The Goth’s Guide To Link Building

I like to think of myself as a happy, sunny person but in reality, I’m really not…I am usually the first person to say “no, that won’t work” when someone has an idea. I expect all restaurants to be out of everything that I want to order and to offer me fennel stew. I think gas will increase to $95 a gallon this summer, and I always have a hat with me in case of rain. I think it’s always going to freaking rain even if the sky is a clear cobalt. I think these guys look like they’d be fun:

Sisters of Mercy

 

I was once a goth, but now I’m a boss, a lot like Richmond on the IT Crowd. Oddly, I was indeed a sunny goth I think, but now that I drive a minivan and wear (fake) fur boots I think my outlet for negativity has suffered, and since I don’t look like the walking dead anymore (just a misplaced Inuit), I think like they must. However, this can totally be used to my advantage when building links. Hahahahahaha. Who’s got the last laugh now Mom?

From Goth To Boss of Link Fish Media

(photoshopped image courtesy of the amazing Peter Attia)

So try thinking like a Goth.

1. Type in your regular happy terms to find the negative pieces that show up in the SERPS, read them, offer the writer an opposing piece or write one on your site and link out. Rain on someone’s parade. Perhaps searching for your brand and adding “sucks” to the end will help identify these. However, if you search for “Link Fish Media sucks” you get our company playlist, which is completely unintentional yet somehow incredibly amusing. Obviously it’s the Sting track that’s driving that result. Sting sucks. Search for that and you’ll be busy all day.

2. Wordstream’s awesome Negative Keyword Thingy lets you search for negative keywords so that you won’t waste money on worthless paid ads, and can therefore afford to buy that mint condition seminal Christian Death album.

Wordstream's Negative Keywords

(See how I have 7 out of 10 free searches left? To me, that means I’m screwed.)

Now, if you did PPC you’d enter these into the system so they would not be shown for these search terms of course. For link building, I’d search and use them to prevent irrelevant SERPs from clouding my head even further like this:

(Because I am also a bit lazy at times, it’s one I pulled from Google ( jaguar -cars -football -os) The best thing about this is that the first result is one for cars. Well done Google!!!)

Jaguar negative search

 

3. Cussing. If you like Deadwood you like cussin’. They all wear very death-rock outfits on that show too. (There’s the tie-in to goth finally…um plus there was that band called The Damned which of course you know.) Anyway, we’ve had some amazing finds when we used curse words with a term. Here’s an example:

By searching for “damned organic soda” because I’m listening to Sisters of Mercy and not The Grateful Dead (like that would ever happen), I see this totally awesome result:

I hadn’t even thought about the potential to use organic soda for cleaning dog urine, so that’s opened up a rainbow of possibilities. Using curse words can lead to some off-the-wall sites and, even if they aren’t good link targets, you may still get some great ideas for discovery. (sounds almost positive doesn’t it?)

I don’t mean to imply that all goths are negative and cursey. Actually all the ones that I’ve ever met are, but I still shouldn’t stereotype. Plenty of cheerleaders curse and bitch a lot too. Just use that negativity for something other than thinking your black hair dye is going to make your hair fall out soon.

 

What To Do When Good Links Go Bad

In my years of working in SEO, I’ve seen a lot of weirdness. Some of that weirdness is related to links and link building. There was the time we discovered 50,000 links built overnight or the time a carefully plotted strategy was ruined by spammers and scrapers. But what do you do when good link building goes bad?

There are a lot of reasons why good links go bad. I’m not talking about link farms harming your rankings (naughty) or anything like buying a link on a specific site known to search engines for selling links. I’m talking about when good links go bad. There are lots of good links from valuable sources that you can get and sometimes acquisition of those links, while in general being helpful, can be harmful.

For some time, I have been an advocate of *not* getting blogroll links for rankings. Not only does the value of these links tend towards 0, the blogs they are on are usually valueless. I once worked on a site where for some reason we suddenly gained 50,000 site-wide blogroll links. What it looked like was a spammy site where non-client sites were being used to pretend to be natural. Our rankings took a dip across the board for a couple of months. Nothing too dramatic in ranking drop and the effect was only 60 days but still demonstrated to us how bad blog roll links could be.

But good links can go bad. Good links from news sites or links from sites that have been penalised for some reason – what happens when someone gets caught for selling links (but you weren’t buying) or something else goes wrong? This can and has happened to me and here is what I did.

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Linkbait Lessons from the Coalface

Hello there, I’m the newest chick. Should you care to you can read more about me here.

Today I’d like to talk linkbait. There are plenty of blog posts out there about successful linkbait, but I think us SEOs have a tendency to keep our mistakes on the down low. The truth is we don’t always get it right and I think that actually there’s more to be learned from the projects that have gone awry than from the runaway successes.

Before we get right into it, it’s probably worth giving some context – the linkbait projects that I work on are all to commercial sites. I’m typically after a combination of links from news outlets (either national or trade press), high end online-only publishers and bloggers. I use a variety of linkbait tactics – written content (from resource guides to press releases), publishing research, data visualisation, competitions, awards, collaborative content, etc.

So these are some of the lessons I’ve learned over the past 18 months or so of doing this stuff – hopefully this will save you some heartache :)

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The Official SES London Networking Party

Next week Search Engine Strategies (SES) is in London, and seeing as 80% (actually it’s more like 70% but Julie is always in London in spirit) of the SEO Chicks are based in London quite a few of us are speaking and attending. Judith is speaking on day 1 and 2 on the subjects: “Introduction to SEO” and “SEO is dead, long live SEO” respectively. And I have two sessions on day 1 covering “Key Link building strategies” and “SEO means business”.  Nichola and Annabel will be attending and covering the event for Stateofsearch.com and Hannah will be covering the conference here on SEO Chicks. So, if you see us around the conference centre, please make sure you say hi, and preferably emulate how you look in your twitter avatar (we don’t see “real” people often and find it difficult to grasp that people don’t look like their avatars).

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The WINNER(S) of the SEO Next Generation Competition are..

We have had some fabulous entries to the SEO Next Generation competition, it has taken us a while to read through them all and score each entry. There were some hilarious, thought provoking and truly original entries, and we would like to thank everyone that entered for their time and effort. Our white, grey and one slightly blackish hat goes off to you.

THE WINNNERS

Soooo, get to the point I hear you all say, who won? Well, that’s the thing, we couldn’t really agree on ONE winner so after much deliberation and one phone call to our friends at SES London (who VERY kindly gave us another FULL Conference pass to SES London) we hereby announce the JOINT WINNERS:

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Welcome Hannah Smith aka Hannah Bo Banna!

The SEO Chicks have big plans of expanding and actually regularly blogging in 2012 (yay) and have already welcommed Annabel Hodges to our team. After racking our brains for…well 2 seconds really (we knew who we wanted to approach really)..we decided to approach the querky, clever and generally awesome Hannah Smith to join our blogging team, and she said YES…

I would officially like to welcome Hannah to the SEO Chicks team. We are so excited to have you on board!

Follow Hannah Bo Banna on twitter. That’s an order.

ps: I challenge anyone to find a different picture of Hannah anywhere on the internet…..I tried, there is NO other…Are you camera shy Hannah? Just you wait, embaressing photos like this one is bound to be taken when we next see you (dear god that’s an awful picture….why in the toilet…and Julie wasn’t even there, she’s the toilet chick..ehm, now I should stop…that can be misunderstood)

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