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Can You Really Get Links By Email Requests?

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Relevant incoming links may count as much as 40% toward top rankings in Google.

To show up in Google searches, you need adequate link authority based on the number and quality of other websites that link to yours. But just sitting back and waiting for links to happen by accident isn’t a meaningful action plan. One potentially fruitful approach is to find relevant websites and send them an email asking them to link to you.

Email link requests have gotten a bad name.

email link requests can be productive if done right.Most website owners with any degree of visibility on the web get link request emails. Most often these are poorly written and come from off-shore mass link builders. They’re pretty easy to identify and most people just delete them as spam. So working with inexpensive foreign link builders seldom provides any true benefit. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be effective if it’s done properly.

According to Website Magazine,

Direct link requests get a bad wrap as they are used (and often used poorly) by those that either don’t care or don’t know any better (believing inbound link volume outweighs inbound link quality – which it doesn’t). It should not have to be said but know that email link requests do not typically work when they are misdirected or provide no immediate or long term benefit to those providing the link.

But there are things you can do to increase the positive response to your link request emails.

Follow a few simple suggestions from this Website Magazine article and you should see your email link request success rate improve.

Need help improving your link authority?  Call Rank Magic — because we can help.

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Recovery From Google’s Panda Update

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Googles Panda Algorithm change hurt lots of small businesses.Google’s recent algorithm update named Panda has caused many websites to lose rankings in a big way. Most deserved it, but not all.

Earlier this month, NPR ran a story about a furniture store called One Way Furniture that had been hurt badly by Panda, mainly due to its use of canned product descriptions, which they copied from their manufacturers’ listings.

Apparently Panda identified the duplicate content and downgraded the value of the pages at One Way Furniture. There are some other suspected factors at work in their rankings plummet as well. Now they’re slowly climbing back to their pre-Panda rankings through a lot of effort:

  • Removing duplicate content and rewriting product descriptions
  • Using the canonical HTML tag to resolve multiple URLs that point to the same page
  • Proper use of 301 redirects
  • Paying close attention to their page speed
  • Constantly building backlinks.
  • One of the things they did was to hire some new copywriters to write original product descriptions aimed at being search engine friendly, and not duplicates of manufacturer descriptions.
Recovering from a Google Algorithm Change

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CEO Mitch Lieberman said

For example, a bar stool that previously used a manufacturer-supplied bullet list of details as its product description now has a five-sentence description that details how it can complement a bar set-up, links to bar accessories and sets the tone by mentioning alcoholic beverages, all of which makes it more SEO-friendly. What we’re seeing now is what is good for customers and what they see on the site is also good for Google.

Another online publication that was badly hurt by Panda, DaniWeb, published a recovery story earlier this month. They cited their own reasons for the hit and what they’ve  been doing to get out of it:

“I guess it also goes without saying that it’s also important to constantly build backlinks, It is entirely possible/plausible that Google’s Panda algorithm hit all of the low quality sites that were just syndicating and linking back to us (with no unique content of their own), ultimately discrediting half of the sites in our backlink portfolio, killing our traffic indirectly. Therefore, it isn’t that we got flagged by Panda’s algorithm, but rather that we just need to work on building up more backlinks.”

Their experience reminds us to be vigilant:

  • Perhaps Google’s page speed factor is more heavily weighted than we thought.
  • And maintaining fresh inbound links from reputable websites is always important.

Need help with your small business SEO? Let’s talk!

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JCPenney Slammed for Black Hat SEO Tricks

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JC Penney penalized by GoogleLast month, the New York Times published an article about a search engine optimization investigation of  JCPenney. 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 text of the links). It seemed that someone had arranged for all of those links in order to get better rankings in Google.

The New York Times logoThe Times presented their findings to Google. Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed that the tactics violated the Google webmaster guidelines and soon the JCPenney 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”.

What happened to JC Penney after cheating with SEO tricks?

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

[Update: SearchDex subsequently either went out of business or changed their name.]

So where did JCPenney 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.

 

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Link Maintenance Tips

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Link maintenance helps keep your inbound links healthy of providing maximum authority value to your page.
Well-maintained links are healthy links.

We estimate that your link authority 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 link maintenance, because fixing existing links is a lot easier than obtaining brand-new ones.

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

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.  Ask them 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.

Maintenance tips to maintain the SEO value of inbound links.

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Broken link maintenance.

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.

Optimized links earn you better link popularityAnytime 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 the existence of “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. So pay attention to internal link maintenance, too. Link to any pages you want to show up in search engine results from other pages on your own site. 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.

Ask how we can help improve your link profile.

Share your successes and/or challenges with link maintenance in the comments below.

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Avoid 3-Way Link Schemes

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We know that your link profile — inbound links to your site from other websites — are essential to showing up in search results. Recently, our clients have been 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 website. 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:
Three way linking structure

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 all 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.

Avoid 3-way link schemes. Read this.

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You’re Not Going to Outsmart 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

Link spam like 3-way link schemes can earn you a slapdown from Google.
Link spam can earn you a slap-down from Google.

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.

Share your perspective in the comments below.

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