At some point, ad agencies will be forced to come to terms with the fact that they will have to accept and work with search engine marketers even if they have to bring them in house. I must admit to having a bit of a chip on my shoulder when it comes to traditional ad agencies, because I’ve been totally shot down every time I tried to have an abundance mentality with them. Since I fall somewhere in between affiliate marketing mercenary and corporate stooge, I love comparing the two worlds - the personalities involved, and the lifestyle associated with each. It is truly an intriguing comparison of people that share a lot in common, but can also be polar opposites.
If you want to inspire confidence, give plenty of statistics. It does not matter that they should be accurate, or even intelligible, as long as there is enough of them.
-Lewis Carroll
Redirects, Url-rewriting, changing and moving sites, and purchasing new sites are all hot topics in the world of SEO. These are things that you don’t want to make too many mistakes on, so you have better know them well even if you can’t necessarily do them yourself. A mistake in this area can wipe out months or even years of hard work very quickly. They can also make a huge difference if understood and applied correctly. I am constantly asked questions about redirects, and constantly trying to improve my own understanding of the subject. For these reasons I have put together what I found to be the best information for a “Redirect Knowledgebase”.
Despite being unsolicited, good e-mail link requests still *do* exist. Their not easy to do, because any webmaster with sites in the top 1000 for ANYTHING is tired of gettin’ arelis generated garbage requests that go out to everyone elese in the top 1000. Make your e-mails personal and relevant, and use the techniques that you can to get better conversion rates.
This makes it more difficult to write a good request that will have a likelihood for success. Crafting e-mails for successful link request conversion is an art and science like increasing conversions on a website.
I got the first VERY good request for a link that I’ve received in quite a while from someone that I didn’t know. I am going to republish the request with the permission of the author below. I’ve added a bit of insight of exactly what he did right, and a few things he may have done a bit better (or just different) below the mail.
It’s HARD to get good links, but if you do it right it can be done. If you’re gonna fish for lunkers, be sure to sharpen your hooks.
Example of a Good Link Request E-mail
“You’re not a true SEO until you’ve been banned at least once!”" - not sure who gets original credit for this one…most likely Boser, Oilman or perhaps Jake.
Anyone who has pushed the bleeding edge of search engine optimization has had a site go greybar, or just totally tank from the SERPs. It really sucks. Sometimes it’s worth a reinclusion request, and sometimes it’s best to keep walking and never look back. Bannings are a very interesting phenomena that don’t get discussed often except by those who are proud to be blackhat. Fortunately, it’s not a problem I’ve had to deal with for personal sites, but I seem to have been getting requests for consulting from a lot of folks who managed to get themselves banned lately, and I wanted to put together some information on the subject. I would like to try to open up a discussion for a few of my own pressing questions including:
- How can you tell when your site has been banned?
- When is it a ban? Filter? Penalty? When is it just poor optimization or the sandbox?
- What percentage of bannings are hand bans vs. algorithmic collateral damage?
- Will the search engines admit to doing hand editing for quality control?
- How can you best prevent a site from incurring the wrath of a banning while still pushing the bleeding edge of search engine optimization?
- What are the best practices for reinclusion if your important or branded domain gets popped
) There is certainly some level of philosophy that is being ignored and sweeped under the rug. This will most likely be one of the larger issues that they will continue to face in the future. Yahoo has already made the decision to hand edit news, and it has seemed to work well for them. It really shouldn’t be a problem to admit to this, but the I would guess the fear of potential rampant corruption (similar to DMOZ) is a big issue in deciding to embrace and fess up to editing search results. Editorial decisions are made with paid search all the time. The longer this issue is ignored, the more likely it will become a bigger issue with those outside the world of SEO.At the WMW conference in New Orleans, I had the privilege of speaking on the “linking on a dime” panel (presentation here), and learned that public speaking most certainly cannot kill you (or at least it didn’t this particular time). The opportunity gave me a chance to step back and evaluate my personal strategy on link development, and how it could all tie together as a a cohesive plan of action. I think I tricked Barry and made coverage a bit difficult, by using pictures instead of bulletpoints a la Seth Godin in “Really Bad Powerpoint”, so I’d like to re-introduce some of the ideas that I introduced sputtering and stuttering in my major public speaking debut.
My over-riding theme for the presentation was “balancing the link equation”, to which I would like to write a bit today. My thesis here being that there is most certainly definite guidelines and thresholds to maximize the value of your linkage data. An early example of this was using optimal anchor text and a lot of it. As this technique became abused, SE’s implemented some types of filters for this technique. If you went over this threshhold your link equation was out of balance and your rankings suffered accordingly.
The Search Marketing Association of North America is a relatively new project being headed up by Ian Mcanerin of SEW fame among others. Having got a chance to speak in depth with Ian on the way to the Google dance, I’m sure this association is in for good things. It gives independant consultants and those of us who like to maintain a little “less corporate” identity an alternative to SEMPO. Ian mentioned it being more of a “bottom up” approach to attracting SEO/SEM’s than the “top down” approach of SEMPO. Since I like rooting for the little guy, I am a card-toting member of the SMA as of about a week prior to SES.
