SEO Question: I have been considering joining a link exchange network to boost my Google PageRank. Is it a good idea?

SEO Answer: You have to know your goals before you can set a plan of attack.

Option #1:
Are your sites automated rubbish and junk content that can't get any legitimate linkage data? Are you just looking to spam MSN and Yahoo! for a few quick bucks of profit per site?

If so then it may make sense to push hard on the link exchange front. Outsource it though if you can. Once you get a system down that is profitable you can replicate it so long as you are paying someone from another country dirt cheap wages. If you are doing this to scale you won't have enough time to do it all yourself, at least not if you value your time, which eventually you will if you are doing this and it proves effective.

If you are doing spammy link exchanges yourself for months and months and months and are seeing no results it might be time to think about switching gears. Some people are good at this option. Others are good at option #2.

Option #2:
Do you spend hundreds of hours creating what you consider to be a useful original resource? Are your main problems that your site is new and you are still learning the web? Do you want your site to do well longterm?

If you fit more in this camp then I think it is probably going to be a waste of time to join reciprocal link spam networks.

Polarization:
Much is lost in polarization and pigeonholing groups of people. But in this case, I think it is an important distinction where you really only need to classify your sites as belonging to one group or the other.

My SEO mentor said he is partial to quality sites but spam can make great money too. Where people mess up is when they piss around in the middle.

Sure it is ok to have garbage sites. Sure it is ok to have good ones. But never the twine shall cross. With each site either spam hard or create good stuff. Don't make a site that has a foot in each pond.

The Illusion of Value:
When I first got on the web I thought it was oh so important to have a Yahoo! listed domain. Why? People taught me that so they could exploit me selling me shitty subscription based services that allowed me to look through a list of domains that already had all the good stuff pulled out.

Does it really help you if your online mortgage site is listed in the wiccan category of the Yahoo! Directory? Probably not much.

With these link exchange networks most people are doing the same thing. Hunting for some percieved magical value that is easy to automate, replicate, and easy for search engines to detect. In most cases it does not add much value for the time you waste looking through them.

More recently I have bought old domains and plan to develop some of them, but I did not get them via the crappy subscription software that was sold to me a few years back.

I had to get certain tips from a couple friends and a cool programmer to create my own custom tools for finding them. I would share them, but here I don't

• I promised my friends I would not

• if everyone accessed them the market would be hypersaturated and I wouldn't be doing any favors to anyone, not even the people using them

Reciprocal linking may still be a useful idea, and you should link out to some quality sites even if they don't link back, but typically most sites in link exchange networks are shit (option #1 above).

Autosurf Traffic Exchange Programs:
Posting this is going to make me sound rather ignorant, but I have no shame...

When I first got on the web I also tried autosurf programs a bit. I was dirt poor and knew little about the web or marketing, but it didn't take me long to realize I was wasting my time.

The only people that autosurf traffic exchange programs help are

1. those who run automated software that spoofs them

2. those who sell scammy fraudulent $5 submit your site to search engine programs (often people in group run automated software that spoofs the network)
3. those who run the traffic exchange network (and thus get to sell, test, and refine automated impressions to targeted newbie webmasters)

I liken most link exchange networks to that analogy. A scam that promotes the network above all others.

The whole link exchange idea pushes the low end of the market, as Brett Tabke noted years before I entered the SEO market.

Search algorithms, the volume of legitimate content, and automated site generation have grown / evolved for over a half a decade (half of the WWW's lifetime) since Brett's article was wrote. That probably means there is quite a bit less value in the spammy link exchange networks.

Promoting Scams:
If there is market demand for an idea someone will sell it even if it is a scam. Search Google for [search engine submission].

If you look at Google's webmaster guidelines they will tell you about how to submit your site, but Google does not go out of their way to make sure that information is available on relevant search queries. They will gladly take some of your money selling ads for that query where likely over half of the ads probably promote some sort of scam or fraud.

Capitalism, Social Networks and Value:
To some extent social networks (and the web is nothing but a big social network) aim to push the same financial reward systems that define capitalism.

Those at the top of the charts get a dispropotionate amount of exposure and can build more efficiency into their process because they get lower aggregated distribution costs or higher return for similar effort.

To put that into perspective, if I wrote this exact same post 2 years ago it probably would get no links or comments. Now some automated systems scrape my content and I am guaranteed those links. Some people read this site daily and I am guaranteed some exposure.

Some people will get more than they deserve while others get the shaft. I have really experienced a good bit of both extremes in the past 2 years.

Guestimating Value:
The stock market is hard for most people to win at because insiders have more value and can control their stock float (the number of shares publicly available).

The three things that helps level the playing field a bit are

• there is always some market equlibrium for demand that gives consensus baseline for value (although that may be way off...see the US stock market for the last 6 years).

• there is a lot of money involved and eventually the markets have to work toward correcting themselves
• there is a ton of publicly available information about companies

With link exchanges and other internet marketing exchange programs there is no baseline. Sure saying 1 for 1 is a fair trade is a baseline, but it is an arbitrary one since you can't possibly quickly research the past and guestimate the future of the potential link partners.

If you are putting in that much effort to learn and evaluate sites then you probably don't need to be in the framework of a site which aims to promote easy-to-get low quality spammy link exchanges.

Misfocused Efforts:
The biggest loss for most new webmasters when they hunt for hidden gold is not the potential that their site may end up getting banned. The biggest loss is the misfocused effort.

Right now I probably own around a dozen Yahoo! listed sites. Many of them were accepted free. Instead of looking for a way to sneak into the directory I simply created sites that they liked enough to list.

Obviously the Yahoo! Directory does not have the same value as it did when I first started out, but I think it is a good example for this post.

If you like a topic enough and put in enough effort eventually competing sites will link at you. I now have links from webmaster who took time out of their day to email me about what an ignorant fool I was a few years ago.

SEO Question: Is it safe to check a sites backlinks daily or would you recommend once a week, my understanding is that using API's for the same site to often a no no as the search engines can easily track this.

SEO Answer: For most webmasters it probably does not matter what is being tracked. There are thousands and thousands of webmasters out there marketing their websites, so I don't think that search engines probably flag linkdomain: searches via APIs as being a bad thing because the main thing frequent research typically indicates is that others want to know how someone got to the top of the search results.

As far as checking the backlinks for a site daily, so long as you are manually publishing content and manually acquiring quality links I don't think you are going to acquire them too quickly per say.

I typically only use tools to research how competitive a market is or to look at the best links pointing at a competing website. I think if you are checking your backlinks daily you are probably wasting time that could be spent creating more content or getting more links.

A couple SEO blogs have recently pointed out Greg Boser's Tattler, which is lightning quick and works with the Yahoo! Site Explorer. It is a bit light on features but easy to export and fast as can be. Great for free!

If you are worried about people stealing content or use content syndication you can check out how many pages a unique article or post wind up on by searching for a unique text string of 8 or so words with them surrounded in quotes. Many of the places that legitimately syndicate articles also link back to the source document or link location in the credits box.

I also typically recommend avoiding bulk link exchanges as I don't see it as an effective forward looking SEO strategy for most webmasters, although here is a free script for checking reciprocal links, and you can also do the same in a bit more automated fashion using tools like Backlink Analyzer.

If you run a blog type site I think it is more important to see how quickly your blog is growing compared to related channels and similar publishing formats in the same field. There will always be ups and downs, so don't think everything will go up and to the right forever.

Also note what percent of your new links are legitimate. If most of your new links are spammy and your posts are not getting any new legitimate citations it might be time to think about taking a bit of a break or change what and how you are posting (at least if distribution is a large goal with your site). I find reading a few books and exercising a bit tends to get me inspired and maybe a bit more creative with a new perspective.

I do vanity searches for things like "Aaron Wall", Seobook and "Seo Book" about once or twice a week. By seeing who is talking about you and why they are talking about you it makes it easier to write posts in the future that more people would be willing to talk about.

SEO Question: Can you explain what the Deep Link Percentage is, I ran a few sites and was surprised to see numbers as low as 7% with some very well respected SEO and large brick and mortar store websites.

My basic understanding is your deep link percentage is the number of internal pages which are linked to by highly relevant incoming links from highly relevant established pages. So for example if you had a ten page site and had one incoming indexed link pointing to each page from a site with proper anchor text your DLP would be 100%?

SEO Answer: Deep link percentage is the % of all your backlinks (or inbound links) that point at pages other than your home page.

What you do is the following steps:

• Do a link search for a site in Yahoo! to determine all links pointing at it, say Y! [linkdomain:linkhounds.com]. That just returned 1,490 results for me (all links to that domain).

• Lets subtract out links to our domain coming from within that domain (also known as internal linkage data) Y! [lindomain:linkhounds.com -site:linkhounds.com] 1,480 results (all links to domain - links from internal pages...it is a really small ~ 10 page website)
• Now lets find out how many pages link at internal pages. To do this we must search for all links pointing at the domain minus links pointing at the home page. Y! [linkdomain:linkhounds.com -site:linkhounds.com -link:http://www.linkhounds.com -link:http://linkhounds.com]. That gives me 1,240 deep links. Notice how in that last step I had to subtract the number of links pointing at both the www. version and non www. version of the home page.

So we calculate deep link ratio to be
# of deep links
---------------
# of links pointing at site

1,240
----- = 84%
1,480

84% is exceptionally high for most sites. Most major newspapers are not even that high. The reason that site was so high are

• I have not actively promoted the site much

• the site generally looks like dog crap so people are probably hesitant to link at it (hey I used a free design template)
• the tools on the site are rather useful and attract a good number of natural links (notice how Jim Boykin just said yesterday how he thinks most paid SEO tools are pure trash, but he also posted that he frequently uses the tools on Linkhounds)
• some people mirror some of the tools and link back at the original tool locations

I pulled results from Yahoo! because they tend to show more of their known linkage data than Google or MSN do. The theory with the deep link ratio is that sites with a higher deep link ratio typically tend to have a more natural link profile.

Depending on your content quality and your content management system you may end up having a really high deep link ratio or a really low one. Generally a higher deep link ratio is better, because it does a better job of shielding you link popularity to make it look natural, but you should compare what other sites in your industry are doing and go from there. Blending in is typically a good thing.

When you referenced the 7% figure for some of the brick and mortar stores they may lack useful compelling content within their site. If they have a strong brand but little citation-worthy content then most of their links will end up pointing at their home page.

Also note that it may be uncommon for all your deep links to point at one specific page. If sites are naturally integrated into the web they should be able to acquire multiple references to their site from related sites.

Many new webmasters do not mix their anchor text very well and concentrate too much on trying to rank just the home page for hyper competitive terms. Many of the old guard on the SEO scene also spend a good amount of time trying to drive 3, 4 and 5 word searches at some of their internal pages.

Please note that there are some killer ideas that are just uber cool linkbait that will end up causing many links to point at one page. Be it the home page or an internal page. A couple examples I can think of:

• currency converters

• color scheme generator
• Xenu Link Sleuth
• online petitions

If you have individual pages or ideas that are exceptionally link-worthy I would not suggest worrying about them or downplaying them because you are trying to fit some random ratio (as I don't really think there is a golden ratio). Ride them for all they are worth, but then also look to come up with other good ideas or content, etc.

Roger Smolski also has an article on DLR. I am not sure, but I think he may have been the one who coined the phrase.

SEO Question: Are you aware of an SEO ranking (by revenue) list anywhere?

SEO Answer: There are two ways to take that question. I will try to answer both of them :)

What SEO companies have the most value?
Very few SEO companies are public. Those that are public are rolled into larger corporations with other businesses as well. I also absolutely do not think that bigger equates to better.

Quality SEO does not scale. You really only need a half dozen or so quality employees to make millions of dollars a year. Many big firms end up hiring lots of people to get on the horn cold calling people or using other aggressive sales techniques.

I have been offered deals to make a commission selling leads to some of the larger SEO firms on the market and I have always turned down that option and have been willing to make less (often nothing) referring leads to friends that I know and trust.

From personal experience I would say that I probably provided better value for my price when I was new to the field because back then I was a bit hungry.

As companies grow bigger they typically get less hungry with how hard they are willing to work to make the same amount of money. I have seen the results of some work from large SEO companies that get people to sign contracts for $1,000 a month and keep charging for work even if they do nothing but offer generalized suggestions that are not implemented.

After 6 or 7 months of working with a large SEO firm one of my friends had about 4 links pointing at their website. One was from their official manufacturer and some of the other links used anchor text like BuyViagra.com with the keywords ran together. Not good considering how few links they had after that much time and $6,000 in the hole.

What SEO Companies do the Best Work?
That is a bit of a tough call because I have not hired many companies. As mentioned above I would probably recommend staying away from large firms with many employees.

I typically refer many people to my friend Daniel, WeBuildPages, or DaveN. When a firm is really good and really established it is hard to match up a client worth working for because they have to be able to afford a high rate to be worth the time of a good firm. Many top SEOs place significant value on their time because they can make money creating their own sites.

What SEO Business Models are Worthwhile?
As far as what business models within SEO are worth doing I think affiliate marketing or contextual advertising are nice because they make great recurring income per unit time / effort and do not require much in the lines of customer service. In fact, if you are good at finding the right verticals you can even outsource large portions of the content production business model while being virtually guaranteed profits.

The other SEO business models that are worthwhile are ones where you can create value without having to give significant attention to each lead and/or guarantee end results. If you are guaranteeing results you should only work with legit companies that have intangible assets favoring them or else you are probably going to be better off working as an affiliate marketer and web publisher.

Many SEO verticals are rather profitable. A few examples:

• keyword research services - Dan Thies is considered about the only game in town

• link brokering - not much ongoing effort per client AND it includes recurring commissions
• link building - since it is considered so hard to build links people are willing to pay a good amount for a set number of links. Even though fewer links may have more value people like the idea of getting x links for y dollars.
• directories - not many of these are well monetized via contextual advertisements, but some directories are rather profitable from submission fees. The hard part about directories is many submitters (including me) hate paying recurring fees because it gets to be a bit complex if they pay recurring fees across 100 different directories for 50 different sites. I would probably stick away from making a general one if I made a directory. I would also look for ways to make it extensible (not forcing every site to get the same sized description and link).
• selling a how to book - hey that's me! I would do pretty good on the business front if I did not spend so much money going to conferences, building SEO tools that I give away, and have an ultra sleazy bogus lawsuit recently thrown my way.
• selling SEO software - most of the buyers in the SEO market are newbies to the market. It is appealing to think that there is some simple automated software that will make it all make sense. If I worked as hard at creating software for sale as I did creating my ebook and blog I have no doubt I would make 10 to 20 times as much income as I do. The problem with software is that it ages quickly, and most of it quickly becomes obsolete garbage, but since people think they need it the demand is there, so people fill the market position. That is why you see sites offering to use software to submit your site to search engines for $2.99. No doubt it is a complete scam, but it is what many people want so the service is available. Most well versed SEO professionals use some of the free software and create their own custom software in house.

I would stick away from selling SEO services unless you had a strong brand which allowed you to get ultra high quality leads. Why?

Organic results drive about 3 times as much traffic as the pay per click ads and yet business on average are spending around 10% as much on organic search as they spend on paid search (at least according to MarketingSherpa).

Marketers spent $5.5 billion on paid listings in 2005 compared with just $660 million on optimization for organic listings.

As the algorithms advance it will be harder to put garbage at the top of the search results. If you are putting garbage at the top of the search results and businesses are only willing to pay you on average about 3 to 5% of the value you are driving then you may as well be a content provider and let them fight over you contextual ad revenue and augment that with affiliate income.

What Keyword Terms and Phrases have the Most Value?
I think it is typically worth avoiding chasing the exact same keyword list many other people chase. The top earning keyword lists that are widely marketed have lead to many people creating sites about mesothelioma. In that sense competition may scale quicker than profits.

If you are in a robust marketplace and most sites are chasing after the top term you may be able to squeak into a great market position by going after some of the smaller overlooked phrases.

Localization and using keyword modifiers are huge. So is market depth. If there are only a few high bidders on the most general terms then odds are not so great that contextual ad value will be much of anything for ads triggered by similar content.

If you can find a way to leverage user generated content that allows you to pick up significant traffic from misspelled terms.

Also within a market you have to look at how the lead value breaks down based on location or other demographics. Andrew at Web Publishing Blog recently pointed at this chart of mortgage lead value by location. Also note that if there are 100,000 people chasing California real estate and only 300 focusing on Kentucky it may make better sense to chase Kentucky if you are starting from scratch.

Overture, Wordtracker, and the Google AdWords API offer search volume estimates and Overture currently lets you view their bid prices, but you also have to research why the top sites are ranked and your chances of breaking into the top results when you try to calculate the value of a market.

Another obvious option for testing market volume and value is to set up a test Google AdWords account and sign up for an affiliate program to see what sort of search volume and conversion rate you get.

You can also look at the number of news articles about a topic and trending blog references to see if the keyword is gaining or losing mindshare within the web publishing industry. I also linked to the Del.icio.us tags on my keyword research tool to show what sorts of stories, tools, and whatnot were recently saved.

SEO Question: I read your book and it said you could get links from charities. Do you have a list of the best charity websites to get on or ones you have gotten on? It feels kind of awkward to ask a charity if they will give you a link back if you pay money, that's why I want to contact ones you have already contacted.

SEO Answers: Not sure how good of an idea this is to answer this one publicly, but why not, eh.

There is a thin line with the etiquette to it, so its really something you need to research and feel out. It is not something you just want to work off a list with.

Search for stuff like

• sponsors

• donors
• donations
• please visit our sponsors
• thanks to the following donors
• etc

After you find a few websites that are leveraging the donation angle
you can follow their paths by doing a Yahoo! linkdomain search for their domain and text that would indicate they were working the donor angle (for example linkdomain:www.site.com sponsors).

A few things I would also say about the donation angle:

• If your site is high profile and the donation cost is far less than the value of the link then quickly others will follow where you have been to lower the value of that link.

• If you do not have many legitimately earned quality links and most of your links come from spammy bits of the web (like junk web directories and scraper sites) and donation pages then that might mess up your link profile (since your co citation data will put you in the neighborhood of a bunch of spammy sites).
• The best donation links to get are things that are a one time occurring event AND on topic. After the one time events have passed you do not have to worry about the page becoming filled with thousands of spammy links. If it is on topic it is icing on the cake as well. Here is a great example: a cat site or pet site helping buy the new server for the Kitten Wars site.
• Sponsoring newsletters and the like can be cool as well, as those tend to get less links per page. Our link suggestion tool may help you come up with a variety of other link getting ideas.
• Donations that do not look like donations are great. The more abstract your donation the better off you are. So for example if you donate an information product you made that might be hard for others to find and replicate that link (or know why a particular person linked at you). The same is true for those who donate hosting, web design, or logos to great causes. Some people even work eBay auctions into their donation angle.
• Even if search engines do not count the donation links for a long time they still are usually cheap enough that the ROI should be there if your business model is sound. Again though they should only be one part of your overall link profile.