Last month, the New York Times published an article about a search engine optimization investigation of  J.C. Penney. Puzzled by how well jcpenney.com did in organic search results for just about everything they sold, they asked an SEO expert to look into it a bit more. The investigation found that thousands of unrelated web sites (many that seemed to contain only links) were linking to the J.C. Penney web site. And most of those links had really descriptive anchor text (the clickable ntext of the links). It seemed that someone had arranged for all of those links in order to get better rankings in Google.

The Times presented their findings to Google. Googler Matt Cutts confirmed that the tactics violated the Google webmaster guidelines and soon the J.C. Penney web site was nowhere to found for the queries they had previously ranked number one for. Matt tweeted that “Google’s algorithms had started to work; manual action also taken”.

J.C. Penney, when contacted by the Times, claimed they didn’t know anything about the links and promptly fired their SEO firm, SearchDex.

So where did J.C. Penney go wrong? Why did they do it? What have they lost? And how do they get it back? Read on to learn more and make sure this doesn’t happen to you.

• The original NY Times article “The Dirty Little Secrets of Search”
• Search Engine Land’s full discussion of the whole affair

We estimate that your link popularity accounts for about 40% of where you rank in Google. Consequently, it’s important to make sure your inbound links are providing as much link juice for your website as possible. Having a steady stream of new incoming links is important. But what about all of those old links that have been around for a while? Are they as effective as they might be? Why not take a look at that, because fixing existing links is a lot easier than obtaining brand-new ones.

Here are a few things you can do by way of link maintenance to make sure that those old links are giving you as much link juice as possible.

Correct any links that point to an old domain name.

If you’ve changed your domain name, all the links to your old domain name are doing you no good. The easiest thing to do is to arrange for a 301 permanent redirect from the old domain name to the new one. That should result in the links to the old domain name passing link juice to the new one. Unfortunately, they don’t pass 100% of their value.

Your best bet is to arrange for that redirect, but then contact the webmasters who link to your old website and asked him to change the links so they point to your new domain. That should bring the link values back up to 100%.

Sadly, we are dealing with a client today whose original domain name was owned by their previous web design company. They’ve had their website redesigned, and it’s now at a much better domain name. Unfortunately, their old web design company seems unwilling to arrange for a “redirect” from the old domain name to the new one. With no redirect possible, this client is getting no value from those old links until they get re-pointed to the new domain name.

Fix any links to your website that are broken.

Check your website analytics to find all links that are going to nonexistent pages on your website. Identify those links and contact those webmasters asking them to change the links so they point to real pages. If for any reason you’re unable to reach those webmasters, or if they’re unwilling to cooperate, then you need to arrange 301 permanent redirects  to real pages from whatever nonexistent pages they’re linking to so you can capture at least part of the link juice they pass.

Improve the anchor text of all incoming links.

Anytime you need to contact a webmaster who’s linking to you, take a look at the anchor text of their link. (The “anchor text” is the word or phrase you can click on to follow the link.) If it doesn’t contain a keyword phrase for the page that it points to, ask them to change what it says so that it does. Keyword rich links can be extremely powerful, as evidenced by our old article on “Google bombing“.

Optimize the internal links on your own website.

Links within your website count for your link popularity, too. It may not be as powerful as external links, but everything adds up to a positive result. Any pages you want to show up in search engine results should be linked from other pages on your own site effectively. Make sure that the navigation on your site is clear and easy to follow and that it includes any pages you’d like to see ranking in the search engines.

Darlene Victoria Gonzales runs A Virtual Perception, a podcast targeted at virtual assistants and home-based business owners. She recently interviewed Bill Treloar, owner and principal SEO consultant of Rank Magic for an overview and introduction to Search Engine Optimization.

Episode 78 of her podcast is entitled SEO Challenged? Start Here. In it, Darlene questions Bill about many aspects of search engine optimization for small business web sites:

• What is SEO?
• What about meta tags?
• Why is the difference between text content and graphical text important?
• Why can’t someone be good at both web design and SEO?
• What’s the most powerful place to put your keywords?
• What main two factors control where you rank in search engine results?
• What are some link building best practices?
• What’s the Duplicate Content Penalty?
• What constitutes a good ranking?
• What are some of your favorite SEO tools?
• What’s Google PageRank?

Have a listen!

Link popularity is an important factor in search engine rankings, specially in Google. Exchanging links with other relevant websites is a good way to improve your link popularity but you want to avoid “bad neighborhoods”. For example, you don’t want to link to gambling or get-rich-quick web sites. But those aren’t the only bad neighborhoods you need to avoid.

You might very innocently link to what appears to be an acceptable web site and not realize that they may have been penalized by Google or other search engines for unsavory or “black hat” SEO techniques. Exchanging links with such sites may well be bad for your own rankings.

But how do you tell?

As it turns out, there’s a neat (and free) text link checker tool available on the web that will check all the links on your web site and report back on the quality of the web sites on the other side of your links. It’ll itemize all of your links and show you graphically whether they’re good or bad. And if it reports any bad ones, you can decide whether to continue to link to them or not.

If they continue to link back to you, that shouldn’t hurt you; search engines understand you have little  control over who links to you. It’s your link to them that’s under your control and that’s what you want to police, looking for links that turn out to point to “bad neighborhood” web sites.

Check out your neighborhood.

It takes two essential things for your web site to pay off in more sales. You need SEO to bring lots of potential customers to your site, but then you need a dynamic and compelling web site to convert those visitors into paying customers. One very effective way to improve your web site’s conversion rate is through online video marketing.

A professional video on your web site can boost your conversions by catching your visitors’ attention and illustrating what makes you special. But it can also help your search engine rankings through its presence on video sharing sites like YourTube. Those placements can bring visitors directly to your site, but the links they contain also improve your link popularity. See a great video done by SiteFire Video for one of our clients.

SiteFire Video is a new Rank Magic client, and they have an excellent video of their own to display the power of what they do. Take a look:

One of my clients forwarded the following email to me:

Good morning, my name is ***** and I am a [sic] Internet marketing professional. I had done [sic] a Google search under the keyword New Jersey Lawyer And had run across [sic] your website www.*****.com. I see that you are not listed on the first page of Google for your particular search.

I am not sure if you’re aware of why your [sic] ranked this low but more importantly how easily correctable this is.

There’s no reason that you can’t have top three rankings for the keyword New Jersey Lawyer based on your Website structure and content. You have a very nice site.

What you need is high quality one-way anchor text links. I can help you with this…..

Not only can I get you ranked for the keyword New Jersey Lawyer but I am talking about all of your keywords on top of Google. Adding new high quality PR anchor-text links from the highest quality websites will produce the results and business you want for http://www.*******.com.

The right kind of links are crucial in getting top ranking… and I can hand deliver these quality links to you.

My partners and I own 1000′s of websites and offer private linking to hundreds of website owners just like yourself.

I didn’t send this email out to very many people but I do favor your website because I can see your website monetizing the targeted website traffic for the keyword New Jersey Lawyer can deliver.

I have your contact information and phone number. Would it be okay if I were to give you a call?

I have a very simple way to prove to you that what I do works risk free for you to try. Nothing beats seeing the results with your own eyes.

Would it be okay if I were to give you a call? I would love to pursue this further over the phone with you or should I go somewhere else?.

Sincerely,
**** *****

P.S.- if the tables were turned and somebody I didn’t know came to me with  a proposition, even one that was appealing, I would be hesitant because I would be wondering – what’s the catch? What does this guy know that I don’t.

But then again I would think he does know something that I don’t know. He owns 1000′s of websites, he does have hundreds of thousands of pages indexed with top rankings on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Websites that can deliver only the highest quality anchor-text links that can move your rankings fast. I would also think that I need to get my website in the top rankings. And he is offering turn key page 1 rankings on all of my keywords including New Jersey Lawyer. Keywords that produce the kind of traffic potentially worth tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars.

I emailed you this because it’s a win-win for both of us. Think of it this way, who wouldn’t be interested in buying money at a discount? Because that’s what I’ll be able to offer you….discount money.

Would it be okay to give you a call? Or you can call me anytime at the number above and would [sic] be happy to explain how I can benefit you risk free.

I was incensed enough to flame that guy back. As you can tell, he really pushed my buttons. Here’s what I wrote, with identities protected:

Xxxxx, [my client]  forwarded your email to me because I’m his SEO consultant. Let me object to your email on a several counts.

• Spamming is an abhorrent practice. Your email is the very definition of spam: unsolicited commercial email. It’s unethical and gives the rest of us who do SEO a bad reputation; I take personal offense. You should be ashamed of yourself.
• My client is a [practice area] lawyer. The keyword phrase you suggest is just plain stupid on three counts.
  • First, the percentage of people who search for a New Jersey lawyer who are actually looking for a [practice area] lawyer is very small. Many will be looking for a criminal defense lawyer, or a divorce lawyer, or a business litigation lawyer, or a real estate lawyer. It’s a poorly targeted keyword and suggests that maybe you don’t know what you’re doing.
  • Second, you misunderstand search behavior. Anyone looking for a lawyer who does what my client does and who searched for New Jersey lawyer would immediately recognize that the search results contained few if any lawyers of the type they’re seeking. They would immediately re-cast their search in more specific terms. Those more specific terms are the ones my client needs to be found under.
  • Third, I’m appalled that you’re one of those “over-promise and under-deliver” guys that also makes the rest of us look bad. To promise top three organic rankings for the phrase New Jersey lawyer in a short period of time for a small law firm is unrealistic, and as pointed out above, even that achievement would be of minimal value to my client. Promising top three organic listings for such a competitive phrase is, in my opinion, dishonest.
• Finally, you’re promoting a linking scheme where you offer one-way links from among thousands of web sites that you own. Google has written on their web site that such practices are considered search engine spam and will be penalized. Google treats these schemes as unethical SEO behavior.

I’ll be advising my client and others to treat your email as spam.

Our clients are reporting increasing numbers of 3-way linking offers. We recommend avoiding them.

What Are 3-Way Links?

3-way links are an attempt to address the belief that reciprocal links (you link to me and I link to you) provide less benefit than 1-way inbound links to your web site. There may be some truth to that, but reciprocal linking done properly still provides effective link popularity credit. The 3-way approach typically takes this form:

What’s Wrong With 3-Way Links?

Google has this to say about link schemes (emphasis is ours):

The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity. However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results.

Search engine ranking algorithms are able to detect 3-way linking as an artificial means of boosting the popularity of both sites and may discount the value of these links. We think it’s unlikely to generate an actual penalty, but you may get no value from the incoming link. And based on Google’s statement above, an actual ranking penalty is certainly not out of the question

Some schemes host the sites involved in this approach on different web servers, thinking that will hide this scheme from the search engines, but once they’ve done a few 3-way links the search engines can detect the pattern, regardless of where the web sites are hosted.

It’s Not Nice to Fool Mother Nature … Or the Search Engines

Most people engaging in 3-way linking are doing it with the express intent to manipulate search results. At Rank Magic, our philosophy is that anything done to deceive the search engines is a bad idea that will eventually bite you in the tail. Once the search engines see that you’re playing games to artificially increase your link popularity, they’ll stop counting many of your links; perhaps even some very legitimate ones.

Our Position on 3-Way Links

We never engage in 3-way linking schemes for many reasons. For one, we think it’s unethical, akin to search engine spam. For another, they’re very difficult to control. And for another, they can hurt more than they help in the long run.

Reciprocal linking where two sites link with each other is perfectly acceptable and natural when both sites are relevant for the same topics and visitors. A plumber’s web site that links to a local electrician’s web site is a natural reciprocal link arrangement. A furniture web site that shares links with one of the furniture manufacturers they feature is a natural thing, and often helpful to visitors on both web sites. That’s much more acceptable than 3-way linking schemes and will never get you in trouble.

One of the most powerful techniques for improving your search engine rankings is to create content that will attract links (“link bait”). Links from directories, reciprocal links, and links you request from other web sites have great value, but there is nothing like the unsolicited links that come from other webmasters.

Here are some ideas on how to get started creating link bait:

• Freebies – Give away an e-book or a tutorial or something else of value
• Review products in your industry
• Write about news in your niche
• Develop a tool and share it (another freebie, yes)
• Interview someone famous in your industry and publish the article on your own site
• Start a controversy
• Create a contest or award Program
• Create a resource: lists of the best the books in your industry, a glossary of terms for your business
• Report on Statistical or Financial trends in your industry.

Here’s a popular and comprehensive resource for link bait ideas.

I’m reprinting an excellent article from Axandra about ensuring that search engines really understand what your web site is all about. It’s easy for poorly constructed inbound links to skew the search engines’ sense of what you’re about. (See our tagged posts on GoogleBombing.) The following article is copyrighted by Axandra.com – Web site promotion software.

You know what you sell and you know the topic of your website. Are you sure that Google puts your website in the right category? If your website is about shoes, Google still might think that it is about frogs and toads.

Toads

If Google puts your website in the wrong category, it will be very difficult to get high rankings for your keywords.

How to find out what Google thinks about your website

To find out what Google thinks about your website, perform a “similar” search for your domain. Enter the following in Google’s search box:

related:www.domain.com/ ~domain.com

Replace domain.com with your own domain name and make sure that there is no spacer after the colon. On the result page, Google will show you websites that it finds related to your site.

If the websites on the search result page are related to your website then everything is okay. If the websites are about totally different topics, then you have a problem and Google probably won’t display your website in the search results for the right keywords.

Why does Google put your website in the wrong category?

Suppose your website is about selling shoes. If your site is linked by other websites that link to your website and other websites that are about frogs and toads then Google might think that your website is related to frogs and toads.

It’s important that the other links on the web page that links to you are related to your site. If you’re listed in the “Shoes” category of an Internet directory then all web sites in the same category are usually also about shoes.

When search engines look at this page and check the links to other sites they will think that your web site is related to shoes. That means that it will be much easier to get high rankings for search terms that are about shoes.

Is your website in the right co-citation category?

The other websites to which your link partners link influence the ranking of your website on Google.

Here’s an example: web sites 1, 2, 3 and 4 all link to the web sites A, B, C and D. Although A, B, C and D don’t link to each other, Google thinks that A, B, C and D are related to each other because the same web sites link to them:

The effect of co-citation on your rankings

If A, B, C and D are all linked from 1, 2, 3 and 4 they might be related to one another, even though they don’t directly link to each other.

If A, B, C and D are all linked by many other web sites, they have a strong relationship. The more web sites they are linked by, the stronger the relationship.

If you are the owner of website A, you should make sure that web sites B, C and D are related to your site.

What does this mean for your website?

When you build links, make sure that the page that links to your site also contains other links that are related to your website topic. The more pages of the other site are about your topic, the better.

If the link to your website is in a good neighborhood then it will be much easier to get high rankings for your keywords.

We’ve written a lot in the past about the importance of link popularity for good search engine rankings. Link popularity counts even more heavily in Google than in the other search engines and it’s not something you can ignore. Links from a web site’s Helpful Resources page are good, but the best links are those that are embedded within a content rich paragraph related to your business. Couple that with the recent increased emphasis by Google on timely information from social networking sources like Twitter and blogs, and you have the basis for a new business model.

There’s a savvy little company called Net-Writers that’s been getting some impressive results with a niche service to help clients gain SEO traction by leveraging the power of this kind of relevant content. They build numerous inbound content-relevant, keyword-rich links by creating and publishing multiple blog posts for a client.  They start with 50 blog posts, each one with three keyword-rich links pointing to the page on their client’s site that’s optimized for them. This can be a powerful technique to supplement the on-page SEO and traditional link building we do at Rank Magic.

The copy they create won’t win prizes for style but it is professionally written and won’t embarrass their clients. This content is also totally controlled, which means it can be edited or taken down if the client has any accuracy or style issues with it.

Net Writers guarantees positive results, too, which they define as an improvement in your ranking position for your keywords. I haven’t seen the wording of that guarantee so I don’t know if it’s specific to Google or Yahoo or Bing, how much of a ranking improvement they promise, or whether they promise improvement on all of your targeted keywords. What I can say, though, is that I’m satisfied their approach works.

Net-Writers’ approach to link building isn’t Black Hat SEO, but it’s not totally White Hat SEO either; I think we need a new category of Gray Hat SEO. That’s because these blog posts are designed to feed keyword-rich links to the search engines, and aren’t really designed to drive traffic to your site in and of themselves. Will search engines eventually learn to detect this technique and lower the value of the links it generates? I doubt it. These are real blog posts, not fakes, and distinguishing them from totally innocent blog posts that just happen to link to a web site would be difficult or impossible. Only time will tell about that, but for now, and for many  businesses, this approach should realize measurable benefits.