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Link building and social media PDF  | Print |  E-mail Wednesday, 29 April 2009 10:10 It’s all about the secondary links silly Time and time again I see folks in the SEO world talking about getting links from social media websites. Many times this advice will include finding ‘followed’ links and even lists of ‘dofollow’ social media sites. This is quite strange and bewildering to me as the holy grail of link building in SM isn’t getting a link from the actual site…. but getting the secondary links that follow viral content. You see, one shouldn’t be using the state of the links on the site as the measure… and such approaches are often even frowned upon by many in the biz as noted in this recent Sphinn thread. Regardless of the emotional reaction, the whole concept is flawed. I could give a rat’s ass if the links on a given site (including social and blogs) are followed because that was never the consideration in the first place. Secondary links are the goal The main thing, from a link building perspective, is not really about direct links but the secondary links one garners from having a viral story on said site. If one gets a hot story on places such as Digg or Twitter, how many links are being generated? This is where the story begins for link builders. Having a viral story make the rounds can often result in a great number of back links that can often be of far more value than those single authority links social spammers seem bent on getting. This is the greater value to be had from SM sites for the adventurous link builder. Now, we can discuss brand development and authority building as an important aspect of content distribution, (and social media) but let’s stick to the potential of them for link building. When we look to target a given social site what do we want to know? Is the site targeted? Meaning does it have active categories relating to our market. What’s the demographic? Is there a viable number or market related peeps? What’s the reach? Is it syndicated heavily, (RSS, Twitter, Blogs, Scrapers..etc..) What links are top stories getting? (is the demo a linking group) You get the idea… we want the best possible opportunity for generating secondary links from the primary exposure. That is the goal at the end of the day (from a link building perspective).   Don’t be short sighted This is actually true of a lot of content distribution/placement channels. You shouldn’t be as concerned about the type of link as the ability to generate links from the situation. What would you rather have? Scenario 1 – a followed link from a marginally popular location such as http://www.under-link.com/ Scenario 2 – a nofollowed link from a popular site (or maybe dropped by a top Twitterer). Scenario 3 – a followed link buried on a popular site (poor exposure) If you said anything but Scenario 2 then please move to the front of the class, because you are failing sadly. Ultimately the actual status of the link is not going to be nearly as important as the ability to get the content in front of as many folks as possible. If you and the content team have done your job, and chosen the right locales, then you should end up with some great secondary links.

If you have your site set to detect a visitor's location and show content based on that, I would recommend the following: Serve a unique URL for distinct content. For instance, don't show English content to US visitors on mysite.com and French content to French visitors on mysite.com. Instead, redirect English visitors to mysite.com/en and French visitors to mysite.com/fr. T hat way search engines can index the French content using the mysite.com/fr URL and can index English content using the mysite.com/en URL. Provide links to enable visitors (and search engines) to access other language/country content. For instance, if I'm in Zurich, you might redirect me to the Swiss page, but provide a link to the US version of the page. Or, simply present visitors with a home page that enables them to choose the country. You can always store the selection in a cookie so visitors are redirected automatically after the first time.

Google's policies aren't as inflexible as you're trying to portray. The same Google page you quote also says that intent ought to be a major consideration (just as when evaluating pages with hidden content). Also, why would Google's guidelines prevent you from using geotargeting without an immediate redirect? Just because you don't immediately redirect search users to a different page doesn't mean you have to ask for their zip code instead of using IP-based geotargeting.    Lastly, I don't think using such redirects from SERPs improves user experience at all. If I click on a search result, then it's because that's the content I'm interested in. It's very annoying to click on a search result and get a page completely different from the SERP snippet. And what about someone who is on business in a different country? Search engines already provide different language localizations as well as language search options to favor localized pages for a particular region. So if someone goes to the French Google, they will see the French version of localized sites/pages. If they're seeing the U.S. version in their SERP, then it's because you didn't SEO or localize your pages properly, or they deliberately used the U.S. version of Google. Don't second guess your users. Instead, focus on making sure that users know about your localized pages and can access them easily (by choice, not through force).5 days ago, 17:00:11 – Flag – Like – Reply – Delete – Edit – Moderate Bill Hunt Frank your spot on as usual. We still keep chasing this issue and as I wrote on SEW last year in my article on language detection issues http://searchenginewatch.com/3634625 it is often more of the implementation that is the problem than the actual redirect.    Yes, it is exactly cloaking (maybe gray hat) when you have a single gateway such as "example.com" and if the person comes from Germany they see the site in German language or English if their IP was in New York. Engines typically crawl from a central location like Mountain View or Zurich so they would only see the English version since they would not provide signals for any other location. Where you really get into a tricky area is if you set it so that any user agent from a search engine can access any version they are asking for and let them in yet a human is restricted - sort of reverse cloaking. If Mr GoogleBot wants the French home page let him have it rather than sending him to the US homepage.    With the growth of CDN's (content data networks) I am seeing more and more of these issues crop up to handle load balancing as well as other forms of geographical targeting. I have a long list of global, multinational and enterprise related challenges that are complicated by many of Google's outdated ways of handling kindergarten level spam tactics. Sounds like a SES New York session...

October 12, 2010 Paid Search Reports: Google Profits at Bing/Yahoo's Expense  Share tweetmeme_source = 'sewatch'; tweetmeme_service = 'bit.ly'; Google gobbled up more paid search spending share last quarter, a result of the Bing/Yahoo integration, according to new reports from Efficient Frontier and SearchIgnite. Google's share of paid search spend rose from 75.8 percent in Q2 to 77.9 percent in Q3, according to Efficient. SearchIgnite had Google growing to 80.2 percent of PPC ad spend. Paid clicks were up 9 percent year-over-year (YoY); CPCs were up 14 percent YoY; and impressions were up 6 percent YoY, Efficient reported. Efficient said this demonstrates Google's continued ability to increase consumer and advertiser demand.