SEO Link Analysis Pitfalls - Whiteboard Friday

Key Takeaways

howdy seomoz fans welcome to another edition of whiteboard friday this week we're talking about the pitfalls of doing seo backlink analysis a lot of people in the seo field have this idea that hey the first thing that i should do when i'm trying to do some link building is see who's running in the top ten you know i'll do a search for my keyword i'll check who's ranking number one you know number two number three who's on that first page of results and i'm gonna look at who's linking to them and try to reverse their backlinks and get a lot of those links for my site because they're helping them rank they must also help me rank and there are some real dangers some big pitfalls to this type of link analysis the the first of which is it's very hard to know if links are coming into this whether they're actually helping the site or not and whether the links that you're seeing are the ones that are having the most impact it's also really tough to know whether these sites particularly a lot of the ones at the top of the results for fairly competitive queries even if they've been there for three to six months or nine months or a year whether they're using manipulative tactics then in the future are going to be discounted or lose value and so what i want you to do is when you do this yes definitely go use sources right majestic and yahoo site explorer and open side explorer can all show you some of the links that are pointing to these pages that rank really well but once you have that data you need to ask yourself right who is linking to this and and follow some rules use this imagine me right here i am look i'm a stick figure i seem to have lost some weight i've also turned slightly purple or mauve but imagine me saying they're like wait before you try and get this link use the smell test right don't assume that every link is helping that person that that url rank there and be very cautious i would encourage you not to use any tactics that don't have some editorial endorsement behind them right so if you're seeing link wheels or you know article churning marketing or uh churnworthy or churn style article marketing that really nasty stuff where someone just publishes a ton of the same article and it's linking back again and again and again if you're seeing reciprocal link directories on those pages that just have long long lists of links and they're trading links back and forth if you see the submit your site for 99 to 3000 search engines kind of listings all that junky adds no value no human being actually says this is a good website those links in the short term can help some people rank well but in the long term they're not going to do anything for you editorial wise they're not going to send good traffic they're not going to be an implicit endorsement for your site they don't follow any of the good principles of inbound marketing and therefore search engines don't really want to count them so remember there's going to be a bunch of phds working at google and it being trying to discount those links if you need to rank in the short term and you're a churn and burn spammer and you don't have a really good site and and you know you're just trying to play in the short run fine go ahead but if you're thinking long term and you have a brand website and you're really trying to build up that credibility you want links that are editorial endorsements and then i would also caution you against some common seo wisdom which is that don't ignore some link sources just because they might not be followed links there are a lot of good links and good uh editorial endorsements that do come through nofollow so you'll often see that hey this you know wikipedia page is the most common one but a lot of blog comments that the person might have left or some good posts that they put up some good uh editorial articles that they've written for other people maybe those links are nofollow because people are worried about search engine spam and seo spam and that kind of stuff but you know what a lot of those types of endorsements will send good visits they are editorial and they can pass value either first order effect maybe or second order effect which is almost certainly the case uh i'd also check any of those links that are pointing to those top ranking pages go make sure that those pages rank well for their keywords right you find a page that's linking to the number one listing and you think wow it's a great place to get a link i don't know it's going to cost me money it's going to cost me a bunch of time or i'm going to have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get it or i need to recommend some content or build some content to be able to get this link before you do that jump through the the earlier easier hoop of figuring out does that page that's linking here rank well what about the other pages it links to do they rank if they rank well for their keywords oh maybe this is a good legitimate page that google's counting maybe it is worth whatever effort that i need to put into it if not questionable i'd worry about that the second thing that i urge you to do when you're doing competitive link research is don't just pay attention to the links themselves those matter they're important you should but be ready to think outside the box right check this out one of the things that i love to do is not just look at the number one listing right the people who have the you know perfectly optimized title tag perfectly optimized meta description perfectly optimized uh uh root domain name right exact match keyword domain those folks often tend to be spammy especially if they got like two hyphens in there and a dot info or you know that kind of stuff even keyword match as opposed to the big brands if you see a big brand ranking and they're oh hey i know them i've heard of them right they're a reputable company and huh they don't seem to be doing a whole lot of seo it's the whole listing is barely optimized for the keyword i wonder how they're ranking so well that's that's where you want to earn those links who links to those guys that's what i would be checking out when i do searches and i see that someone's ranking well but hasn't done a whole lot of on-page doesn't appear to have done a ton of you know off-page like manual link building or or link spamming or any of those kinds of things those are the links that i would be very much checking out and then i also really like to do this so this is essentially finding those brands that i think are really good the brands that are listed in there and seeing rather than just who's linking to them who's mentioning them who's talking about them what are the important sources that are citing them not necessarily with a link or a follow link and so you can search for the brand name minus site colon that their domain name and click that search and that will bring up a bunch of listings of places that talk about that brand the most important places in fact in order in google's opinion of who's talking about that brand it could be profile pages social profiles they've got maybe you should get those social profiles could be tools that they've built or bloggers they've reached out to or news articles or journalists or forums that are discussing them all of those places are great places to start doing some inbound marketing right you want to participate in those forums you want to contact those journalists you want to get the content written that's going to attract those same types of links who mentions them is a really big step if you follow this the link analysis that you're going to be doing for your seo is going to be worth a ton more than if you just reverse the backlinks and try to get every one of them and it's likely going to carry you through in the long term when a lot of these short-term manipulative tactics fall by the wayside alright everyone hope you've enjoyed this edition of whiteboard friday we will see you again next week take care you