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Public Relationships and Toxic Linkage

Posted by Michael Martinez on February 27, 2008 in SEO Theory

Ms. Danielle raises an interesting point about building Public Relations links. She writes that “by diversifying your link building and gaining [Public Relations] links, this will help spread buzz about your site, in turn gaining you even more links from other real sources.”

Search engine optimization should be viewed as a component of marketing, one means of building traffic and visibility out of several. I think most Web marketers understand this but we often find ourselves “caught in the weeds”, as it was recently put to me. Instead of keeping our attention on the overall strategy, we fall prey to the temptation to keep tweaking the SEO because we just do one more thing to make it all better.

Search engine optimization should be viewed as a public relationship. By that I mean that we need to determine where to build search visibility and how to leverage it. But because links can help with search engine optimization we should be looking at link placements (on other people’s sites) as opportunities to be self-promotional without seeming to be gratuitously self-promotional.

Gratuitous self-promotion occurs when someone interjects their ideas into an ongoing discussion to tell the participants (and lurkers) that they have the solution to their problems right there before them. You can probably think of a handful of names without much effort that fit that description. They don’t like to jump into discussions without extolling the virtues of their software, services, and products.

Gracious self-promotion is less in-your-face, less obtrusive. Gracious self-promotion may consist of agreeing to an interview where you can reasonably expect a link, but placing an advertisement on a site, of using your name to embed a NoFollowed link in a blog comment. It’s gracious because you’re not slamming people up against the wall by telling them how you’ve always been there to solve their problems, but rather you’re just participating in the discussion. It’s gracious because you don’t care if the links pass PageRank or anchor text.

Many people could smile and think, “Michael Martinez is hardly one to be talking about gracious participations in discussions”. While it’s true that I draw a hard line in technical discussions I also observe a very firm boundary when it comes to self-promotion. And I respect other people who observe similar boundaries.

The first impression you make on people counts as much in search engine optimization as it does in anything else. Presentation occurs on two levels in this industry. There is the way you come across personally and there is the way your content appears in search results. You can stand firmly on results.

Public relationship management builds your visibility and credibility in the community not so much as an expert on a topic but as someone with whom someone else has made a connection. That connection could be agreement in principles and beliefs, shared experiences, or a common advocacy. When you show that you are connected, people become more flexible about linking to you.

One way to build public relationships is to drive traffic to other people’s sites. That is, don’t wait to become Mr. Popular. You instead want to become That-Guy-Who-Sent-Me-Traffic-So-I-Want-To-Recognize-Him. When you become the resource you build value in yourself.

The best resources don’t express explicit opinions. You cannot build a list of preferred links without someone inferring that you endorse those links (despite your disclaimer that you don’t necessarily endorse them), but you can certainly keep your opinions to yourself and become a neutral third voice.

In some cases opinionated linking is good, especially if you really do provide objective comments in your opinions; in other cases opinionated linking makes you look cheap and immature, less professional. Your opinionated linking invites commentary from other people but if you experiment you’ll find that people fall out into different groups.

Some people are more likely to link to offensive, critical, hostile opinion. Other people are more likely to link to neutral, objective, rational opinion. In my experience the second group tends to be larger but the first group tends to have more key influencers. If you can get a key influencer to agree with your opinions you’re doing great. If you rouse the ire of a key influencer you may cut yourself off from a particular audience.

That is, in our public relationship we can hurt ourselves by earning links from hostile entities. Those hostile entitites can shape our visibility on the Web, in search, and in community discussions without our ever writing a word. As someone who has had to contend with hostile entities on more than one level, I can assure you that I have never found a search engine optimization benefit to having some radical wack-job attack me online.

There are some really toxic people hanging around on the Web. They ingratiate themselves in discussion communities by voluminous participation. Their contributions are generally no better than anyone else’s but when someone more knowledgeable on a topic comes along these toxic people zone in on the better-informed person and start destroying their credibility with subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) remarks, leading questions, and sometimes by contacting people privately and conducting poison pen campaigns.

You can garner a lot of links from toxic people, none of them good, simply because you stepped into their pond and didn’t pay proper homage. Those toxic links don’t hurt your search engine rankings; instead, they improve your search visibility, but they improve it in the worst possible way.

I’m not talking about your search reputation, but rather about your search baggage. You can have a great name space where people say only good things about you and still be getting slammed and slandered in active queries you’re not even aware of.

In other words, buzz linking is a two-edged sword. You become the subject of buzz because you’re comment-worthy. You become comment-worthy by taking a risk and exposing yourself to the public in some deep, personal way. You may share your feelings, point of view, or information you have. You may not care if you gain praise but if someone targets you for character assassination you’ll find that getting links ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

We all need to be gracious and courteous to each other on the Web because we cannot erase our tracks. We have shown people that we are here and the evidence of our passing is virtually indestructible. Toxic links can build up their own visibility and momentum and take control over your search campaigns in ways you never imagined.

The content you create, if it becomes comment-worthy, contributes to your public relationships on the Web. Keep that in mind when you think about creating link bait, building links for their Public Relations value, and just expanding your visibility without regard for what happens in the search engines. Ultimately, if people say good things about you on the Web those good things will influence your search results. But the other side of the coin is that if people say bad things about you then those bad things will also influence your search results.

Toxic linkage is something you can influence but not really manage. Your best strategy is to give people as few reasons to be toxic toward you as possible without hiding under a rock. Don’t be afraid to express your opinion, share your feelings, and spread your knowledge. Just understand that if you don’t leverage your ideas for your advantage, someone else may leverage those ideas for your disadvantage.