The Less Links, the Better – How SEO Hacker Achieved PageRank 5

November 23, 2012 by

So there’s that recent PageRank update that finally put me through the PageRank 5 barrier. There is no real ‘quantity’ as to when you are going to have that numerical increase in your PageRank score – but I’m pretty sure that my (approximately) 20,000 inbound links is not anywhere quantitatively enough to put me on PageRank 5. So how did it happen? The PageRank System Disclaimer: This is my idea of how Google’s PageRank system works. If you think it is inaccurate or if you know anything to add to my knowledge, please do leave your thoughts at the comments section below. The PageRank score is a metric that Google gives each and every webpage. It measures the quantity and the quality of your inbound links – that’s all it measures. In order for a website’s PageRank score to increase, it has to exponentially increase its inbound links quantitatively or draw in qualitative links from high PageRank webpages. Quantitatively this is my idea of how your PageRank score would increase: PageRank 0 – 0 – 10 Links Pagerank 1 – 10 – 100 Links PageRank 2 – 100 – 1000 Links PageRank 3 – 1000 – 10,000 Links PageRank 4 – 10,000 – 100,000 Links PageRank 5 – 100,000 – 1,000,000 Links I’m currently nowhere near that 100,000 – 1,000,000 links. Good news is, PageRank score does not only deal with quantitative factors but qualitative ones as well. The thing is, I don’t know how they exactly go together to determine a webpage’s PageRank score. What I do know is I DID NOT actively built links for SEO Hacker. So how did SEO Hacker get to PR 5? To be honest, it also bothers me. But here are some of my assumptions: I have a Content Strategy that I follow for my target audience and my tribe of followers – Create content for beginner to intermediate SEO and write it out all on simple terms. I got a lot of Word of Mouth links through Cornerstone Content – I don’t ask for links nor work hard to build them. I simply create content that gives value, answers and comfort, and my readers reward the value I give with their referrals. I practice smart Interlinking – Let people and the search engines which other content in your website is related to the one they’re reading right now. Perhaps they want further readings or sources. I practice smart Outbound linking – Don’t give out linkjuice if you don’t have to. Give to those who deserve it. Otherwise, keep some for yourself. A site with a lot of outbound links can look like it’s a link farm. Lesson learned? I’ve always been a guy who looked at the value of great content rather than a great link profile and good rankings. Perhaps I want you to realize that a site that ranks really well can make good money online but can’t make good business in the long run. Someone with solid content is always bound to overtake you in terms of branding. And mind you, branding is an ever-increasing factor in the Search engines nowadays. So the key takeaway would be: don’t focus on building links. Build great content that dishes out value to your audience. Remember the story of Jack and the Beanstalk? I’m pretty sure you’ve heard of the tale. Jack went up the beanstalk and saw the Goose that laid the golden eggs. What did Jack do? Did he take the golden eggs to make himself rich? No. He took the Goose. Why? Well, the eggs will make you rich – once, twice or perhaps thrice. But after that, his riches will be drained out and he would have to look for magic seeds again to climb the beanstalk and face the giant once more – just to get more golden eggs. I don’t want to climb the beanstalk again. I don’t want to face the giant again. So I went for the Goose. You should too. The Goose? Well, if you haven’t figured out yet, it’s Cornerstone Content. No you don’t steal it. But you’d have to make one yourself. Overlay it with solid content strategy and promote it with exceptional content marketing – that’s the formula for golden eggs to get laid. That’s the formula for attracting Word of mouth links. I already outlined what SEO Hacker’s content strategy is . What our type of audience is . What you need to do is to define those things for your website – then publish content that follows your content strategy. The thing about the ‘Content is King’ mindset is that they leave out the ‘Promotion Strategy is the Herald’ part of it. Once you’ve got great content, you have to have a great promotion strategy to go with it! A Great Promotion Strategy Comprises of: An extremely attractive headline overlaid with “Yes” Content – Grab attention with your title. Get people to agree with you. Trigger emotions. Read all about it here . A clearly defined target audience – Who are the kinds of people your content is written for? Platforms where your target audiences are – Where are they spending most of their online time? Facebook? Twitter? Google+? A forum perhaps? Clearly defined list of your target audience’s influencers to help boost your promotion strategy – Who are the influencers in your niche? The thought leaders? The people with a good tribe of followers? An effective strategy in reaching out to those influencers to help you promote – How are you going to tell them about your content? How will it help them? How will it help their followers? Building solid relationships to those influencers so that they would keep on promoting your stuff even if you don’t ask them to anymore – Can you return the favor? Are you willing to promote each other’s content mutually? The thing is, things are moving slowly but surely away from linkbuilding towards great, solid content that provides your target audience with value. These things are what I’ve been doing for the past 2 years since SEO Hacker started – and lo and behold, we’re now in PageRank 5! It’s a thing to celebrate and I wanted to share with you how I did it. Forget the golden egg. Go for the Goose.

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The Less Links, the Better – How SEO Hacker Achieved PageRank 5

Filed Under: Beginner, facebook, Google, How To, Link Building, Marketing, mindset, Money, phil internet marketing and social media and seo, sea, seo, Top News, twitter Tagged With: , , , , , ,

How to Future Proof your Linkbuilding

May 21, 2012 by

Google is constantly changing and improving. It’s obviously not the same as what it was when it started a handful of years ago. The recent Penguin update has changed the way we look at linkbuilding . It used to be about quantity and quality. Right now, linkbuilding is shifting away from quantity – giving a much higher emphasis and importance on link quality and link naturality. Link Quality – This pertains to how powerful the link is in terms of bringing you PageRank juice. It includes factors such as Link host Relevance, PageRank, Authority, Anchor text, Anchor Title, etc… Link Naturality – This is the measurement of how natural your link profile and pattern is. The less your link naturality, the more prone you are to the Penguin’s beak pecking your rankings away. SEO Hacker was not hit, in any way, by Penguin. Want to know why? Because we practice Future-Proof Linkbuilding. We make sure that Google does not hit slap us – not now, not ever. And if you want to Future-proof your linkbuilding, here’s how you can start: Link host quality Is the link host a website that brings in value to its visitors? How many outbound links does it have? Does it have thick, meaty content all over? Does it sell links? Having a high quality Link host is very important. It immediately spells out your link as a quality link. A valid link. It triggers a natural link signal because, chances are, the linking host links out naturally. Therefore, each and every link that goes out from that link host is considered a natural, quality link. Linking Patterns Does your website garner links in a logical pattern? Perhaps 20 links in a month? 40 links a month? 200 links a month? Are you getting links from only one kind of website? Blogs? Directories? Forums? Are you doing link exchange? Are most of your links coming from the footer? Do they have the same anchor text? A linking pattern specifically says that you are linkbuilding . Consequently, it does not give your website a good leverage in your link naturality profile. Don’t link in a pattern. A linking pattern easily detectable even by freely available backlink checking tools! Make sure that if you are doing linkbuilding, do it in such a way that no pattern can be easily seen. Don’t allow Google to connect the dots with your backlinks. Social Signal Balance No one’s Liking your stuff in Facebook, retweeting it in Twitter or giving it a +1 in Google Plus but you’ve got a lot of links coming in to your page? Hmmm… “How come so many people are linking to you but no one wants to share your stuff?”  It’s a very simple question that should have a very simple answer: Linkbuilding. Remember that linkbuilding should be done naturally – meaning, people should be linking to you not because you’re asking them to or paying them to. It’s because you provide great value that should be worth sharing. Social Signals can be a very powerful way to measure your link naturality. If you don’t have that much social engagement going in your pages that have high amounts of links, your link naturality will score very low. High amount of links should almost always amount to high amount of social engagement. Anchor Text Variation Links are made by people and the anchor text they want to put in depend on what they prefer. So how come 100 different websites with 100 different webmasters put in the same anchor text to your page? That’s pretty weird. And the chances of that happening naturally are very slim. Having a highly concentrated amount of the same anchor text to your backlinks immediately spell out a very low link naturality. Almost every SEO specialists agree that high amounts of exact match anchor text is the problem behind websites hit by the Penguin update. I agree. It’s not the only factor behind the Penguin penalty, but it is a big factor nonetheless. We always make sure that we have a lot of phrase match anchor text here in SEO Hacker to keep our link naturality score high. PageRank Distribution PageRank distribution is vital to each and every website especially as the search engines are moving forward in their algorithm development and changes. Having a webpage with highly concentrated PageRank might signal artificial linkbuilding to that specific page – considering all factors I’ve discussed earlier. Consequently, this will tell the search engines of the link naturality for this webpage – and it might just affect the whole website’s link naturality too. Having a good interlinking strategy between your pages will eliminate high PageRank concentration. Make sure to assign a handful of phrase-match anchor text in your interlinking to signal a higher link naturality score to the search engines. Content Thickness I know that Panda has rolled out and is almost done in the havoc it created with the SERPs but I just can’t stop reiterating the importance of content. Great, real, Future-proof SEO starts will great, solid, quality content that provide value to people. This is where it all starts! This is where we started and this is still what we are doing here in SEO hacker and even with all our clients! Content Thickness does not deal with the number of characters or words. It deals with how great your content is regardless of the number of words. Great content will ALWAYS attract natural links – of course, you have to promote it and market it out for it to attract attention. But as soon as it does attract buzz, believe me, the links will just come pouring in – naturally. Most of those links are quality links that will indisputably increase your link naturality score. Knowing all this, what’s the best Future-Proof Linkbuilding Technique? If you ask me, it’s still going to be Linkbaiting. It’s really the way to go. Linbaiting allows you to avoid outright manipulation of garnering links. Rather, you tap into people’s emotions and logic to drive them to link to you. If you’ve read my linkbaiting entries here in SEO Hacker , I’ve always repeatedly stressed that this is my favorite linkbuilding method. It still is. How does getting high quality, one-way links in a natural way sound like? Linkbaiting allows you to do just that. It is the most natural way of attaining links – consequently boosting your link naturality altogether. Linkbaiting is not easy. You need to have a lot of creativity, research, and authority and put in a lot of marketing effort to make it work. But it pays off. And when it does, it does so BIG-TIME. Tips for Keeps: Start thinking of your own linkbait now. Push through with that experiment and try it out for yourself – perhaps starting out with a news linkbait or a tutorial linkbait will work for you.

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How to Future Proof your Linkbuilding

Filed Under: facebook, Google, Link Building, Marketing, mindset, phil internet marketing and social media and seo, research, sea, seo, twitter, websites Tagged With: , , , , , ,

The Different Levels of Linkbuilding

March 26, 2012 by

First and foremost, I would just like to say that linkbuilding is here to stay. Social will NOT take over linkbuilding’s value and effects. There are different levels of linkbuilding that we use in our team that I think you should be familiar of too. Tier 1, 2 and 3 I’ve separated linkbuilding to three levels. This post may not cover all linkbuilding strategies but so far here’s the breakdown: Tier 1 – Guest posting, Broken Linkbuilding, Citation Requests Tier 2 – Directory Listing, Article Submission, In-content Link Exchange Tier 3 – Forum posting, Blog Commenting, Social Bookmarking, Profile Linkbuilding Tier 1 Linkbuilding – Organic This is the top level tier of the bunch because garnering links using these linkbuilding techniques ensures that you have little to no competition doing the same. Guest posting is difficult if you’re doing it for a client – mainly because it requires a good mastery in a field that you have yet to study. It’s easy to guest post if you already have a reputable name in that industry and if you have published previous cornerstone entries – without which, it is really difficult to get your guest post request approved in notable blogs. The idea behind great linkbuilding is easy – if it’s hard to replicate, it most probably is the most natural, trustworthy, and authoritative plus it’s the one least done or achieved by competitors. The tier 1 linkbuilding techniques are 80-90% organic in its methodology. You cannot force it to happen and there are a lot of conditions. I’ve outlined them below as well as my perceived percentage of these factors: (the percentages are just to give you a general idea and are not completely accurate) Guest posting Factors: 20% Email Template – Is your email template good? Is it clear? Concise? Is the persona you’re using effective? Is the email address you’re using effective? 25% Prospecting effort – Is the website you’re sending to, a good one? Does it have a contact form? Is it still alive? Is the webmaster still checking? 25% Webmaster – Is he available? What articles does he accept? Does the webmaster accept random guest posts from anyone or does he invite a chosen set of writers? Is he going to allow links in your guest post? 15% Guest Post Content – Is it really good? Remarkable? Is it going to haul you in a lot of traffic from the hosting blog/website? 15% Unknown – Is it a holiday in the webmaster’s country? Did your email get through? Broken Linkbuilding Factors: 20% Website – Is it still live? Is someone still behind it? 20% Email Template – Is your email template good? Is it focused on the webmaster’s website? 10% Archive.org – Is the content you want to replicate still there? Are there still any archived footprints of the content you want to replicate? 30% Webmaster – Does the webmaster still care? Is his email still active? Is he still reachable? 10% Replacement Content – Is your replacement content better than the lost one? Is it going to convince the webmaster to reroute the broken link to you or would he rather just delete the link and be done with it? 10% Unknown – Is it a holiday in the webmaster’s country? Did your email get through? Citation Requests Factors: 50% Website – Is it a personally owned website or a company owned website? Are there numerous permissions before your citation request gets approved? 20% Email Template – Is it personal? Friendly? Is it going to move the webmaster to approve your citation request for your brand as a source? 20% Linkable Asset – Are there any linkable assets in your website that is relevant to your link citation request? Or are all your citation request links going to your homepage? 10% Unknown – Is it a holiday in the webmaster’s country? Did your email get through? Tier 2 Linkbuilding – Semi-Organic This is where the mid-level linkbuilding strategies fall into. There are not a lot of uncontrollable factors included in this set – and it can be manipulated, therefore making it semi-artificial. These are also not too hard to replicate – and without the right tools, they’re not really too easy either. Tier 2 Linkbuilding Methods are around 30-70% Organic – and I don’t encourage it in my team. Directory Listing Factors: Directory Site – Is it relevant? If there are no relevant categories for your site, move on to another one. Editors – Are they strict in auditing? The stricter, the better. Means they have less outbound links. Article Submission Factors: Editors – Are the editors strict in auditing? Are they picky? If they aren’t, don’t waste your time there. Unless you want a low-quality backlink just to increase quantity. Quality of your Article – Is it remarkable? Will it catch the attention of readers? If the article submission site accepts anything less than quality, forget it. In-Content Link Exchange Factors: Webmaster – Is the webmaster willing to exchange in-content links? Email Template – Does your email template spell out ‘trust’ and ‘relevance’ to the webmaster? Is it a common, impersonal email wherein you just care about getting a link to your website – and you ask the webmaster to ‘put my link first’? Relevance – Is your content relevant to the webmaster’s article? Will it make sense if the webmaster links to you? Tier 3 Linkbuilding – Artificial These are the linkbuilding methods that are easiest to replicate. Gradeschoolers can do this and it’s a matter of legwork and perseverance. I’m not saying that tier 3 linkbuilding methods are useless. I’m just saying that if you’re using these methods to compete, you’ll almost always lose. Tier 3 linkbuilding methods are usually used to supplement tier 1 linkbuilding techniques if the tier 1 techniques are moving slowly due to unstable factors. Forum posting Factors : Good Profile – When the forum moderator passes by, is your profile that of a human or of a spammer? Posting Relevance – Whenever you post something in a thread, does it make sense? Does it sincerely help? Community Contribution – Do you answer questions or do you just keep on asking? Are you giving the community value or are you just sucking from it? Blog Commenting Factors : Comment Quality – Does your comment make sense? Is it relevant to the blog entry? Website – Is the blog still maintained and moderated by a webmaster? Does it give out dofollow links to blog comments? Social Bookmarking Factors: This is purely artificial – Just create a social bookmarking account that looks clean and trustworthy and you’re good to go. Profile Linkbuilding Factors : This is also purely artificial – put up a profile and set a link there. Check if the accounts page is indexable, if not – find another one. These three levels of linkbuilding are how we categorize and gauge the effectivity and quality of links we garner from our linkbuilding efforts. Tips for keeps: Have a good mix of tier 1, 2 and 3 for each site that you’re building – they compliment each other.

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The Different Levels of Linkbuilding

Filed Under: articles, Link Building, phil internet marketing and social media and seo, Prospecting, sea, seo, traffic Tagged With: , , , , ,
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