We Do Search Engine Optimization.

Dmoz, where art thou? Thou hast forsaken your loyal users and contributors and become a tyrannical organization. Dmoz.org founder Rich Skrenta opines on the ongoing internal struggle of the open directory, and how many problems could be related to retaliation by Time Warner employees over the failed merer with AOL.com.

Skrenta admits that dmoz is broken and has succombed to SEO’s. He seems to relish the fact that the site had a PageRank of 10 and forced Google to re-engineer their algorithms to accomodate the dmoz spam. Everyone knew a listing in the open directory was worth gold, and now it literally seems to require gold (or cash) to be added.

I have been a contributing member of the open directory since 1999 and during my time as an edit of several small categories I took great pride in makine sure only quality sites were listed. Approximately 1 in 5 submitted sites were good enough to be listed, and the rest were low quality spam.

A brief history of dmoz:

Originally launched as NewHoo in 1998
Aquisition offer from Infoseek.com 1 month later
Sold to Netscape.com in 1999
Netscape was sold to AOL.com in 2000
6 week dmoz outage in 2006
September 2007 Dmoz Google SERP’s problem

Google search engine results page for the dmoz search. Note dmoz.org is not #1.

Many websites and blogs are discussing the current state and future possibilities of Dmoz, but the biggest question is how many people really care? I mean seriously, who uses the open directory as an information resource?

Filed under linkbuilding, since no one outside the search engine optimization community seems to know what Dmoz.org is.

Links are the foundation of PageRank and modern search engine algorithms. For your site to rank well you need to be on the receiving end of lots of links. Some pages will send authority voting power attached to outbound links, and some pages do not. As a link builder you need to know which pages are the best to target your link requests.

Indicators of Linkable Pages:

• Is that page indexed
• Is the page cached, if so how recent is the cache date
• Does it have inbound links
• Are the inbound links topically relevant
• How many clicks is the link page away from the homepage
• Does it have toolbar PageRank
• Are outbound links from that page found in Yahoo from the reciprocating page
• Does that page rank well for its own unique text found in the title or content

Read more about link authority at SE Roundtable.

Good news for all you linkbaiters, TextLinkAds is offering a 15% discount from all targeted link purchases. For this month you can get free text links with this discount coupon. This coupon is good for all new orders and extends throughout the life of your link buy. This is a great deal.

TextLinkAds has the largest inventory of sponsoring websites and has traditionally commanded the highest link purchase prices, so the 15% discount really helps. Need more links, buy some targeted links from quality, related websites.

Text Link Ads coupon code: august

Making the case for link exchanges – sometimes good old fashioned hard work pays off. Link exchanges are still one effective method to use for link building. In addition to linkbaiting (creating a controversial or compelling article and submitting to digg.com, reddit.com, stumbleupon.com etc) and social media marketing, and link buying, link trading continues to be a workable model to acquiring links.

Link exchanges are based upon email exchanges, where you physically email the webmaster of a complementary site and ask them to link back to you. It helps immensely if you have already posted their link on your site. Link trading works best when you compliment the site owner you are proposing, and show good faith in posting their link on your site first. Human nature dictates that a good percentage of the population will return your favor out of obligation by linking back to you, provided you have a quality website and it is related.

In my 7 years of SEO and link building, I have seen about 90% of link exchanges remain active over this time period. This is a huge return on investment for sending out an email requesting a link. Link brokers will typically charge you $20-$50 per month for a link, and some of my links have been up for 84 months so this free link represents a value of $1680-$4200!

The link exchange DO’s

1. send compliments
2. actually view their site, don’t send a form email telling them how wonderful their website is without actually having viewed it
3. provide a backlink first
4. be persistent. Most webmastes will not respond to you until the 2nd or 3rd email.
5. personalize your email request. Instead of addressing your email to ‘Webmaster’ search for a real person’s name. People love to see their own name, and are much more likely to open an email with their real name on it.

The link exchange DON’Ts

1. don’t spam – send 1 email and 3-4 well spaced follow-ups, then leave the poor webmaster alone, as they are unlikely to respond to you.
2. do not focus on Page Rank. Seek link partners in your category – these will provide you better long term value
3. never make demands or require a webmaster link back to you with specific anchor text. You can suggest they use “my keyword phrase” but if they use “yourplainwebsite.com” be gracious, thank them for the link, and continue on.
4. don’t ever tell a webmaster their page is worthless because it has a toolbar PageRank of 1 or the page is more than 2 clicks from the homepage. Relevance is key, and PageRank is at least 6 months outdated – a near worthless indicator of the backlink value.

Another benefit of emailing other website owners in your field is that they will often make a business relationship with you. Below is an example of a response I received ALMOST 5 YEARS later! Yes, this person accepted the link exchange after 5 years. It is very powerful when you can have your email sitting in front of your potential partners inbox for years:

—————– Email Received —————–
Sent: Wed, 08 Aug 2007 19:21:40 -0400
From: “Site Fair”
To: “cvos@mysite.com”
Subject: Re: link exchange

Hello cvos,

I added your link to our www.—fair.com. Please check out and let me know if you would like to make any changes. This is code for your site:

—Fair Wide selections of top quality, eco-friendly products made from natural organically grown fibers and ingredients Including clothing & footwear for men, women and children, accessories, home items, non-animal tested body care.

I am also interested in your products.

How do I sign for wholesale?

Thank you,

S——–

—–Fair

——————— Original Message ————————

Sent: Monday, October 28, 2002 7:41 PM
From: “the linker”
To: < info@—fair.com>
Subject: link exchange

please consider exchangling links www.———.com

your link is located here: www.———.com/links

thanks, C V

————————————

If you do it right you can make the power or link exchanges work for you. Search Engine Roundtable and Esoteric labs have good writeups of the current state of link exchanges, and misconceptions of google’s public blogger Adam Lasnik.

The mainstream media is chasing social media hard and embracing linkbaiting with gusto! A major newspaper is bending over backwards to get their content featured on the drudgereport.com

This is the title of the article that appeared on the LA Times FRONT PAGE on August 4, 2007:

Hot links served up daily

So the MSM really wants a piece of the online action.

Here is the title that started everything:

Overwhelmingly, they arrived after spotting this titillating link on a news site called the Drudge Report: “L.A. Times Shock: ‘I am a Transsexual Sportswriter.’ “

Hard not to click on that one.

And they reveal how much traffic this linkbait brought in:

By day’s end, the link to the column accounted for nearly 25% of visits to latimes.com

It goes on to describe Journalist’s lusting after Mr. Drudge:

Every day, journalists and media executives in newsrooms across the land hope they’ll have something that catches Drudge’s fancy … most keep their fingers crossed that he’ll discover their articles on his own and link to them.

And you thought Digg was powerful:

Drudge’s following is so large and loyal that he routinely can drive hundreds of thousands of readers to a single story, photo or video through a link on his lively compendium of the news.

Even the color of Drudge’s hat is exposed:

there’s a lot of irony that Matt Drudge was a black-hat villain, and now a lot of those same journalists realize that getting a link on his website is crucial to their stories getting wider attention… That’s the way the Web works. We’re all trying to make sure our journalism is discovered.

Another revelation, our society reflected in our news consumption, again printed on the front page:

Gossip has become so much a part of journalism that what he does doesn’t stand out.

The idea is to get reporters, who might throw away a self-serving network publicity release, to chase the item on the Drudge Report because it has “more of a news aura” … Some journalists, the executive said, might write the story simply to avoid getting beaten by someone else.

Comparing the traffic of Drudge and major newspaper websites:

the Drudge Report received 3 million unique visits in June, with visitors spending an average of 1 hour and 6 minutes on the site… visitors return an average of 20 times a month. Most newspaper websites would be fortunate to draw a quarter as many return visits.

This directly affects online newspapers profits:

links from Drudge skew readership numbers — up one day, down the next — making it difficult to determine ad rates

How well does Drudge make out:

he regularly links to a website that provides up-to-the-minute wire-service stories — a website he created to cash in on Drudge’s legions

I know Alexa is for entertainment purposes only, but Alexa users clearly favor Drudge:

How cool is it that a multi million dollar media company is begging for recognition from a one blogger? The Drudge Report is a more in depth version of the Daily Show.

Read the full article.

Links are the nerve center of the pulsating web. Links create the internet and add value to your site. Links to you improve your natural search engine placement, and links you create to others enhances your value as an authority on your subject.

When linking to external websites it is best to use meaningful keywords as the anchor text instead of a generic “click here”. Also using the title element gives the link more weight.

How to code a regular text link:

Where to find a quality <a href=”http://fruitcompany.com/” title=”company fruit”>Apple Distributor</a> that can deliver tasty fresh fruit.

How to create a powerful image link:

<a href=”http://fruitcompany.com/” title=”company fruit”><img src=”images/apples.jpg” alt=”green apples on a tree”>Apple Tree</a>

When linking an image, always try to have anchor text associated with the image. This will give the image much more authority and virtually guarantee it will be included in image searches, which can drive huge volumes of traffic. Alt tags are always nice, but they are only effective if the image is linked. Search engines (rightly so) ignore alt text if the image is not linked.

In a ruling sure to please ignorant site owners and lazy webmasters everywhere, a Texas judge has allowed a ruling forbidding deeplinking to content. Instead of using a simple referrer redirect, the site owners spent thousands of dollars suing the website for linking directly to content. Now, these site owners will have much fewer inbound links, and substantially worse ranking. These corporate owners have chosen to isolate themselves from the web and are hurting themselves and web users in their community.

Suing to stop linking is nothing new

Deep linking is a time-honored practice that has existed since the very beginning of the web. Indeed, deep linking was one of the fundamental design principles that helped the web grow as quickly as it did, by making it easy for people to directly access individual web pages.

There is even a DMOZ category devoted to deep linking and link law. I’m sure Jim Boykin the self proclaimed link ninja would agree

Ok, so you can’t exactly delete Microsoft Excel from your harddrive, but Instacalc will give the Myspace generation a lot of educational experience while having fun. Instead of having to read boring math textbooks and memorize endless conversion tables, this nifty program will do all your calculations for you. Need to find out the number of times your heart beats per year? Just enter a simple sentence and get your answer.

Instacalc also offers entertaining equations, such as the corresponding dating age for men and women.

A Frenchman made this function: female age= (male age/2) +7

This embeddable widget will find its way onto thousands of myspace pages. What a great piece of link bait.

The next time you have a to figure out a way to spice up boring statistics report, see what goodmagazine.com did. By writing the numbers on a super attractive woman they have link baited a video with 550 thousand views and counting. By taking 1 day to film this amateur video and getting a female model to donate her time by allowing her to advertise her paysite (this is just speculation), Good has made the viral video of the month. heir paid subscriptions are way up, which is a great thing, because apparently 100% of revenue goes to charitable causes. Who said porn never brought anyone good?
Here are the stats:

• 89% of porn is created in the U.S.
• $2.84 billion in revenue was generated from U.S. adult sites in 2006
• $89/second is spent on porn
• 72% of adult content viewers are men
• 70% of all traffic to porn sites occurs during the 9 to 5 workday
• AdultFriendFinder.com is the most visited adult website with 7.2 million daily visits – almost 2x the NYtimes.com
• 260 new sex sites go online daily

Countries that ban adult content:

• Saudi Arabia
• Iran
• Bahrain
• Egypt
• United Arab Emerites
• Kuwait
• Malaysia
• Indonesia
• Singapore
• Kenya
• India
• Cuba
• China

The video presents this data in a very visual medium:

Unsurprisingly, the adult industry takes in a huge share of online revenue. What might surprise you are the mainstream companies that are behind many of these ventures. AT&T makes millions off of phone sex operations, Time Warner makes millions delivering late night adult programming into your television. Even Google makes a huge percentage of their revenue from serving up ads for sex related searches. None of the public companies will ever tell you how much money they make from porn, but it is substantial.

Read more about this viral sex video.

Free and paid directory listings have historically helped boost credibility and PageRank. If you want to know which directories to submit your website to keep reading.

Google does use directory listings as part of their quality score algorithm, and the higher quality directories are given more weight. Paying for a directory link is not an indication of quality, but discrimination is. When creating your link directory, don’t try to hide paid links and don’t link to unrelated websites.  The only bad paid links are links designed to disrupt the flow of Pagerank and attempt to game the Google algorithm. Google wants your spam reports on paid links to better test, confirm and improve their link valuating algorithms. When submitting a spam report include the text “paidlink”. This is a semi-automated method used to test the effectiveness of low qualty paid link schemes.

Matt Cutts answer:

A: I’ll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a directory. When considering submitting to a directory, I’d ask questions like:- Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.

- What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of the directory.

- If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.

The more discriminating and selective a directory is, the better changes it has of passing trust and improving your ranking. This is the reason that the Yahoo directory and DMOZ have been the premier directories that are essential to be in.

Read more at SE Roundtable, SEL and SE Watch.