ruin SEO tips, tricks, and techniques. Although most of you could not care less about Microsoft’s search engine, that doesn’t change the fact that Microsoft Live is used by 70 million people every month and that Microsoft Live and MSN.com combined drive more search traffic than Yahoo!

SEO metrics suck, they suck big time, but the only metrics that suck worse are the horrible excuses for search market share published by Compete, comScore, Hitwise, and Nielsen. And I say that with all kindness and respect for the immense amount of work they put into gathering and collating their data. But you’d think it would have occurred to someone by now to start taking numbers of visits and estimated unique visitors into consideration.

Someone other than me, that is.

So let’s say you find a search engine is actually indexing and crediting a type of content you didn’t expect. If you’re a typical member of the SEO community you have drunk the Kool-aid and you believe links are more important than content. If that’s the case, why on Earth would you want to share your secret SEO knowledge with people who read SEO blogs looking for SEO link building tips that they can exploit?

Is someone paying you to blog about SEO tips, tricks, and techniques? (Hint: This is NOT my personal blog). If you’re being paid to create an SEO brand, to prove to other people that you put some time and thought into developing SEO strategies and techniques, that you base your methodologies on something approximating a crude science, you probably are okay to share some ideas on a blog.

But if you’re not earning an income from the blogging, why are you telling everyone else how to get strange, obscure content indexed? Especially if it’s strange, obscure content in which you can embed links that may pass value to your own pages? Do SEO bloggers who share linking secrets really stop to think about what those handfuls of Sphinns are costing them in terms of competitive advantage?

SEO link baiting does succeed in building links to SEO blogs. I suppose if you have the courage (and the permission) to link to your client sites from your SEO blog you may actually be doing people a favor with all your SEO tipping, tricking, and techniquing (how do you spell “techniquing”?).

Search engine optimizers universally know one SEO secret: we’ve all figured out that if you get links to your site, search engines will find those links and maybe crawl them and maybe pass the anchor text and maybe that will help you hit the top of the search results for targeted queries.

Alas! There are other search engine optimization secrets that quite a few people don’t appreciate. Oh, they act like they believe in the value of content but if you hold a gun to their head or give them an opportunity to garner some “Great Post!” comments from their loyal readers, they’ll come out and show their true Link Lover colors without much prodding.

Links don’t really do you any good if you don’t have anything to link to. At the very least, therefore, content MUST be at least as valuable as the links. Of course, you can get content indexed without inbound links now thanks to XML sitemaps. Any search engine that accepts XML sitemaps will come sniffing and see what you’ve got. If it looks interesting, they’ll index it.

If you’re chasing long tail queries or blazing a new query space then just getting indexed with the XML sitemaps is usually sufficient. No inbound links needed. You then go forth, unleash your non-search marketing campaign, and as the queries began to hit the search engines your content is there, waiting for them.

It works like magic, it has always worked like magic, and until the search engines figure out a way to filter out pre-emptive SEO practices I think it will continue to work like magic for the foreseeable future. Link baiting, on the other hand, has been accused of bringing tons of low quality traffic mixed with small amounts of desirable traffic. More than one person complained about low quality link bait traffic in 2007.

Now, as I’ve always noted, if you put enough effort into the least efficient method of accomplishing any task, you’ll see results. The problem with the SEO community is that they are all too willing to fall in love with the least efficient, least effective methods of building traffic. After all, they don’t have to think (someone else has already done that for them), they don’t have to find link sources (someone else has already done that for them), and they don’t have to worry about what anyone else will think of their methods because they are doing what everyone else is doing.

So the formula for SEO success is clearly built on links and linking. The amount of effort you have to put into it (starting out knowing virtually nothing about where to get links or how to get them), the length of time you have to put in to learning how to do it (some people claim it took them six months to figure out how to get links), and the lengths of time you have to wait for those links to show up (because they are afraid to reciprocate for fear of triggering search engine penalties) — all that stuff and more unappealing aspects to following the other SEO lemmings vanishes beneath the daily landslide of SEO blog posts telling you that “it’s really all about links”.

What it’s really all about is content. SEOs create an immense amount of content for the sole purpose of garnering mostly worthless links. This blog alone gets a lot of links every day from blackhat scraper blogs that autopost little link lists, snippets from various blog feeds, and randomly scraped text from blogs based on names, concepts, and using certain words. Those links would not exist if I weren’t writing about search engine optimization.

Admittedly, the SEO blogging community has moved more toward counting RSS subscriptions. I’m not sure why because, unless you’re charging for those subscriptions, they don’t directly translate into any money for you. If you’ve got a loyal audience of about 5,000 subscribers (more than this blog has) then you have, I suppose, achieved a small measure of what Lee Odden calls ‘SEO Celebrity’.

Of course, SEO celebrity don’t pay the bills. But maybe it brings you a search engine link while you are sharing your last SEO secret. After all, SEO blogging is really mostly about SEO link building. You don’t have to think about anything new or useful — just link out to everyone else’s daily post and your loyal subscribers will thank you for scrutinizing their daily feeds. Some people claim to subscribe to as many as 400 feeds. I don’t subscribe to any.

Subscribing to RSS feeds doesn’t bring in any money, it doesn’t sound very enjoyable, and I barely have time to browse fewer than 20 SEO-related blogs every day any way. And most of the SEO bloggers are sharing ideas that I discussed with other people in SEO forums years ago. I’m kind of burned out on “linking trick of the week” discussions.

Real search engine optimization is founded on research and analysis, not links and content. Web sites are built on content and links, search visibility is built on links and content. You need to do your keyword research, your trend analysis, your competitive content analysis, and your search engine analysis.

The SEO community doesn’t do search engine analysis any more. Everyone in the SEO community knows you just go to Yahoo! to do your backlink research even though you’re really only concerned with Google. Why? Beats me. Yahoo! doesn’t know anything about Google’s database.

Doing Google link research through Yahoo! is like taking your Mazerati to a certified Porsche mechanic. He may be very good at what he does but he’s not the best choice you can make. “But he’s the only real mechanic in town,” most people would be quick to point out. Yes, that’s true. No one gives you backlink reports like Yahoo!.

Yahoo! reports links that don’t exist, either because it crawled non-existent URLs that were redirected (with 200 OK header code responses) to root URLs and/or sitemaps, or because it crawled scraper sites carrying Google Adwords (yes, Yahoo! reports your Javascript links as real links).

Yahoo! reports links that Google doesn’t index because they are located on pages that Google has banned, penalized, or which use nofollow.

So, you want to do some link analysis with Yahoo!? Go ahead. Make my day.

The only real problem with SEOs using Yahoo! for link analysis is that they don’t take their heads out of their butts long enough to acknowledge that they are obtaining a very warped, distorted, irrelevant picture of what Google may know about.

As long as you’re honest with yourself about how limited Yahoo!’s link reports are, you can still use them for some basic trend analysis. After all, if you find 100,000 backlinks to a site in Yahoo! (and have sense enough to filter out all the internal links, which Yahoo! easily allows you to do), then you’re pretty safe to conclude that the site has a strong link profile.

A few studies have been performed through the years comparing Yahoo! and Google’s databases. These studies were conducted by academics who were not (to the best of my knowledge) affiliated with either Yahoo! or Google. A few people like me and Danny Sullivan have occasionally performed some random query-based tests and used the results to very roughly, approximately estimate the relative sizes of Google and Yahoo!’s indexes.

None of these sources are authoritative but the general consensus (the trend that emerges) is that Google has the larger index and that Google and Yahoo! together probably index no more than about 60% common sites. That is, the estimates suggest that Google may know about 60% of Yahoo!’s sites and Yahoo! may know about 40% of Google’s sites.

I have not seen a recent study on this topic, so all the estimates I am familiar with are 1-2 years old. Furthermore, because of Google’s screwy search results (and Yahoo!’s for that matter), I no longer trust the query samples I used to rely upon. I can’t speak for Danny on the subject but I vaguely recall him suggesting they were not very reliable tests around 18 months ago, give or take.

It’s extremely difficult to devise a reliable test for this kind of information, short of downloading and comparing the search engines’ data sets. Researchers are limited to comparing no more than 1,000 results per query. Since Yahoo! and Google use different algorithms for crawling, indexing, and relevance scoring the differences we find in their results may be due only to the way they evaluate Web content.

Yahoo! claims to give more weight to the first link from any domain to another domain (what constitutes the “first” link, though?). Google makes no such claim and, quite frankly, I find enough site-wide links apparently passing value that I suspect Google looks at linking in a very different way from Yahoo!.

Still, knowing nothing about either search engine’s algorithms or data sets, many SEOs feel confident that using Yahoo! to research Google link profiles is a good, reliable method of performing competitive intelligence.

Anyone can go to Yahoo! and capture a number of links. I do it all the time. You’re ahead of the game, however, if you compare that Yahoo! data to something, even if it’s only Google’s randomly selected “sampling” of links.

Generally speaking, Google should report fewer links than Yahoo! but every now and then Google actually reports more links than Yahoo!. That’s not so scary if you know about the search index overlap theory (what I described above: that there is only an estimated 40-60% overlap between their data sets).

The sites in the shared 40-60% range may seem like desirable link-building territory but you still have to understand that a link that counts in one search engine doesn’t necessarily count in the other. Both Yahoo! and Google set their own rules for determining which links count and how much. Ask and Microsoft do the same thing.

Perhaps no more than 15-20% of all publicly accessible Web content may be indexed by all four major search engines. About the only thing we can conclude from that estimate is that probably no more than 15-20% of all publicly accessible Web content passes everyone’s trust tests.

If you want to build links, your best bet for identifying the real characteristics of trusted, safe, good linking sites is to identify a sizable number of those 15-20% sites and then replicating their success. In the end, being one of the more trusted sites improves your search visibility. Search visibility is critical to SEO success because when you understand the search market you can leverage it to your competitive advantage:

Approximately 130 million people use Yahoo! every month.

Approximately 130 million people use Google every month.

Approximately 70 million people use Live search every month.

Approximately 70 million people use MSN search every month.

Approximately 30 million people use Ask search every month.

An estimated 600 million people presently have Internet access. Do the math. They’re not all using Google (exclusively).

Those hundreds of millions of searchers who don’t use Google (or who use the other search engines in addition to Google) are looking for something and if you don’t care enough to put your content where they can find it, you’ll never have what they are looking for.

Links don’t tell you that.

Link building blog posts don’t tell you that.

SEO pundits who tell you “it’s all about links” or “links are more important than content” don’t tell you that.

People who tell you to do your Google link research at Yahoo! don’t tell you that.

In short, the SEO community is largely silent on most of the topics it should be discussing because those topics don’t bring them money. Why? They haven’t invested the time and resources necessary to make money from any source other than Google. They haven’t invested time and resources in learning anything better than to just blindly build links without any way to determine which links work or why.