Sunday 27 September 2009

Off-page Search Engine Optimization

Off-page search engine optimization refers to links coming to your website or blog posts from other sites.

As I explained in my post on How Search Engines Work, links coming into your site are a powerful voting machine, representing the wisdom of crowds. The idea is that people only link to good pages, and thus the best pages will have the most links and rise up the search rankings.

Anyone reading the above will see at once how it can be gamed. Why not set up a whole bunch of other sites yourself, and then get them to link to you? The "blog-farms" beloved of blackhatters are based on this principle. In the early days of search engines this technique worked pretty well. But then Google wised up.

As I've explained before, Google is a hand-built search engine. Sure they have a very complex search algorithm at the heart of their system, but they also have teams of engineers who are actively looking to put an end to efforts to game their engine. They've built in a system of flags, which prompt the engineers to do manual inspections of the sites that have triggered flags. Flags get triggered if a new website suddenly accrues a large amount of external backlinks. Now that can happen if there is a new hot topic (such as Michael Jackson's death), and an engineer will quickly glance at the site and decide it is legit (though note it took Google half an hour to realise that Michael Jackson's death was a legit event - during that half an hour, they blocked searches on Jackson, assuming that they were under a denial-of-service attack). But a sudden collection of backlinks can also mean that someone is purchasing links or someone has created a blog farm to propel them up the rankings.

Once the engineer has inspected the site in question, it's a simple matter of tracking back to the other sites, to see what is going on. If the sites linking to you are sites with no other links out apart from to you, they know something is up. If the site linking to you is an existing "authority" site - in other words a site that has been around for a while and has proved over time that it is legit, then they will deem the link to be natural and valuable, and you get full benefit from it.

One of the happiest moments in my career was when one of my blogs got linked to by the Financial Times Alphaville blog. Those kind of links can't be bought or begged for - you need to earn them with great material.

Therefore the first and best way to get good quality authority links to your site is to create great unique material. You will find that people link to you spontaneously and the sites linking to you will be of a great variety and so diverse that the links are obviously natural and not farmed.

One problem with natural links is that the anchor text the links are on is usually not great - "click here" and "this article" tend to be common. You can help the situation by always being careful about the title of your blog posts or articles so that they include your keyword. The person who is linking to you will either use your article title or your blog title, so choose carefully.

I need to point out that there is a chicken-and-egg situation with the "write great material and you will get links" theory. If the only way to get found in the engines is due to backlinks, and no-one has yet found your new great article because it is new and hasn't any backlinks, how are you to get found in order to accrue the links to get ranked in the first place?

Google tries to get round this by the "new content bonus". They will boost new pages simply to help them get found. They then sit back and see what happens. If it is great, they reason, it will naturally accrue backlinks. If not, it will sink. However, for some niches, it is so competitive, even the new material bonus doesn't really help you get noticed. This is where social media and web 2.0 sites come into play - they give your material some exposure so that someone else can read it (and hopefully link to it).

If you create a HubPage or Squidoo lens pointing to your website, you will not only get backlinks, but those hubpages/lenses will benefit from their site's internal backlinks, and will thus gain authority. Google trusts certain web 2.0 sites that it feels regulates spam properly (and periodically penalises sites when it thinks they have lost control and the internet marketers have taken over). The trusted sites change from time to time. Squidoo for instance had great trust from Google - and then lost it when the spammers selling dodgy weight loss products and whatnot descended en masse. Squidoo responded by banning certain types of lenses and topics, and also operating a secret blacklist of sites, which if linked to by the lensmaster would automatically get the lens in question locked and unable to be loaded. Squidoo's trust level is slowly coming back. Hubpages too was flavour of the month because their proprietary hubscoring system was successful at weeding out spam - but the internet marketers learned to game them, and they lost trust.

The point to remember is that the "most trusted" web 2.0 site changes from time to time, and you need to keep up with the fashions so that your initial backlinks are from sites that will gain you the most exposure so that you are in a position to accrue the coveted "natural" backlinks.

I might add that both Hubpages and Squidoo are great sites to make money on in their own right, and I will be going into how to do this later in this series.

Another way to get links to your site is simply to ask for them - email the webmaster and ask if they'd like to exchange links. Putting your URL in your signature in forums also helps to a lesser extent, as does making comments on other people's blogs, with your own blog URL anchored on your blog name (which of course you selected carefully to include your keywords).

If you do go along the "farm" method then be careful to link out to a number of sites, not just your money sites. That way you should be able to disguise what you are doing better from the engineers. You also need to take care to build the links slowly so as not to trigger any flags.

However do note that however careful you are, if you are in one of the "big money" niches, you will get manually inspected no matter how careful you have been. Sometimes the best way to make money online is to keep to the small niches outside of the "big money" areas that are frequented by blackhatters. That way you end up staying under the radar permanently and making good money as well. I will be going into this in my series on Niche Selection later.

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