What Links Have the Most Value?

Rand asks do links from the top ranked sites for your keyword have the most pull?

The question I pose today, however, is on the subject of links from the top ranking pages in the existing SERPs. These links are heavily pursued by SEOs and traffic builders as good sources for both referrals and high conversion visitors. After all, if the visitors are primarily coming through search, it's easy to determine whether they are likely to convert simply by running PPC campaigns in those results. But, let's imagine for a moment that the visitor value was entirely removed from the equation, and the link was purchased/cajoled/traded purely for the purpose of boosting rankings.... Are the highest ranking pages on a subject providing the most valuable links?

Jim Boykin offers a workaround into the neighboorhood:

I'd have to say that getting links from the "Similar pages" to those in the top 5 might even be better. (Google's "related:" command).

These "related/similar" sites are sites that have common backlinks to the top sites...so a kind of "back door" approach to getting "in the neighborhood" is approaching those sites since they help to identify the neighborhood.

It is a bit hard to separate out the direct and indirect effects of a link, especially if a story goes viral. A few months ago EGOL made a post about the importance of natural links and other elements of SVA. Sometimes the best part of a good link is the onslaught of secondary links that follow.

Partial Article Link Exchange

I have not tried this idea out yet, but St0n3y has a new content exchange link exchange idea.

Some people who would be willing to trade content are too lazy to write an article for your site, so what you do is write an article for their site which links back to your site and then write most of an article for your site to link to them.

Leave out a section for pointers or tips and let them write a pointer or two including links back to their site.

How Do You Turn Vision Into a Viral Story?

Bausch & Lomb did a study on Beer goggles.

Within a couple years up to 20% of viral linkbait will likely be from various scientific(ish) commissioned studies and the like. Even if the stories are half-assed the added controversy would likely equate to more links.

[from TW]

Blog About Early Days at Google

Xooglers - a blog about working at Google. Lots of interesting stories. [via SEW]

In other Google news, it appears they are testing click to call and are looking deeply at print ads.

How to Make Google AdWords Ineffective

In How to Become the Doctor for a Famous Rock Band Clifton Sewell tells the whole world (including his competitors) that AdWords are currently under priced in his vertical.

The doctors have been running paid ads on Google for four months now, under terms such as "San Francisco Doctor". They're spending roughly 50 cents per click for top positions and their total monthly spend is about $500. "We get about 20-30 new patients a month from it, so we're happy," said Clifton.

Next month part 2 of the series will be out, where Clifton bitches about how AdWords is ineffective due to being hyper competitive.

Mapping the Google vs eBay Local Shopping Wars

WSJ: Getting an Oil Change Off eBay [sub req]

EBay is aiming to take over the phone book's customary role as the first place people turn to find local services from housecleaners to accountants.

While eBay Inc.'s focus for now is on auto services like oil changes and brake jobs, its goal may be to connect consumers with local businesses of all kinds. This could signal a major shift in the way consumers shop for such services and greatly affect pricing and competition among local shops.

Does eBay have any sort of a map? How are they going to do local without one? Craigslist (which eBay owns part of) links off to Google and Yahoo! maps. I think Google and Yahoo! get information from the same source: Navteq. Not sure if Navteq is going to go after local search as well, but they recently partnered with Zagat.

Any chance someone would want to scoop the leading map company? Are there any other high quality digital mapping companies?

Froogle was recently upgraded, and without a hitch! Google's Froogle Drops eBay for a Day.

When Paypal was upgraded in June Google overshaddowed the news with the announcement of Google Wallet.

Here is yet another article about who should be afraid of Google.

Expert Claims to Have Beaten Google Sandbox...

So WMW has a subscriber only thread titled Expert Claims to Have Beaten Google Sandbox. The best info is in the free Matt Cutts on the Google Sandbox thread. DaveN mentions a site that was quickly out of the box. His main tip?

don't think like an SEO
build site go get links from ...... <- seo

Dave also showed some encrypted logfiles showing that he was getting decent traffic from a couple sites outside of search engines.

RAE also offers up

IME it is more accurate to go *after* traffic and not links.

Find the Easter Eggs in Google AdWords

Andrew Goodman says there is an Easter egg feature in the new AdWords system:

And did we mention pay-per-call, separate content bidding, an obscure nameless easter egg feature that I don't wish to comment on but would like to thank Google for adding apparently in response to a wish list entry I think I posted long ago at Webmasterworld and SE Watch Forums...

Anyone know what egg Andrew is talking about? A bit hard to search WebmasterWorld right now, but SEW has What are your Top 5 AdWords feature or tool requests?

Based on a bit of thinking and Andrew's posts in that top 5 features thread I think some of the cool things you can now do with AdWords are:

Run site targeted content ads without paying CPM rates by bidding on the official site names or common phrase matched page elements of sites you want to advertise on.
Target ads against competing products without competitors being able to prove you are using their trademarks or product names to trigger your ads. This prevents you from taking needless large sums of crap that I took about a year or so ago.
In the past Andrew also hinted at - trailer park geotargeting and Googleplex-cam.

Angel Funding Via Google AdSense

When I recently interviewed Matt Cutts he stated that many companies at the Web 2.0 conference were powered by AdSense. Kevin Burton hopes to take AdSense one step further, using it for angel funding for TailRank. Some others are already donating their AdSense.