Link & Ranking Strategies for Enterprise Sites

Tonight I'm back from Hong Kong and China, sitting at my computer in lovely, cool, wonderfully-clean-tap-water-spouting Seattle. There's a lot to come on Chinese search marketing from myself, Si and David Temple (who generously offered coverage of the conference for the blog), but, in the meantime, I know we need to get back to basics here at SEOmoz, so I thought a good, old-fashioned, illustrated post on enterprise search strategy would be just the ticket.

Enterprise sized sites range between 10,000 - 10 million pages in size. Good examples would be sites like AllBusiness.com, Answers.com and Findlaw (full disclosure - these 3 are SEOmoz clients) and others like Yahoo! Media Group, Expedia, New York Times, Amazon and Forbes.com. For most of these, one of two problems exist in the realm of link strategies:

1. Inaccurate distribution of internal "link juice"
2. Not enough inbound links (resulting in not enough "link juice" to go around)

Let's take a look at how we can tackle these tough issues.

Above is an illustration of the link juice distribution issue. Imagine that each of the tiny pages above represents from 50-1000 pages in an enterprise-sized site. Some areas like blogs, articles, tools, popular news stories, etc. might be receiving more than their fair share of inbound link love and internal link attention. Other areas, often business-centric and sales-centric content, tends to fall by the wayside. How do we fix it?

It's simple, at least in principle. We have the link-rich pages spread the wealth to their link bereft brethren. As easy as this looks, in execution, it can be incredibly complex. Inside an architecture of several hundred thousand or million pages, it can be nearly impossible to identify link-rich and link-poor pages, nevermind adding code that helps to distribute juice equitably.

The answer, sadly, is labor-intensive from a programming standpoint. Enterprise site owners need to develop systems to track inbound links and/or rankings and build bridges (or, to be more consistent with the above illustration, spouts) that funnel juice between the link rich and link poor. Typically, since interfacing directly with an analytics system like Omniture or Indextools is very difficult, a secondary layer of analytics might need to be installed to help control the tracking.

An alternative is simply to build a very flat site architecture that relies on relevance or semantic analysis (several enterprise-focused site search and architecture firms offer these). This strategy is more in line with the search engines' guidelines (though slightly less perfect) and certainly far less work intensive.

Interestingly, the rise of massive weight given to domain authority over the last 2-3 years appears to be an attempt by the search engines to overrule potentially poor internal link structures (as designing websites for PageRank flow really doesn't serve users particularly well) and reward sites who have massive authority, inbound links, and trust.

Let's move on to problem #2 - enterprise-sized sites that have a low ratio of links to content. These sites are hungry for link growth, but even the most massive linkbait campaigns often isn't enough to make a large dent. Enterprise sites don't need a few thousand links pointing at a few dozen pages, they need hundreds of thousands of links pointing at millions of pages. Achieving this is a true challenge, but I have a few suggestions.

1. Don't use link brokers or link purchases
2. Don't rely on sitewide link buys or "partnerships" from other large sites (technically, you'll be passing the PageRank, but sitewides don't carry their 2002 levels of value)
3. Don't count on a manual link building campaign of any kind to bail you out
4. DO think about your site design, usability, accessibility and site architecture - do they appeal to your users and, in this case more importantly, potential Linkerati?
5. DO think about your content strategies - does it appeal to Linkerati?

Management in these cases generally need to make two large, sometimes painful decisions or risk becoming irrelevant in comparison to link-savvier and more link-magnetic competitors.

First off, it's critical to look at the design & layout of your content pages. Do you overuse pagination? advertising? banners? poor color choices? 1998-style design? Don't forget how important the presentation of material can be - the best dish you've ever had may be at a run-down street vendor in Taipei, but the new Frank Gehry designed restaurant in New York will be getting far more press, even if the cuisine is subpar.

The second tough task is thinking about content generation - how it's done, how it's controlled, how it's managed and how it's executed. The smart manager will provide guidelines, suggestions and templates to the creative team and then get out of the way. Good writers/producers will take these tools and queues and execute truly inspiring and link-worthy ideas.

At the end of the day, you've got to have some help from these guys:

Without them, you're up search engine ranking creek (way up in the dozens that is) without a paddle (link love).

BTW - I didn't have time to discuss specific enterprise link tactics, but if you have some to share, I'd love to hear them.