Matt Cutts interview with Eric Enge on Sure-Fire Linking Practices. Listen Up! Champ speaking.
Matt Cutts, Head of Google Webspam team, talks with Eric Enge on some of the best and most ethical linking pratices during the recent Search Marketing Expo Advanced .
When i read the interview transcript, my head was almost spinning. The content was jam-packed with originality and was authored by an industry expert from Google. While you may think that you know alot of the techniques used here, please be reserved, because the techniques are from the same person who heads the webspam team at Google. What i have done is to untangle and organise the whole transcript into a logical read, with key points, that you can always refer to for SOS linking predicaments. Have fun.
“Building links that will stand the test of time” AKA “how to be link worthy”
“links generated because of the sheer quality of your business or the value add proposition that you have that’s unique about your business. Those are the things that no one else can get, because no one else has them or offers the exact same thing that your business offers.”
Original research - Personal and original accounts and research that can be substantiated with figures, making the article link worthy.
Have unique content. “the more unique it is, the more compelling it is. And so, you can certainly be controversial, but the long-term credibility really does come from being that source, that people are like, “Oh yeah, here is this guy, you can trust what he says. He knows what he is talking about.”
An eg pointed out in the interview would be the developement of a Firefox Plugin that links to an area of interest - the Auction Watcher developed by Ebay.
Getting on the Homepage of Digg. Even if it means paying a social media consultant to get on the front page of Digg, Matt Cutts reckons you get a more than decent ROI. “you are not paying for links. You are funding some creativity”
Be creative, stir up emotions and interest with provocative and witty content. STAND OUT! “The people who link to the site are linking because it’s something compelling instead. It’s not that linkbait has to be off-topic; you can have really great on topic linkbait. And, that’s just another reason for people to be interested in your site.”
Develop a widgetbait. These are useful widgets that people can put on their site, and you of course as the developer can place a link whereby people can reciprocate by visiting your site. In this topic, Matt Cutts seems firm about the relevancy of the widget and its link. He warns about how a widgetbait publisher can be penalised for linking to spam sites, even in the event that he isn’t aware of spam activity. Spam activity here refers to incidents of widgetbait developers hiding and burying links in the widget. Also pointed out is not to abuse the anchor text of the link in the widget by spamspamspamspamspamingit This constitutes ethical linking practices. Speaking of Widgetbait and spam, have a look at a Widgetbait gone wrong. I’m sorry but i had a really good laugh.
“The people putting the widget on their site know exactly what they are doing, and it’s completely on topic. We wanted people to be informed of what they are linking to and we want the links to be editorial. And, if we feel like somebody got tricked into making a link; like they signed up for some service and they didn’t even realize that a link was going to be piggybacking along on this.”
Use anchor text in links sparingly. Don’t ever take advantage of the leverage anchor text has. Always ensure that anchor text is relevant to content. “The main thing is you want people to be informed; organic anchor text often has all that natural distribution that you want anyway”
Matt Cutts nods his head to article submissions.
Excessive and unnatural reciprocal linking can Damage your Link campaign, and hurt your ranking instead. Note that when i say reciprocal linking, i AM assuming the reciprocal link is relevant. Still, it can hurt even if its relevant.
“reciprocal links do occur naturally. Really, what you need to do is avoid the excessive reciprocal links. So, what we mean when we say avoid excessive reciprocal links is if your portfolio has a very large fraction of links where you’re getting them by sending automated emails saying Did you know that exchanging links can help your rankings in search engines? That’s not a basis for fundamental long term, solid growth of your links if that’s all you are doing.”
“So, we tell people to avoid excessive swapping; and the nice thing is that people have a pretty good idea of what excessive is. So, you add a word like that and people are going to understand that it’s natural that reciprocal links happen in the course of being on the web at some point, but it’s not that I have to chase after those too much. We do still encourage people to have interesting and helpful links for their users. And, don’t focus too much on trading with the authoritative guys and never the smaller guys.”
Offering a form of incentive naturally, that makes your users want to link to you. An example pointed out here is the offering of a coupon code. “Sometimes you are just building their awareness or trying to drive that direct response without requiring a link at all.”
If you already know you are participating in any form of spam-link related activity, follow Google’s policy and use a “no-follow tag”. Be a gentleman about it and you probably can avoid an email from Matt Cutts, or his team at Google.
