The problem with online PR in the past is that it has tended to ignore SEO. This means that these company or product mentions are rarely accompanied by the keyword-rich hyperlinks which can help a website gain better visibility in search rankings.

The Google Panda update has seen many SEOs re-evaluate the importance of branded links, as a pose to the keyword-rich links we traditionally target. A new focus on branded links gives the advantage to PR content, as a company can be openly mentioned, recommended or talked about without the risk of turning an editorial piece into an advert.

Online PR still means public relations – but news releases can be utilised for SEO purposes. Following simple best practises such as including keywords and hyperlinks in press release titles, sub-headings and copy can help contribute to an SEO campaign, so PR firms who do not understand the potential SEO benefits of PR activities are missing an opportunity. Kelvin has written for eConsultancy about the PR industry getting into SEO and how PR professionals can make better linkbuilders.

Post from Apple Pie & Custard blog by SiteVisibility - An SEO Agency

ABC’s of SEO: O is for Online PR

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No-follow is an attribute that can be assigned to a link, which instructs search engines that the hyperlink should not contribute towards page authority and rankings. No-followed links are the easiest to get; the type of links you can submit manually in the form of a forum post, blog or social network status update or share. No-follow is often used to preserve authority, or “link juice” on a website.

Inbound
As social media plays an increasingly important role in ranking search results, isn’t it about time we stopped seeing no-followed links as invaluable and started to understand their power? Tweeting a URL is a great way of getting content indexed quickly, and social signals are playing an increasingly important part in ranking search results.

If applied to digital marketing more broadly, no-followed links are not a waste of time providing no value – they can, in the form of answers to questions or engaging commenting on forums or blog posts, be a great source of traffic, sales, engagement and more. Digital marketers are one-dimensional if they don’t understand the importance of no-followed links. In terms of SEO it’s also important to keep a natural-looking link profile; a link profile which only contains followed, keyword-rich links is likely to be seen as suspicious.

Outbound
Some webmasters have used the no-follow tag on internal links on their site, in an attempt to build page rank authority or link equity on specific pages. As Matt Cutts explains in this fairly recent video, page rank can’t be sculpted through applying the no-follow tag to internal links. The conclusion is that it is best to let the link juice flow.

The best times to use no-followed links onsite is when you link out to an external site which you don’t necessarily trust. Linking out to low quality domains can damage domain authority so applying a no-follow tag can protect a site from experiencing any detrimental effects. Remember that many of the best and most well-performing websites out there are “hub sites”, which link out to many different sources of information. Linking out with real, followed links is no bad thing for SEO. Tad Chef wrote this great piece on the SEOptimise blog about how to link out for SEO benefit.

Post from Apple Pie & Custard blog by SiteVisibility - An SEO Agency

ABC’s of SEO: N is for No-Follow

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Sweet links dude!

At a panel we did for the DPA conference yesterday I mentioned it was possible to get dofollow links from Facebook pages or profiles. This has been possible for a fair while using numerous Facebook apps but as soon as slightly backdoor tactics to get links from prominent sites start getting talked about at conferences or showing up on Seomoz you know they’re not going to last long anyway. We’ve seen this lately with Twitter closing out dofollow links through applications and more recently Dave Naylor’s Flickr comment trick getting ‘fixed’

So here’s what you need to do to get your 50,000 free links:

1. Get yourself a new Facebook page here
2. Install the HTML profile box app Static FBML app
3. Add a block of links to the html box using your anchor text. You can deep link to as many pages as you like here, for the sake of argument lets say you add 25 links (you could link to as many sites as you want here not just pages within the same site)

Now once that page gets indexed you’ll have 25 dofollow links, great but how do I get 50,000 I hear you cry!

4. Now all you need to do is create lots and lots of Facebook pages for Google to crawl, don’t worry you don’t have to create new business pages for each one because Google’s going to crawl every wall post (status update) you make as a new page, just check out the index for the coke facebook page . Go ahead and plug each of your keywords into your status box one by one.
5. To create an individual page for each status update you’ll then need to leave a comment on your own status update, here’s what that might look like:


Your links will be placed on awesome contextually relevant pages like this:-)

6. The cool thing about this is not only do you get lots of pages, the page title of each page you create will use the keywords you put into your status message.


Unique, keyword rich page titles on all your linking pages

7. Now go ahead and repeat this page creation process as many times as you like. For each status update page you create you’re actually creating however many links you added to your sidebar in step 3. So if you added 25 links then do 500 status updates you’ve created 12,500 dofollow inbound links, not bad for an hours work right?
8. But wait the fun doesn’t stop there, because Facebook can translate your page into 67 languages and duplicate your pages (and links) across stacks of subdomains like http://uk-ua.facebook.com/cocacola?v=feed&story_fbid=126800933305, your pages are going to self replicate and before you know it your 12,500 links are going to become 50,000+.

I know what you’re thinking, Google ain’t going to count all these links are they?

Well yes and no…

In the sense of rankings, PageRank, authority or anything that actually matters – no these links probably won’t help your site.

But in the sense that  Google will report the links in webmaster tools and they’ll probably also show up in public data sources like YSE and Majestic or whatever yard stick you use to gage your link popularity your data is going to be skewed. Yes they do ‘count’

All these facebook links will show up in webmaster tools

On a practical level you could use a technique like this to hide your link data and make it harder for competitors to drill into your backlinks and find your most valuable links. This should also help lead your rivals down the wrong path with their own link building-

“Holy crap yourdomain.com has got 100,000 backlinks, we’re going to need 200,000 backlinks and fast. Where’s the number for that Indian directory submission company”

Now for the serious stuff

You probably shouldn’t use the technique described above. The most likely result is Facebook will delete your page and block your account within hours if you try. But these exploits are all around. Virtually any UGC site can be hacked around with to create links, blog platforms like wordpress.com and blogspot being the most obvious and often exploited examples.

With raw link data being so easy to manipulate my question is what value do link measurement tools really have?

Think about the ways you might use quantitative data to asses the quality of a page when doing link research.

PageRank – Can be brought, faked or cyphened off link networks with little or no skill involved. Soon to be redundant?

Inbound links – Really easy to manipulate i.e. the Facebook example above

Linking domain diversity – Easy to fake by hosting your content over subdomains

Linking root domains – Better, but still easy to manipulate with low quality bulk link building (bulk link directories, automated link exchange, cheap paid links, comment spam etc)

Bespoke link measurement tools i.e. linkscape – Essentially flawed by virtue of the fact they really just composite the above data.

The point I’m getting at is that knowing a site has a PR7, 50,000 backlinks, MozRank whatever is worth nothing without the most valuable tool in your link building arsenal – human beings.

The SEO industry has tried and failed for years to make link building easy, and most link quality measurements are geared up to support this construct. To a link research tool the types of links you get through a program like inlinks look amazing. High PR, lots of linking domains, dofollow, in-content. Its only when you visit the blog for yourself and discover its a garbage paid link in a blog post which has be written by an article spinner that you see its true value- the quantitative data lied to you.

To get good links which stand the test of time you need awesome content, powerful PR, real world business relationships and time sucking, manual link research and outreach work. Quantitative data can help you work more efficiently but measuring the success or strength of your site in terms of any link based metric is only going to give you half the story.

How do you measure the strength of your backlink profile?

Post from Apple Pie & Custard blog by SiteVisibility - An SEO Agency

Click Here for 50,000 Free Dofollow Links from a PR9 Domain

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