SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Roundup Thursday for the Week of 7/20/08

rebecca — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:01:16 -0500

Posted by rebecca

Three star links:

Great news for Internet marketers and e-commerce: more shoppers are purchasing goods via the Internet because of the high gas costs.
The New Atlantis exposes the "myth of multitasking." Well, there goes my built-in excuse to Rand whenever he asks me why I'm browsing Etsy instead of doing site reviews. Crap.
Interesting opinions here: Paul Graham discusses pooled-risk company management, and 37signals disagrees with him, saying you don't need to sell your company in order to have financial freedom.
Say goodbye to the Googlebomb 1.0 and make room for v2: reputation mismanagement. :)
Coming soon to a Facebook profile near you: Microsoft Live Search!
Danny Sullivan examines how well Knol pages rank in Google's search results and finds that about 33% of the pages listed on the Knol pages are ranking tops.
Speaking of Google Knol, the ever-chipper Michael Gray tells us all how to turn Google Knols into an MFA scraper.
AudetteMedia came out with a free SEO diagnostics tool, the log file parsing script. It quickly parses out key criteria from log files using simple commands.
SEMvironment also debuted something new: the link builder for Wordpress. The Link Builder tracks the websites and pages you link to and sends an email to the website's owner/administrator, notifying them of your link.
Kirix.com has a video illustrating Benford's Law against Digg post submissions. They also use the law to show how a woman in Arizona was making fake payments to a fictional company to defraud the state. :O
A former astronaut claims that aliens do indeed exist. RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!

Four star links:

Y Combinator came out with a list of startup ideas they'd like to fund. I think it's pretty clever and classy of them to list some good ideas and express an interest in being involved with them in some way.
Season 2 of Mad Men starts this Sunday on AMC. If you haven't watched or heard of Mad Men, it's a show about an advertising agency in NYC in the early 1960s. It's a very well written and visually stunning show, and as a marketer I find it especially compelling to see a glimpse of what advertising and marketing was like 40 years ago (especially on more traditional media like radio and print).
Here's a fascinating study: bloggers' interactions with their readers decrease the more prominent they get. I'd encourage you to discuss this in the comments below, but I'm too important to read them so never mind. ;)
In case you were all wondering what our former CTO, Matt Inman, was up to, he's still building dating sites. For zombies.
AgencyTool is "the definitive resource list for anyone designing, developing, marketing, or maintaining websites." The list of resources is pretty impressive. Check it out for some hidden gems!
Best extra credit idea ever. My favorite is the illustration of the guy using Netscape Navigator. :D

Five star links:

Loren Baker provides some great advice on how to combat complaint sites that are ranking for your brand.
Now THIS is some extremely clever and awesome link bait. Can you guess the accent? (I scored a 39, by the way...need to brush up on my Lithuanian, apparently.)
Congratulations to Sean Maguire for winning our SEO Haiku contest (see Rand's announcement here)!

YOUmoz entries:

Hey Microsoft, Here's How to Kill Google. Carfeu proposes that Microsoft use Windows to incorporate search into the OS core and effectively get rid of the browser, thus eliminating Google.
Simple Fix: The Easiest Page Views You'll Ever Get. PennysylvaniaFarmer shares some tips on how to optimize your 404 pages and provide some gateways for searchers so that they don't reach a dead end and leave your site.
BLVD Status - Track Micro Conversions and Non-Traditional Goals. Cbin shares with us a new analytics program he and his brother created called BLVD Status.
Link Building Using Unique Original Content and Other Techniques. MattRoberts shares his current link building tactics and encourages the readers to pipe in with tips of their own.
Dumbing It Down For Your Sales Force. Tim Staines crafts up a letter to one of his clients and shares it with us. It details the benefit of links and the purpose of building them, and also outlines ways to ask for links.
"Follow" Your Brand with Twitter. Fabio Ricotta talks about Twitter's acquisition of Summize and discusses how to watch your brand/various keywords/events/competitors on Twitter.
Stop Wasting Money on SEM: How to Drive Cheaper, Better Traffic. RichPage shares some great tips on how to maximize the value of your PPC campaigns.

Best of YOUmoz:

Advanced White Hat SEO, or How I Learned to Stop Chasing Rankings and Love My Users. LGTim authors up a very well-written and entertaining post identifying the difference between white and black hat SEOs, basic and advanced SEO, and quality vs. quantity. Very eloquently put--read it if you haven't already.

New events added to the Events Calendar:

No new events added this week.

Upcoming events:

SMX Local & Mobile July 24-25 in San Francisco, CA
Forex Affiliate Convention July 25-26 at the Flamingo Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, NV

New additions to the SEOmoz Marketplace:

Featured job postings:

Internet marketing consultant and sales consultant for Rise Interactive in Chicago, IL
Contracted JavaScript/PHP web developer for Patrick Sexton, aka feedthebot
SEO/PPC coordinator for SEER Interactive in Philadelphia, PA

Featured companies:

United States/North America:

Utah Web Services in Utah
3K Interactive in San Diego, CA
ListGalaxy in La Mirada, CA
Nothing But SEO in Lynnwood, WA
First Web Search in Las Vegas, NV

UK/Europe:

Naxtech in Reading, UK
Ph.Creative in Liverpool, UK
Collective ID in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
Your Media Factory in Groningen, Netherlands
Construkt Development in Marbella, Malag, Spain

Featured resumes:

Currently looking:

Lisa Wilberding (who I think lives in Michigan) is a communications and marketing expert who specializes in writing and public relations. She has experience managing traditional and social media relations accounts for various online marketing agencies.
Michael Kennedy (who I think lives in California) is a versatile Internet marketing executive who has a strong e-marketing orientation. He has over 7 years of experience with SEO, web 2.0 product development and management, customer relations, email marketing, and online subscriptions.

Happily employed:

Carlos Obregon in Vancouver, BC, Canada is an SEM specialist for HealthPricer Interactive. He manges PPC campaigns with a budget of $50k/month, and he also develops keyword-rich content, title tags, builds links, and performs a number of other tasks.

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Optimizing for Multiple Word Order Search Phrases

randfish — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:27:08 -0500

Posted by randfish

SEOmoz member Michael Janik wrote to me last week and asked about how to optimize for multiple word order search phrases. I think it's an excellent topic, and one that we haven't covered well in the past.

The issue arises from keyword phrases that receive search queries in different formats, for example:

Restaurant Reviews Seattle
Reviews Seattle Restaurants
Seattle Restaurant Reviews

Looking at the search results, each of these queries produces different ordering in the results. When this happens, an SEO campaign focused on getting traffic for each can be very frustrating. You're optimizing for one phrase configuration in the title and text, but others are getting queries and traffic that has the same intent match. What to do?

STEP ONE: Determine Relative Traffic Levels

This is best accomplished using Google AdWords' Traffic Estimator Tool, which allows for exact phrase match volume searches.

You can see above that by using "quotes" around the phrase, I can request the traffic estimates for a precise phrase order. The tool then gives back some predictions:

This data isn't terrific, but it's better than nothing, and by sorting by "search volume" I can see some visibility about order of popularity/demand (even though the green bars on the bottom two appear to be the same length).

Conceptually, you could also try the more basic Keyword Tool from AdWords, but you'll often get results like these:

Bizarre, right? Although these tools should obviously be pulling data from the same source, they're directly contradicting one another. Intuition and experience tell me to trust the Traffic Estimator - "Seattle Restaurant Reviews" almost certainly has more searches each month than "Restaurant Reviews Seattle." Even the number of advertisers would appear to support this conclusion.

STEP TWO: Make the Higher Traffic Phrase Priority One

Although it may seem obvious, you should go after the highest traffic phrase ordering first. I say this even if you're thinking the competition is stiff and you might have a better shot with some of the less high demand orderings - those will come later.

You'll want to not only do great on-page optimization (which I'll get to in step 3), but also get a lot of good anchor text links pointing in with the right phrase. For this specific example, I'd be issuing web badges to all the restaurants we reviewed that point back to both our reviews page for their restaurant and an anchor text link below to the reviews page. It's the equivalent of businesses that put up the "people love us on Yelp" sticker decal in the window :-)

STEP THREE: Optimize on the Page (& Site) for the Different Phrase Ordering

For on-page optimization of something like this, I'd go with:

Title: Seattle Restaurant Reviews | Citymoz Reviews Seattle's Top Restaurants

URL: citymoz.org/reviews-seattle-restaurants (This is the toughest of the phrases to target with on-page copy and getting anchor text like that is going to be very difficult; hence, by using it in the URL, we can kill two birds with one stone and have another edge on the competition.)

Meta Description: Restaurant Reviews for Seattle, WA. Citymoz tackles deals, dining & decor in our Seattle restaurant review extravaganza – get the best (& worst) Seattle has to offer.

Headline (H1): Seattle Restaurant Reviews

Headline (H2): The Best & Worst Restaurant Reviews in Seattle

Use of Phrase: "Seattle Restaurant Reviews" at least 3-4X on the page, in sensible ways, where it makes sense for users (I hate reading anything that looks "SEO'd"). Probably 2-3X mentions of each "Reviews Seattle Restaurants" and "Restaurant Reviews Seattle"

Image/Graphic with Alt Text: Citymoz Reviews Seattle Restaurants

A final note on on-page optimization for this - I don't like to abuse internal anchor text. I've seen it have negative effects. I'd probably link to this page internally with "Seattle Restaurant Reviews" or, if my entire site was about reviews, maybe just "Seattle" to be organic and natural. I would, however, link to it from places like the blog or other articles with the more optimized anchor text, as it makes more sense in a non-navigational element.

STEP FOUR: Link Building with Alternate Anchor Text

This is one of the best ways to earn those top rankings for the different phrase orders. Chances are, most of the folks who currently rank well have very little external anchor text pointing to their pages with the less common anchor text variances, making this a prime area to be competitive. Even 5-10 instances of the anchor text from low PageRank (but indexed and relatively frequently crawled) pages will usually give you the boost you need to get into the top spots.

I'd love to get discussion started about other strategies you've used to help with the multiple word order phrases - it's one of the subtleties of SEO that rarely gets a public mention.

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Comments: The Window To A Website's Soul

Jane Copland — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 05:24:00 -0500

Posted by Jane Copland

SEOmoz is pretty lucky when it comes to blog comments in that we receive a lot of them. By most blog's standards, our regular count of between twenty and sixty comments is quite enviable, trounced by the likes of Techcrunch but highly competitive in this industry. We also keep a relatively good record of the comments our members make and how well received those comments are via Mozpoints and the record of recent comments we keep on everyone's profile.

Two things we often fail to address is what our - or any website's - comments say about the state of our community and what the best comment protocol is for encouraging a productive commenting environment.

Whether they mean to or not, bloggers often write to the people they believe are reading their work. We know that we have "lurkers", as much as I dislike that term, who read blog posts but never comment, but since we know the names, faces, styles and opinions of those from whom we receive feedback, we sometimes focus on them. Thus, the makeup of a blog's commenters makes at least a small difference to its content.

Many websites can make guesses at how their community has changed, but here, we can record it with precise scientific accuracy. Or through a made-up system of points that appeals to geeks. When SEOmoz first calculated Mozpoints in February 2007, the scores were arrived at through participation alone: obviously, no one had ever voted on anyone else's contributions at that stage. This is what our contribution hierarchy looked like on February 10, 2007.

In contrast, here is our ranked users page now. It looks a little bit different. How, as a blogger, should you analyse these changes? Why did users such as simmal_tree (whose user name is now kulpreet_singh) taper off their commenting? Did he - and other previously active users, of which there are many - lose interest in our site? Did they become too busy to participate in online communities? Did they move away from the search industry?

Our community hasn't changed drastically enough for us to really need to take a look at who we've lost or who is less active, but I believe that a system like ours is worthwhile for sites that maintain a large readership. Measuring both contribution and recognition (through votes) allows a website's owners to monitor both changes in a site's demographic, but in contributors' values.

I ask you this: if you've been reading and participating in SEOmoz discussions since, say, early 2007 or before, what do you think has changed here? Do you remember V2 with its brown and orange tones? Do you remember a time before floating comment boxes and user generated content? How is your interaction with SEOmoz different now than it was then?

A secondary concern I have with comments is how best to implement a commenting system. This seems to be less important in the quest to keep readers, but significant nonetheless. I think ours is very good, only we do hear the occasional complaint about our login requirement.

I like a system which has users log in and maintain a profile for the following reasons:

It promotes slightly more responsibility. A person's comments are archived more accurately and a profile acts as a small portfolio. Users' profiles often rank well in search engines and should give people more reason to be considerate about what they write than if all they're required to do is leave a name and email address. Of course, this often doesn't stop people from making ridiculous comments, but it helps filter out trolls who can't be bothered creating accounts in order to be negative. Sadly, it keeps out positive commenters too.
It slows down spam. Whilst hardly stopping it, login requirements add one more obstacle for the Furberry and Fauxlex merchants.
It creates a sense of belonging that makes people return at a higher rate.

I also recognise that it has its flaws: Non-members are less likely to comment, even if they have something valuable to say, because our attention spans online are short and the couple of minutes it takes to create most accounts is too long. Darren Rowse at Problogger presents the view of someone who does not like logging in:

There is one situation where I rarely leave a comment - even if the post deserves it - blogs that require me to login before making a comment. Maybe I’m lazy (actually there’s no maybe about it) or maybe there’s something inside me that worries about giving out my personal details - but when I see a comments section that requires registration I almost always (95% or more of the time) leave the blog without leaving the comment that I want to make.

The three types of comment systems I see most regularly are those which make someone enter their information every time, those that remember returning visitors, and those which maintain accounts:

Quick 'n dirty commenting: users don't even have to leave a website if they don't want to. This is the easiest and most common system, but is also easily morphed into a certain degree of membership:

I don't have an account at the above site, but it remembers my information from the last time I visited. A small sense of belonging is achieved without making users create accounts or log in. This achieves a balance between membership and ease and should appeal to people like Darren who aren't keen on logging in, as well as people like me, who like to feel... remembered.

If you are logged in here on a regular basis, you'll recognise the final form of commenting. Acknowledging that SEOmoz built its blog from the ground up and didn't use a CMS like Wordpress, it still seems to me that allowing profiles and at least having a membership option, if not requirement, promotes repeat visitors and heightened participation.

Acknowledging that I've covered two different facets of commenting here, I believe that both comment protocol and long term comment activity act as both measurements of a website's success, as well as helping to determine what level of engagement users have with a site's content and with each other.

In addition to wanting to hear from those of you who've been around for a long period about how this site and community has changed, I'd also like to know the opinions of those of you who rarely comment about why you read blog content but don't add your own thoughts. If you have been reading our site for a long time and rarely comment, all the better!

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Search Engine Optimization in Haiku

randfish — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 17:39:18 -0500

Posted by randfish

It's been a long day
and I'd love a little break
Let's try some Haiku

Describe SEO
With your finest 5-7-5
syllable poem

SEOmoz shirt
to the winner in comments
Vote below with thumbs

I'll start things off with
my own stab at the topic
and then it's your turn

Our battleground's set
25 billion URLs and
a hidden link graph

Some very quick rules
One entry per member; we
end at noon, Thursday

(UPDATE: We're getting some thumb abuse on this post and are trying to puzzle out the cause. In the meantime, we'll only consider thumbs up, rather than up minus down, for the scoring.)

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Headsmacking Tip #3: Run Your Blog Post Titles Through Keyword Research Before You Hit Publish

randfish — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:29:39 -0500

Posted by randfish

I'm getting to like this series :-) (see #1 and #2). This week, I thought I'd talk about a tip that might cause mild concussions if you haven't been doing it. That's right, it's the ultra-simple "research before you post" technique for bloggers.

The basic tenet goes something like this - if your blog has any reasonable quantity of link equity and ranking ability, chances are that every blog post has the opportunity to earn you ongoing search traffic. This search traffic is, oftentimes, even more valuable than your loyal readers, because they've expressed a specific interest in what your post covers. Thus, by default, your content is exceptionally on-topic (way to go!). The problem arises when you don't take advantage of this fact by publishing before obeying the cardinal rule of SEO blogging - run keyword research on that post title!

Watch the process - it's shockingly simple:

STEP 1: Come up with clever blog content, write a title and the blog post, throw in some graphics, and choose a category (all the things you usually do when writing for a blog).

STEP 2: Visit your favorite keyword traffic estimator tool - Google, Wordtracker, KW Discovery (sadly, to access Yahoo! & MSN's keyword suggestion tools, you'll need to login to your paid search account - though these are free to set up).

STEP 3: Choose the keyword or phrase most central to your blog post's title and enter it into the keyword suggestion tool.

STEP 4: Take the results and modify your title intelligently. You might even consider adding the popular search terms that are returned to the post's body content (just once or twice is all it takes).

STEP 5: Don't go overboard or get carried away trying to insert keywords. Sometimes, there won't be any good ones to use. Other times, the terms will be so broad and competitive that they're not worth targeting (or you've already targeted 5 other posts to that same keyword - see cannibalization). But every time you hit a sweet spot, go for it.

Using this mind-numbingly simple and obvious tactic every time you publish requires a bit of discipline, but if you make it part of your blogging process, you'll see incredibly positive results over time. Not only do you earn more search traffic, but that traffic will send more links, resulting in higher rankings and a snowball effect that will make your blog the envy of its niche.

Who knew blog post titles could be so valuable for SEO? Oh wait. We all did. That's why this is such a "headsmacking" tip.

BTW - When I say it requires discipline, I'm serious. I probably do this on less than 10% of my posts, and regret it every time I think about it (kinda like when you forget to floss night after night - yikes).

p.s. For those of you on Wordpress, SEMvironment released a clever plug-in that lets you access the suggestions from the KW research tools I pointed to above right inside your editing panel. Thanks to James Zolman in the comments for the heads up!

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Manage Client Expectations And Reduce Your Risk By Including A Warranty In Your Client Contracts

Sarah Bird, Esquire — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 04:07:07 -0500

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire

May It Please the Mozzers,

Today's Legal Monday is brief (for a change!), but very important for anyone doing SEO consulting.

When selling their products, consultants tend to overstate their abilities and over promise on deliverables. It is important to resist this temptation and communicate as effectively and honestly with clients as possible.

A certain amount of over-selling is expected, and there is even a legal word for it: "puffery." A little light puffery ("We're the best SEO firm in the State of Washington" or "We deliver better results for less money than the competition") will generally not be interpreted as legally binding. However, every consultant is going to run into a client with unrealistic expectations who refuses to pay you for the work you've done. A consultant doesn't have to lie or provide bad service in order to be in this situation. It will happen to you and it doesn't necessarily mean you're a bad SEO.

Even if you verbally tell a client that there are limits to your SEO magic, clients will sometimes disregard your warning and only hear that you are going to increase their business tenfold.

Including solid warranty language in your client contracts serves two important purposes. First, it helps manage client expectations. Clients forget and/or misinterpret verbal conversations. If it is written down, your client is more likely to remember that you didn't promise the moon and the stars. Thus, your client will be less upset on the day their rankings drop by five results for no apparent reason.

Second, including a solid warranty disclaimer limits your liability in the event that you can't get your client to the top of the rankings and/or can't sustain high rankings for your client. SEOs understand that there are many factors beyond your control that affect rankings. Clients don't understand. Eventually, you're going to have an angry client who will either (1) refuse to pay you because they are unhappy with the results, or (2) will sue you because they paid you and they are unhappy with the results. Having language in the contract that specifically states you cannot promise particular rankings will greatly reduce your chances of (1) and (2).

There are a few important things about disclaimers of warranties.

They must be some place obvious so that the client can see it easily. Do not bury your disclaimers. If you do, a court won't enforce them and you don't get the benefit of having proactively managed your clients' expectations. Disclaimers work better when actually read. Make the print large, in bold, and preferably someplace obvious on the page.
If you have client contracts, include them in the body of the contract. Even if you only use a "proposal" or "estimate" for your consulting work, include the warranty on the proposal.
Warranty laws can vary state by state. Some states require you to specifically and explicitly disclaim warranties for "fitness for a particular purpose" and "merchantability."
Some states don't let you completely disclaim warranties. Thus, you should never use your warranties as an excuse to do bad work. It's bad business and it will land you in legal trouble.
Be sure to communicate that you can't promise specific rankings.

Here is SEOmoz's standard consulting disclaimer of warranties:

SEOMOZ MAKES NO WARRANTY, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, WITH RESPECT TO THE SERVICES PROVIDED HEREUNDER, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION ANY IMPLIED WARRANTY OF RELIABILITY, USEFULNESS, MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, NONINFRINGEMENT, OR THOSE ARISING FROM THE COURSE OF PERFORMANCE, DEALING, USAGE OR TRADE. By signing this agreement, you acknowledge that SEOmoz neither owns nor governs the actions of any search engine. You also acknowledge that due to fluctuations in the relative competitiveness of some search terms, recurring changes in the search engine algorithms and other competitive factors, it is impossible to guarantee number one rankings or consistent top ten rankings, or any other specific rankings for any particular search term.

You'll notice that we included some explanatory language so that our clients understood why we can't promise particular rankings. Including some explanatory language makes the disclaimer language more palatable to clients because they understand that there are things outside of your control that affect rankings and therefore you can't be responsible for fluctuations in rankings.

Including a disclaimer of warranty is a relatively simple and easy thing you can do to (1) better manage client expectations, and (2) reduce your risk of suit.

Note: I want to be clear that I am not advocating over-selling your services and then relying on a disclaimer of warranties to either avoid liability or bully clients. Doing so is dishonest and bad business. I am advocating the use of warranties because every talented and honest SEO consultant is going to run into an over-demanding, unsatisfied client. Sometimes that demanding client over-relied on harmless puffery. Sometimes you run into clients that accuse you of providing sub-par service to try and get out of paying you for your services. Sometimes clients just don't listen to your verbal warnings about the limits of your services, even if you don't use any puffery at all. In each case, a solid warranty dislclaimer will help you both prevent problems down the road and resolve problems when they arise.

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns about warranty disclaimers and how they operate.

Best Regards,
Sarah

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What Part of the SEO Process is Hardest for You?

randfish — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 19:02:11 -0500

Posted by randfish

Every SEO has their strong points and their weak ones. For me, subjects like content creation and keyword research have always come naturally, but others like methodically using analytics data to improve and running manual link building campaigns have always been a struggle. Today, I'd thought it would be interesting to get a bit self-critical and talk about those items on the SEO-to-do-list that cause us the greatest struggles.

Perhaps if we indulge our catharsis, we can grow stronger.

Which of the Following SEO Tasks Presents the Greatest Challenge for You? (surveys)

In the comments below, feel free to describe your struggles - what gives you the biggest headache, which tasks you dread during the workday, and what processes are ripe for outsourcing?

As a start, I'll provide some of the checklist items that I find most cringe-worthy:

Guessing at which website is going to be included for duplicate/licensed content when most of the standard metrics would indicate a near-tie (PR, inbound link counts, competitiveness of current rankings, etc)
Determining which page to get links from when offered multiple pages with similar external metrics
Identifying the cause of a rankings/inclusion penalty (Yahoo! is actually the hardest one, as they seem almost arbitrary at times, but Google can be a formidable struggle too)
Measuring the success and value of a link building campaign
Explaining why PageRank in the toolbar isn't a good metric for success (to a non-SEO)
Competing against low-quality Wikipedia pages in the rankings

OK, now it's your turn :-)

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Tying Topical Events into Your Site's Link Building Strategies

rebecca — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 06:21:17 -0500

Posted by rebecca

VanessaH, an SEOmoz member who does SEO work for PlumberSurplus.com, recently contacted me about an interesting link bait campaign her company is attempting. Basically, the SEOs over at Plumber Surplus are trying to build more links to the site and hopefully bump the Page Rank up from a 5 to a 6. They had been trying various methods and campaigns and were brainstorming additional ways to attract more links.

By happenstance, the site/property group owner, Tim, who is a staunch Republican, made a t-shirt on a whim that said "Don't Trust This Man" and had an arrow pointing to a picture of Barack Obama. He wore the shirt out to lunch one day and got a large response from both Democrats and Republicans alike. Being the diligent marketers that they are, Tim's team immediately started thinking of ways they could channel this buzz into their Plumber Surplus marketing tactics.

The result? Don'tTrustThisMan.com, a site aimed at both conservatives and liberals. The gist of the site is that if you write a blog post about either PlumberSurplus.com or OutdoorPros.com, one of their other properties, you'll be entered in a daily contest to win a t-shirt of your choice (either a pro-Obama or a pro-McCain shirt). The site gives suggestions on what you could blog about if you don't have the creative juices flowing, and it posts some rules to adhere to in order to make sure the links are spiderable (e.g., "must not be behind a login") and to make sure that Don'tTrustThisMan won't get penalized by Google ("must adhere to Google's Webmaster Guidelines").

The site also offers some badges you can display on your site, blog, MySpace page, et al:

I think the badges are extremely clever, as both Liberals and Conservatives who are passionate about the upcoming elections are likely to display these images in order to share their political opinion and show everyone who they're supporting. The only snag is that the badge image points to Don'tTrustThisMan, which in turn encourages users to promote two entirely separate websites, so it's a bit of a roundabout way to try and build links. It's unfortunate that the badges are too off-topic to host directly at Plumber Surplus.

I think this link bait campaign is both brilliant and problematic. The pros are that it takes advantage of a current hot topic, one that's generating constant buzz and attention: the upcoming presidential elections. I think that "Don't Trust This Man" is an extremely clever concept--it's definitely attention grabbing, and it both sparks curiosity in the uninformed user and is controversial to a politically-savvy user. Best of both worlds, I'd say.

Now for the cons. As I mentioned before, the topicality of the link bait is weak. Using a political agenda to promote plumbing merchandise may be questionable in the search engines' eyes. Additionally, I wonder about the relevancy and topicality of the links that Plumber Surplus will attract from these various blog posts. They likely won't be from other home improvement stores or wholesalers, but rather from regular folks with personal blogs or websites or from political sources. Thus, will the links hold much weight since they won't be on-topic?

Lastly, the rules don't even explicitly state that you have to link to Plumber Surplus or the other site at all. I'd assume that a good chunk of the folks who'll blog in order to win a free t-shirt will mention the site but won't link to it, and the ones who do will probably just use the domain name as the anchor text, meaning Plumber Surplus isn't really building a large number of optimized links. It seems like a missed opportunity.

That being said, Vanessa has informed me that the contest is now live and that they're more than happy to share their data and findings with us here at SEOmoz once their experiment has run its course. We'll see if this campaign is a success or a failure. Either way, it's bound to be a fascinating case study and is sure to make for an interesting analysis.

What do you think of the link bait campaign? Do you have any suggestions on how they could improve their efforts? Have any of you tried a similar strategy--if so, what was the result?

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Whiteboard Friday - Has Pagerank Changed?

great scott! — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 21:16:00 -0500

Posted by great scott!

Live (on tape) from Whiteboard Studios 2.0, it's our first ever WBF from our sweet new digs in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood!

This week, Rand discusses good ol' Pagerank. How has it evolved, and is it still the same fickle curmudgeon we all know and ~~loathe~~ love? PR has certainly seen its share of tweaks and updates over the years, but how much does it even resemble what we saw in the patent apps of yore? Let's explore, shall we? Feel free to chime in with your thoughts and concerns about the topic and how you feel it could impact SEO in the future.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday-Has Pagerank Changed? from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Rand got the idea to discuss this topic from a couple of really good posts over at Greg Linden's Blog, Geeking with Greg. Go check 'em out:

PS-Once we get all settled in, I'll be sure to give you all a quick tour of the new offices.

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