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Identifying Poor Quality Sites

2/14/2007 by Leave a Comment

WebmasterWorld has a nice thread going about 25 signals of crappy sites. Fribble starts the thread with the notion that we spend a lot of time looking for signals of quality. But it’s also useful to look at the inverse. It’s a pretty good list, and forum members chip in a few other good ideas.

Being aware of these signals can be useful when you are evaluating the merits of web sites for partnering with them. If a site has too may of these negative signals, it may not be worth the trouble to pursue them. While inbound links from third party sites, for the most part (yes I am hedging on this a bit), can’t hurt you, you don’t want to spend your link building energy on things that won’t help you.

After all your time is limited. Of course, look for more than 1 of these signals to tag a site for ignoring, unless they do one of these things in a really egregious manner.

Filed Under: linkbuilding, SEO, WebmasterWorld

Why Wikipedia links are still valuable

2/12/2007 by 4 Comments

As we have all heard, Wikipedia has placed “nofollow” tags on their outbound links. This was greeted with a fair amount of dismay by the SEO and Webmaster world at large, as well it should have been.

But it turns out that Wikipedia links still have great value. Why? Because other people go to Wikipedia pages and then link to the sites that Wikipedia links to.

In a non-scientific examination of some of the sites we work with, we have seen Wikipedia links result in a significant number of additional links. One site we know regularly gets 20+ additional links for every Wikipedia link they get. Best of all, these are relevant links.

So don’t lose all interest in Wikipedia yet. Links there can still help your site.

Filed Under: linkbuilding, SEO

Writing for Search Engine Watch

2/8/2007 by 3 Comments

I am pleased to announce that I now have a role as a blogger for the staff at Search Engine Watch. You can see the announcement here. I will continue to put new articles and blog posts on this site as well, as I enjoy doing so.

On SEW, I will cover 3 major vertical markets:

  1. Link Building
  2. Vertical Search
  3. Web Analytics

All these topics are personal passions, and I look forward to serving the SEW community.

Filed Under: SEO

The 4 Best Things in the new Link Capabilities from Google

2/7/2007 by 1 Comment

The SEO world has been abuzz with the announcement of “accurate” link information from Google. This is, in fact, really good news for webmasters. If you care about building traffic to your site, you care about links. And having the tools to find out when you have new links is very good news indeed. It just makes our job easier.

There are a few things worth commenting on, with regard to this new tool:

  1. The link counts are less than those shown on Yahoo’s Site Explorer. A quick check today shows about 13,100 links to the Stone Temple site. The results I got from Webmaster Tools was around 8800 (67%).
  2. So Yahoo shows some links that Google doesn’t. However, the converse is also true. Google shows some links that Yahoo doesn’t. So for those of you who are into the gory details, looking at both will make sense for you.
  3. Webmaster Tools provides you the ability to download the data in a spreadsheet. This is just a fabulous feature. It allows you to quickly and easily manipulate the data to see what pages are linking to to each of the pages on your site. This is pure gold.
  4. Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped reported earlier today that you can also use Google Webmaster Tools to download other people’s backlinks. Of course, Yahoo let’s you see any site’s links with Site Explorer, but the ability to download these into a spreadsheet on the fly is really, really precious.

So lots of good stuff in this release. Kudos to Google for making this available.

Filed Under: linkbuilding, SEO, Webmaster Tools

Interview with Jim Sterne

2/5/2007 by 1 Comment

Jim Sterne is one of the most well known names in the world of Web Analytics. We recently had a chance to interview Jim, and had a great discussion with him. Jim has published several books, including the well known title “Web Metrics”. Jim is also President of the Web Analytics Association, and the Emetrics Summit.

Jim’s passion for analytics emerges immediately and clearly when you begin a discussion of web analytics with him. In our interview he provides a great top down view of the analytics industry, and how businesses should use web analytics as a part of their business strategy.

So check out this great discussion with Jim Sterne for a great look into the world of web analytics.

Filed Under: Analytics

Big changes at SEOmoz

2/5/2007 by Leave a Comment

Big changes are taking place over at SEOmoz. A while back, Rand Fishkin (its CEO), announced that he planned to offer paid content services in the near future. Well the change has happened, and the new SEOmoz site is launched.

Premium Membership costs $39 per month or $299 for a year. What you get in return for this is access to premium content and tools, including:

  1. The Professional’s Guide to Link Building
  2. Access to the SEOmoz Crawl Test Tool
  3. The ability to compare multiple reports on the same page in the SEOmoz Page Strength tool.
  4. View all the page strength scores for a URL over time in the SEOmoz Page Strength tool.
  5. Run five Keyword Difficulty reports at a time. Other users are limited to one.
  6. Beta test new SEOmoz tools and features before they are released to the public.
  7. Access to SEOmoz multimedia training, webinars and audio/video podcasts (as they become available).
  8. Invitations to in-person SEOmoz events at conferences and here in Seattle.

It looks like the blog will continue on its merry way, by which I mean it will continue to produce the great content it always has.

However, there is some new stuff here too. Now any user can go to the YOUmoz section of the site, and write their own blog post. Built into this is a voting feature, where other users can read the YOUmoz posts, and vote for them (thumbs up or thumbs down). The most popular posts will then be shown on the main SEOmoz company blog. This is a great way for users to get some exposure in a high traffic site.

This is obviously a big step for Rand and SEOmoz. But Rand has always had a deep passion for good content and quality research. It makes sense to me that they have taken this step, and I think they will be successful with it. Check it out!

Filed Under: Blog, SEO
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