When we talk about "trust" in terms of websites, we often refer to elements such as adding details such as you address and contact details, a privacy policy, and a guarantee. But trust is also a process.Trust is something earned with every interaction.

For example, once a music artist has built up a fan base, their new album is bound to sell more units than a new artist. The fans place a higher level of trust in someone with whom they have positive, prior experience. It's not just about the intrinsic quality of the music, it's also about the conditions that lead to a valued relationship. The same goes for websites.

Thinking of trust as a process can help build momentum, build your name, and build your reputation. In order to get users to engage with your site, they need to first place a level of trust in your site. Thankfully, the bar is reasonably low. You don't have to convince them to hand over their life savings, you only need to convince them that engaging with your site will provide them with value and not waste their time. And in order to keep them over the long term, you must maintain that trust.

Let's look at a few broad principles about trust as a process.

Ease Of Interaction

Make it easy for people to interact with the site. Learn the self-evident lessons of usability. Go beyond usability. Offer easy ways for people to interact. Why is interaction important? The most important trends in the web space in recent times have been about community and shared space. Think Facebook, blogging, Wikipedia, feed readers, and cloud computing. They're all about interaction, as opposed to the mid 90's web, which was mostly about top-down publishing.

Interaction will become an increasingly important factor over the coming few years, especially as the global recession bites deeper. Here's an exert from Jason Calacanis' latest email letter:

"The good news in all of this is that folks are going to be spending a lot of time online, playing video games and consuming things that are not expensive. They're going to be looking for "experiences over expenses. ...Why will there be a boom in traffic, engagement and participation?

Well, people will have time on their hands and the desire to socialize. Group behavior makes people feel better. One of the best cures for the blues is sharing a meal with friends.

Blogging became a phenomenon not because of some technological advance, but because between 2002 and 2005 there were a lot of unemployed--and underemployed--individuals with a lot to say and a lot of freetime. Bloggers like Peter Rojas, Michael Arrington, Nick Denton, Rafat Ali, Xeni Jardin and Om Malik broke out in the down market--not the upmarket."

Awards

People like to feel important. Offer them an award or an elevated status level. You see this technique used in forums. Members are given classifications, from Newbie through to Moderator. Bestowing moderator status not only assigns an administrative role in itself a form of hierarchy - but it also elevates their status within the community. Similarly, the granting of stars, boosting posts to sticky status, or boosting posts to the front page has a similar effect.

So long as an award process is transparent and consistent, people will come to trust in it, which, in turn, leads to greater levels of engagement.

Voting

People like to feel their opinion matters. Give people an opportunity to vote. Voting helps make people feel included, and that they are influencing outcomes. An obvious example of such a system is Digg. Digg is a community built around voting and a forum for expressing personal opinion. It could be argued that the downside of Digg is that some people's votes appear to matter more than those of others. The lack of transparency is, to my mind, Diggs biggest flaw. If people feel that voting is skewed, they are less inclined to trust the system.

Meet Expectations

Deliver what your users expect.

Google had a problem. They wanted to index subscription-only material, but clearly publishers did not want to give this material away. This led to a situation where Google users would click on a result, but not get the article they expected, based on their previous experience of using Google i.e. clicking on a result leads directly to the indexed content. This situation leads to a decrease in trust. So Google came with First Click Free. First Click Free allows users to skip over the subscription page on their first visit.

The lesson is to try and maintain consistency. If users get something other than they've come to expect, they'll leave.

A Sense Of Belonging

People like to feel they belong. Cultivate a sense of belonging, and look to include people, wherever possible. Be accessible. Talk in terms of the group, rather than the individual. Examine the language you use. Does your language speak of a sense of community, involvement, and shared values? Of course, this won't apply to every type of site, but if you've got a strategy based around user interaction, then look for ways to make people feel as if they belong. It might be something as simple as responding to people's comments in timely fashion, or providing a personalized welcome message, or using inclusive language.

Social Proof Of Value

People like to go where other people are. Think about ways in which you can demonstrate that other people use, and place a high value upon, your site.

Methods include visitor counters, positive mentions you've received in the popular press, recent comments on your site, feed reader subscription stats (like those offered by FeedBurner), third party traffic stats (from sites like Alexa and Compete.com) and quotes from known influencers. Make sure that people who are new to your site see these social proofs as soon as possible. Don't bury them deep - put them up front, loud and proud. Don't be afraid to blow your own horn.

Social proof is an increasingly important aspect of internet marketing. Some things gain currency for no other reason than everyone else likes it. No one wants to eat at an empty restaurant, even if the food is just as good as the heaving restaurant next door. People like to be where other people hang out.

To get there, you need to establish momentum. But how on earth do you build that momentum from scratch? The answer isn't pretty - it's hard - but there three concepts you are helpful.

Have a read of this article, Filthy Linking Rich & Getting Richer by Mike Grehan, if you haven't read it already:

"The great twentieth century sociologist Robert Merton dubbed it the "Mathew effect" as a reference to a passage in the Bible, in which Mathew observes, "For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath." The Mathew effect, when applied to networks, basically equates to well connected nodes being more likely to attract new links, while poorly connected nodes are disproportionately likely to remain poor.....It has been proposed that "the rich get richer" effect drives the evolution of real networks. If one node has twice as many links as another node, then it is precisely twice as likely to receive a new link."

This is also known as cumulative advantage.

Also take a look at this article in the New York Times, entitled "Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?". To summarize, the article talks about how social influence plays a large a role in determining the market share of successful songs as differences in quality.

"The long-run success of a song depends so sensitively on the decisions of a few early-arriving individuals, whose choices are subsequently amplified and eventually locked in by the cumulative-advantage process, and because the particular individuals who play this important role are chosen randomly and may make different decisions from one moment to the next, the resulting unpredictability is inherent to the nature of the market.....If one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors. "

So, popularity is an impossible process to replicate and systematize. Popularity is due to a combination of factors, which could include take-up by a few influencers, being in the right place at the right time, gaining the momentum affect as others get on board, and a large dose of luck.

However, there are, I think, three main lessons here.

One is the role of influencers. Influencers is a fairly broad term, which can include people who hold sway over large communities, to those who are merely inclined to pass on a good find to another person. You need to make it easy for those people to engage with your site. To trust you. It's old fashioned word-of-mouth, and it's still the most powerful marketing method there is.

In practical terms, try linking out to the inflencers and saying good things about them. Or bait them. Give them things. Make it easy for them to talk about you.

Secondly, identify the hubs with a sphere of influence. All communities have a few, central authorities around which the entire community orbits. Try to get seen on those sites, whether it's by buying advertising, posting articles, or participating in discussion.

Thirdly, leverage off a trust process.

SEO is an example of leveraging off a trust process. The user trusts Google to find the best results. The searcher searches on a phrase, and chooses a result from the left hand side of the page. The user will often choose one of the top three listings.

The key to achieving these things is tenacity. And to build and maintain trust.

In the following interview of Jon Stewart, Bill O'Reilly mentioned that Jon's audience was younger and left leaning.

Recent research from a survey of 3,036 Americans confirms that people who contribute content to the web are skewed toward being young, left-leaning, and more passionate about the sites they contribute content on.

In Online Communities and Their Impact on Business [PDF] Rubicon Consulting highlights the following:

Most frequent contributors are different from the average web user. They're more ethnically diverse; more technically skilled; more likely to be single; more likely to work in technology, entertainment, or communications companies; and more likely to be Democrats. But most of all, they are younger than typical web users. Half of the web's most frequent contributors are under age 22.

The common stereotype for the Digg crowd also applies across many other sites and industries.

That's not to say you should try to appeal to the Digg audience, but if a disproportionate amount of content is created by young liberals then there is business sense in appealing to that demographic. Appealing to the 10% of people who create content makes you look better to the other 90% of people who use the web.

If you look at a traditional user adoption curve the people to the far left are the people who have blogs and the people who leave feedback on other websites. The interaction with the loud users is what helps potential customers build confidence. These loud stakeholders are influencers.

A site which has more user generated content on it has the following benefits

• a broader range of unique textual content to rank against (which helps it build a larger organic audience)
• built in social proof of value/cumulative advantage (people think it is popular, and perhaps more authoritative, because others contribute to the site)
• built in loyalty (people who contribute to your site have a vested interest in spreading the word about your site, and seeing to the success of your site)
• more editorial reviews that turn searchers into shoppers into buyers (reviews increase consumer confidence and make them more likely to purchase)
• more inbound links (people are more likely to link at a page full of editorial reviews, and the people who review products are more likely to own websites)
• faster and cheaper market feedback
• a broader reach with new releases (particularly if you build an audience by offering an email newsletter or a regularly updated blog)
• lower traffic acquisition costs, lower marketing cost, and higher value per visitor (due to many of the above points)

The Rubicon research also states that young people are more likely to be influenced by online reviews, and are more likely to search online for support issues...so having a search accessible FAQ section can drastically lower customer support costs.

We've all, at some point, received the "request-for-a-link" email.

Such emails are useless, on a number of levels, the main reason being that the offer is lousy. However, such emails also tend to get the pitch wrong, so further limit the chances of getting the link. Getting the pitch right - the way the offer is described - is a bit of an art.

I've been looking back through the emails I've received and there are common characteristics displayed in those I ignored, and those I responded to.

There are two aspects common to all such emails, the offer and the pitch.

The Offer

The offer must be compelling. No matter how good the pitch, if the offer doesn't advantage the recipient in some way, then the sender is unlikely to receive a response.

Take, for example, the PR offer.

I receive a lot of these. They don't get read. Why? There's no advantage for me in doing so. There is advantage for the company that wants free coverage, of course, but not me. Unless the information is ground-breaking, and hasn't been circulated widely in the public domain, then the typical PR email "offer" is very poor. The offer is essentially this: "give us your time and effort for nothing so we can advance our cause"

Well, no. No I won't :)

But lets say the offer is to my advantage. Either I'm receiving some genuinely useful information, a good opportunity, or a good incentive. It can still be let down by the quality of the pitch.

The Pitch

Here is an email Aaron received recently:

Subject: About an Advertisement on Your Blog

Hellow.
I've recently created a software for automated social bookmarking.

Just wanted to ask, if it is possible to order a post about our tool on your blog, written by you ?
You don't even need to install and actually test the software if you don't want to, just mention that there is something out there that is worth using for seo purposes.
Here is a website: (removed)

Thanks.

There are a few obvious problems in terms of both the offer and the pitch.

• "Hellow". The very first word is misspelled. This is unprofessional.
• Does not include the recipients name. It's not personal.
• Asks about advertising, then demands coverage, with no transition. What's in it for me? Where's the incentive?
• Asks us to post about the software without trying it. Again, why would we do that? Our credibility would be at stake, for starters.
• Domain misspelled. You'll have to take my word on that one, but it was :)
• Does not have the senders name in the email. Again, unprofessional.
• Their domain is a scrolling sales letter with no other content. Why would we recommend our readers, who tend to be very web-savvy, to such a site? We'd lose credibility.

Not only is the offer a poor one, but we can't take the pitch seriously either. It could have worked if they'd thought a little bit more about the offer, and pitched correctly.

How To Pitch An Email

1. Make It Personal

Imagine a telephone call where the caller launched straight into their message, but with time spent on social niceties. Even telemarketers make some effort to establish rapport.

The same goes with email. You need to know who you're writing to and address that person by name. Read their About Us page, read their site, Google them, get to know them. It can be a good idea to make contact with them, and build a rapport, some time before making your request for a favor. Try to pay it forward. Give them something first.

It's also a good idea to clearly outline a connection you have with the recipient, if such a fact isn't already established. For example, "I read your article "SEOmoz's Linkscape: Why the Backlash is Overblown" and wanted to ask you a question...." or "I was talking to a friend of yours, Aaron Wall, and he suggested I....."

2. Keep It Professional

Hi Arren,

I waas wanting too no if you would link to my site?

Spelling and grammar matter. No one expects William Shakespeare, but poor spelling and grammar screams "unprofessional". An obvious exception is when you know someone well. The better you know someone, the less the technical aspects of communication tend to matter.

3. Tone

If you don't know someone well, it is best to use a professional tone. Too conversational can come over as "not serious", especially in email correspondence. Remember, it's not like dealing face-to-face, where nuance, inflection, expression and gestures become important signifiers of meaning.

So keep it clean, clear, precise and professional. Be particularly careful with humor. What sounds like a joke to you may get lost in translation, especially if the person you're emailing is from a different country.

If in doubt, play it straight.

4. Message Title

So much depends on the title.

Put yourself in the recipients shoes. Like you, they're probably busy. They're focused on their own stuff. They might have an inbox that is full to bursting, and they're feeling a little guilty about not clearing it out. One more message is just one more problem they must deal with.

Then your message arrives.

In this context, how do you make sure your message desirable?

The trick with email is to make the title personal. Relate it directly to the recipient in some way. Arouse curiosity, praise people, describe a benefit, or pose a direct question. But put a personal spin on it.

A lot of email marketing strategy gets this wrong, particularly in relation to benefits. Titles loaded with benefits, such as ""Do You Hate Your Job? Discover Seven Secrets..." will be viewed as spam. Titles like that may work if you are in the spam business, but they are highly unlikely to work anywhere else. If you do use benefit statements, then try to personalize them.

5. What's In It For The Recipient

This is possibly the most important aspect in getting the recipient to act.

Outline the benefit to the recipient, and do so before they switch off.

Be concise.

Too lengthy, and it's unlikely the recipient will read to the end. A big block of text can be very off-putting. The first contact should be brief. You can go into detail latter. Think of the first email contact as a covering letter.

Try to offer them something of value. A discount code, a free trial, a free product. It should be something of real value.

Ok, so let's try and rewrite the email, using the guidelines. Note: the intent of the original email was a little ambiguous. It sounded as if the person who wrote it wanted a pay-per-post deal. However, SEOBook doesn't do those types of deals, so I've refocused on how it should be pitched, if the writer had bothered to first research SEOBook.com's editorial policy :)

New SEO Software Your Readers Might Like

Hi Aaron,

I'm a loyal reader of SEOBook.com, and I've written a piece of software that you and your readers might be interested in.

The software automates social bookmarking.

You can use the software to help build links and increase traffic to your site. If you'd like to try it out, here is a link to a free copy. I've included a recent case study showing how we took a site from 1,000 visitors to 4,000 visitors in less than a week.

I'd be very interested in hearing any feedback you may have.

Kind regards,

Joe Emailer

acme.com

Not perfect, but it only took one minute to write. I'm sure we can all agree that it is an improvement on the first one.

Aaron might even have answered it....

Sales people talk a lot about about "closing the deal", the final stage in the sales process needed to get people to sign on the dotted line.

Typically, the stages leading up to the "close" are affordability, no perceived need, no hurry, or no trust. Sales people are trained on how to spot and deal with this issues, and ways in which to overcome a customers objections. Sales training is partly systematic, and part art. After all, everyone is different.

It's the same on the web, however unlike the salesperson, you can't engage a person, one-on-one. But there are things you can do to increase the chances of making the sale.

Checklist

I thought I'd put together a simple checklist for beginners on ways in which you can get a visitor to take a desired action. I've included links to some great resources for those who want to dig deeper and see practical examples.

But what if you don't sell things?

Really, every web site "sells" something, be it a good, a service, or an opinion. This checklist can be used, and adapted for any site. Sometimes, a simple change or two is all that is required to go from good to great.

For example, Amazon, a company that builds conversion techniques into their powerful sales platform, made one simple change that made them millions of dollars in extra revenue. Rather than phrase match search results, they displayed products most people purchased after searching on any given query. By doing this, they increased relevance. The result? A revenue increase of 3%, which amounted to millions of dollars in extra sales each year.

You can read more about what Amazon did in this free report "Controlled Experiments On The Web: Survey And Practical Guide"

1. Never Make It Difficult For People To Pay You

Once someone has said "yes" to an idea, you need to get them to sign on the dotted line as quickly as possible. Leave too much time, and people may reflect, have second thoughts, get distracted, or otherwise lose momentum. Think about bricks 'n mortar stores. It's always immediately obvious where, and how, to make payment. If the store is smart, they don't make you wait to pay.

One exception to this rule is if you have a good chance of upselling. However, overplay this strategy, and you might lose the customer altogether. A certain, large domain name registrar springs to mind.....

Further Reading:

• Shopping Cart Usability: 21 Best Practices
• Best Practices for Online Checkout Process
• Hidden Secrets of the Amazon Shopping Cart

2. Be Relevant

Learn the lesson of Amazon. What do you your visitors really want from you?

If you're not what the visitor wants, then all the SEO, testing and tweaks in the world won't help. Monitor what people do on your site after they arrive. Do you know how many visitors click the back button after arriving? If too many visitors click the back button, you've clearly got a relevancy problem.

Obvious, right? What's not so obvious is what to do about it. Which brings me on to point 3....

3. Measure & Iterate

Good analytics are important. What's even more important is acting on the data.

Look at your website as a constant work in progress. It should be always "under construction". Watch what your visitors do, and what they don't do. Make changes, measure the results, then make further changes in response to those results. Repeat.

Converting visitors to action is part science, part art. There is no one way of doing it. What works for you may not work for others.

Further Reading:

• 10 High-Profit Redesign Priorities
• Increase Your Sites Conversion Rate: Google Website Optimizer
• A/B Split Testing

4. Reassure People

The web is often nebulous. Unlike a physical store, or face-to-face dealings, it can be hard for the visitor to gauge credibility. Therefore, you need to go the extra mile to reassue people your site is legitimate. You need to include as many credibility markers as possible.

Examples of credibility markers include your contact details, testimonials, money-back guarantees where appropriate, a physical address and phone number, credit-card security measures, and privacy and data collecting policies. Tell people what to do when/if the process goes wrong.

Further Reading:

• Website Credibility
• How Do People Evaluate a Web Site's Credibility (PDF)
• Do Your Users Trust You?: 21 Tips for Improved Website Credibility

5. Make Your Call To Action Crystal Clear

A call to action is a description of the activity you want your visitor to take.

Do you know where your visitors look and click? Using tools such as CrazyEgg, amongst others, you can approximate eye patterns, and see where visitors click most often. This is where your call to action should be located, if practical.

Eye paths are are also important. What visual or textual elements grab people's attention the most? Try changing the size of the headline. Try changing the separation between the headline and other page elements. Place the headline next to a picture.

Take a look at this before and after:

Before:

http://meclabs.com/resources/hyp1.jpg

After:

http://meclabs.com/resources/hyp2.jpg

The "after" page, with enhanced credibility markers and clearer eye paths and call to action, increased the conversion rate by 40.7%

Further Reading:

• Optimizing Landing Pages 2006
• Optimize your PPC Campaigns, Eye Paths And Page Copy
• Do Your Users Trust You?: 21 Tips for Improved Website Credibility

6. Provide Clear Signposts

Because the web is non-linear, it can be difficult for people to determine where in the process they are, and what happens next. Try to make this explicit by using signposts.

For example, you could outline in the first step of a sales process that the process will take five steps. Then, at each step, clearly show what step people are at. Signposts can be both visual and text.

7. Encourage People

Sometimes, the visitor might be unsure if they are following the process correctly. Encourage people at each step, reinforcing that what they are doing is correct. Create thank you pages and send responder emails. Tell the visitor who to contact if they have any concerns.

8. Give Visitors A Reason To Return

Most visitors aren't ready to buy or commit to action. They're tyre-kicking, they're researching, they're browsing. Try and "capture" these people, and hopefully they'll convert to desired action next time they visit.

Encourage them to do something painless, like bookmarking the site. Offer them a something free in return for their email address. Think about what you can give people in order to make them feel indebted to you. Clearly outline the benefits they'll get if they do return. What's in it for them?

9. Create A Sense Of Urgency

As a seller, you might have a sense of urgency, but the buyer may not. One way to help close the deal is to create a sense of urgency in the buyers mind. Methods such as the time sensitive offer work well i.e. if a visitor orders today, the visitor receives a special discount.

Further Reading:

• The Smart Way to Create a Sense of Urgency

10. Personalize Your Communication

The very existence of a blog or newsletter on your site reinforces the idea that there is a real person behind the site. If appropriate, sharing your views and experiences is a powerful way to engage visitors on a personal level. Careful, though. Over-familiarity can also be annoying. It may also be inappropriate in some environments i.e. old-school corporate.

Amazon features authors statements, reviews, and personal feedback. You really get the feeling the website is a place, in which real people reside and communicate with one another.

Further Reading:

• How to Write With a Distinctive Voice
• Personalization Can Backfire
• Converting One-Off Blog Visitors To Regular Readers

Right after I finished writing a post about how being likeable is a great business strategy, I went back to Sphinn and saw it erupted with controversy and negative feedback about SEOmoz's Linkscape. Since then threads have been open, closed, and open. People are worried about everything from the index size to how to remove your site to why you shouldn't label your site with an obvious SEO footprint.

So my timing on that last post was a bit off, but I still think the general thesis is valid. But now that there has been so much negative feedback I figure it is my job to play devil's advocate and highlight reasons why most SEOs do not need to be too worried about Linkscape.

Cool Features

Unique Linking Domains

One of the coolest features of this tool is knowing the number of unique linking domains pointing links at a specific site, but that feature is for paying members only.

A competing tool by the name of Majestic SEO allows you to see that data as part of their free overview. Click on the image below for an example.

If your competitor has high authority links then you need more than just quantity to compete, but if most of their backlinks are garbage then this is a good stat to have, along with many other stats you can get from tools like SEO for Firefox.

Spam Reporting

Not that I advocate spam reporting (as the official guidelines have departed from reality so much that almost everyone that ranks is spamming and/or spammed in the past to get to their current market position), but for professional SEOs that own dozens of sites and like doing spam reports to Google this might be a good tool for outing competitors, since it makes it easy to find some noscript links, links from off the page, inbound 301 redirects, but the average webmaster probably does not need to worry about that.

A Bit Top Heavy

One of the biggest limitations in Linkscape is that you can only go 500 results deep unless you want to buy a custom report. They allow you to see various lenses of 500 at a time through search features and filters, but a big recommendation I can make on this front is for them to allow you to see all that data, even if it requires exporting data to CSV...they already spent the money to collect the data, so if you're a customer they may as well give it to you...it helps nobody if nobody sees it.

Majestic SEO appears to have a similar sized database as Linkscape, and they allow you to do a full data export for your own domain free of charge. Other domains they charge a scaling price for depending on the number of links to the domain.

More Cool Features?

Nick Gerner promised more features in the next version of Linkscape, but unless they start buying usage data and become more like Compete.com I am not sure if it will be a game changer. On to explaining why...

1. Editorial Rules

When Linkscape was announced Danny Sullivan said:

Personally, I'm not too worried. You want to compete with me and get links in places where I'm listed? We get listed in places where editorial rules. So just knowing where we're at doesn't get you in the door -- you have to be good enough to walk in. And if you are good enough, well, good I guess.

The highest quality links typically tend to be editorial in nature, with many of those being driven by social relationships. No matter how much one decides to analyze link patterns, they can't re-create most of the link relationships if they don't already have the content quality, market exposure, and awareness. And if you copy someone's idea after they already did it you need to greatly improve upon it to get credit for it.

2. Tons of Alternative Data Sources

Common link analysis questions...

How do I Get a Basic Competitive Overview of the Search Results?

Search Google with SEO for Firefox turned on. Make sure you are pulling data in the automatic mode while searching.

I Want to do Anchor Text Analysis. How do I Analyze Links?

Some options include...

• SEO Link Analysis - a free Firefox extension that adds anchor text to Google Webmaster Central and Yahoo! Site Explorer.
• Link Diagnosis - another useful Firefox extension.
• Link Analysis Tool - shows the PageRank and number of inlinks to each page on a site, though it requires you to set up a MySQL database.
• Both Google Webmaster Central and Majestic SEO allow you to download backlink profiles for your own sites after you authenticate your sites.
• Backlink Analyzer - a free desktop based tool I had created a few years ago that pulls data from the Yahoo! API. Make sure to watch the video on the download page before using it.

I Want to Find New Links to Competing Sites

If you want to find what someone's best ideas are all you have to do is subscribe to the Google Blogsearch feed for links to their site, like so. That should list many of the people who are talking about this site.

A paid option on this front is Advanced Link Manager. It costs $199 (or $299 if you package it with Advanced Web Ranking) and scrapes data from Yahoo!, keeping track of the date when the link was found.

I Want to Find New Links to My Site

This is the same as competing sites, but you can also use your web analytics and server logs to dig up additional information. You can also look inside Google Webmaster Central to download backlink reports.

I Want to Find The Most Authoritative Links Pointing at a Site

Yahoo! Site Explorer generally orders backlinks roughly in terms of authority, with some of the most authoritative backlinks showing up at the top of their results.

I Want to Find .edu Links

Yahoo! Search offers a wide array of advanced link operators. Here are .edu & .gov links pointing at searchengineland.com.

I Want to Get an Estimate of Unique Linking Domains

Majestic SEO offers a free estimate...though, like LinkScape, their crawl is not as comprehensive as Yahoo!'s.

I Want to Find Hub Links?

• Hub Finder is a great tool for finding topical hubs.
• Google TouchGraph is another great option with a cool graphical interface.

What Sites Drive the Most Traffic to My Competitors?

The best way I have found to get this data is from Compete.com Referral Analytics, though it requires a $500 a month subscription...which is a nice chunk of change, unless you are already doing quite well!

Do I Have Any Broken Links?

• Xenu Link Sleuth will crawl your site and help you find broken links, showing you which pages the broken links were on.
• Google Webmaster Central offers broken link reports.

3. All Link Graphs Are Unique

Each search engine has its own crawling priorities and own web graph. Google has probably spent hundreds of millions of dollars building and refining their crawling sequence. No two crawls are the same.

Image from Google Touchgraph.

4. Yahoo! Search Counts Link Weight Differently Based on Page Segmentation

Google's PageRank was designed based on a random walk theory, where browsers click a random link on the page. But search engines are looking to move beyond the random walk model.

Yahoo! Search's Priyank Garg stated:

The irrelevant links at the bottom of a page, which will not be as valuable for a user, don’t add to the quality of the user experience, so we don’t account for those in our ranking. All of those links might still be useful for crawl discovery, but they won’t support the ranking.

5. Microsoft May be Looking to Heavily Incorporate Usage Data

Microsoft did research on BrowseRank, which aims to use actual usage data to augment (or perhaps replace) their link graph. Be default, Internet Explorer 8 sends usage data to Microsoft...when you know what 80% of web users are doing you do not need to rely on a random walk.

Think of having access to the majority of the web's usage data like this:

• If Google's algorithms are more relevant than Microsoft, then putting weight on usage data allows Microsoft to quickly catch up by weighting whatever Google is weighting
• Microsoft could theoretically be better than Google at filtering out paid links, as most paid links in a sidebar or footer do not send much traffic...and thus could easily be weighted less than links in content - though with Google owning so many products they could improve significantly on this front as well, if they decided to use their AdSense data, analytics data, Chrome browser data, Feedburner data, and toolbar data.

6. Google Does a Lot of Hand Editing

Google hires 10,000 remote quality raters.

Beyond those editors there are many search engineers inside the webspam team offering a variety of techniques to throw off SEOs, including

• stripping all PageRank from a site and killing all its rankings
• stripping some portion of a site's PageRank and ranking abilities
• stripping PageRank from the toolbar but still allowing sites to rank
• showing full PageRank in the toolbar, but killing the ability of a link to pass PageRank

Without working inside of Google and/or buying and testing lots of links across a wide array of sites and verticals it would be hard to know if any particular site passes PageRank, and how much it might pass. For instance, a link from Text-Link-Ads.com's website is one of my highest MozRank links, but I doubt Google places much weight on that link since Google does not let Text Link Ads rank for their own brand.

Read Eric Schmidt's perspective on brands to consider how Google holds different sites to different standards.

7. Search Engine Editorial Policies are Selective, & Constantly Changing

According to Udi Manber, Google did 450 search algorithm updates last year. Even if you could somehow catch up with all the editorial stuff search engines were doing to manipulate their version of the link based web graph, you would have a hard time of keeping up with it - let alone accounting for the hoards of usage data the search engines have.

The status of a link (and its ability to pass PageRank) may arbitrarily change based on media exposure. In the past many websites were hijacked by 302 affiliate links (this even happened to Google's site, and this is still happening today to corporate sites as big as Snapnames).

At an SEO conference about 3 or 4 months back someone highlighted that some large sites use 301 redirects on affiliate links. This topic came up once again at SMX East, where it was deemed an acceptable marketing practice:

Shockingly, when asked point blank if affiliate programs that employed juice-passing links (those not using nofollow) were against guidelines or if they would be discounted, the engineers all agreed with the position taken by Sean Suchter of Yahoo!. He said, in no uncertain terms, that if affiliate links came from valuable, relevant, trust-worthy sources - bloggers endorsing a product, affiliates of high quality, etc. - they would be counted in link algorithms. Aaron from Google and Nathan from Microsoft both agreed that good affiliate links would be counted by their engines and that it was not necessary to mark these with a nofollow or other method of blocking link value.

A few years ago I set up my affiliate program to use 301 redirects to prevent hijacking, and get any link benefits I could. But right after I changed by business model to a membership site my affiliate program was featured/outed in this interview, and it no longer passes PageRank.

Watch the above video and see how at 2 minutes and 15 seconds in my site was put up for review to any Google engineer that happened to watch it.

The same set of links, to the same site, using the same format, under similar circumstances...

• counts for most major corporations (and is allegedly an approved and legitimate strategy)
• counted for this site for years
• stopped counting around the time they were outed by a popular SEO blogger

8. Temporal Algorithms + Domains Expire, & May Lose PageRank

Search engines may place weight not only on the number of links pointing at a page, but also on the rate at which links are accumulated. Even if you know the raw number of links and the site age it still does not tell you how many links were built last month or in the last year.

Not only are links born, but some of them rot. The web graph as a whole is over a decade old. Linkrot was a big issue in 1998, and it is still a big issue today. In 1998 6% of links were broken, and the DotBot crawl shows 7% of links being broken.

To appreciate how bad linkrot is...

• if you publish a large site with many outbound links, run Xenu Link Sleuth through your site and see how many broken links you find
• if you run a large complex portal, check your error logs or sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and discover how many broken links you have in your site

Some domains that expire may keep their PageRank, but many expiring domains lose their PageRank. With how hard it is to build links today and 1 in 7 links broke there are SEO tools designed around trying to capture this link equity

The domains that die off may later be re-registered and re-purposed. And keep in mind that the 1 in 7 broken links number is actually much higher than that when you consider how many people buy expired domain names and build them out.

By creating an index of the web in 2008 a person would have no idea if...

• the links occurred recently
• if the links are old
• if the site expired and potentially lost much of its link weight

And Matt Cutts generally hates re-purposing expired domain names. Why? The very first spam site he found was a high PageRank expired domain linked from the W3C. That site was converted to a porn site, and ever since then (before Matt was the head of the webspam group - before Google even had a webspam group) Matt has not liked expired domains.

Matt offers background on that story 30 seconds into this video:

9. Advancing Algorithms That Move Away From PageRank & Anchor Text

Paid links have been an obvious weak spot in the relevancy algorithms for years. PageRank and anchor text are still both important, but Google also considers other factors like...

• domain age / link age
• domain name (and extension)
• domain history (ie: spam infractions/penalties, etc.)
• site authority
• signals of locality (hosting location, TLD, link sources, etc.)
• searcher intent (Google's Amit Singhal stated "the same query can mean entirely different things in different countries. For example, [Côte d'Or] is a geographic region in France - but it is a large chocolate manufacturer in neighboring French-speaking Belgium")
• other forms of search personalization (past searches, user subscriptions, frequently visited sites, etc.)
• editorial partnerships with news companies & other universal search categories (like Google Shopping Search and the maps local onebox)
• usage data (especially with sites they host, like YouTube)
• content age (read up on the Query Deserves Freshness algorithm)

Look at some of the search results from Google's 2001 index and compare them to current search results to see how much Google has moved away from a raw PageRank model. Yahoo! Search's Priyank Garg also stated that they have moved away from placing so much weight on links:

All of those links might still be useful for crawl discovery, but they won’t support the ranking. That’s what we are constantly looking at in algorithms. I can tell you one thing, that over the last few years as we have been building out our search engine and incorporating lots of data, the absolute percentage contribution of links and anchor text to the natural ranking of algorithms or to the importance in our ranking algorithms has gone down somewhat.

Final Thoughts

It is not that Linkscape is a bad tool, it is just aiming to do something incredibly complex, and as long as Yahoo! Site Explorer gives us a decent free sample (and other tools let us layer data on top of Yahoo!) we can get a good idea of the approximate level of competition for free. But with Yahoo! at $12 a share, if Yahoo! gets bought out and Site Explorer goes away then Linkscape (or Majestic SEO, depending on who does a better job of innovation) might be one of the best SEO investments one can make.