When demand for a product or service shifts, marketing responses shift with them. Changing consumer preferences drive what solutions are offered, to whom and for how much so when I saw the following ads, I thought “what the hell is driving this?”

I am the first one to raise my hand and say link building can be tedious, difficult, time consuming and uber boring,  but scary?  I’ve never associated fear with the process of securing links.  I’m not sure why these ads are running (no one from the ad company responded to my email) but apparently someone feels there’s enough demand to warrant an ad campaign targeting people afraid to build links.

Hmmmm.  Afraid to build links…where is this “scary” mindset coming from?

Not too long ago there were some very high-profile outings by major media of mega brands like JCPenney and Overstock.  People lost their jobs, pages lost their rankings and general embarrassment ensued but… did those stories scare people into not wanting to build links on their own?

I wrote the ads off as amusing advertising angles and forgot about them until I was sent this link last week, it’s an outing of a SEO company by the 9To5Mac blog.  Seems the SEO company sent 9To5Mac a basic link request and 9To5Mac decided to use the exchange for attention-bait.  The SEO company asked 9To5 to hyperlink a phrase in one of their recent posts on behalf of a client, they didn’t offer any money for this action nor promised a reciprocal link.  As a matter of fact, the SEO was very clear to say changing the link would be helpful to them and nothing more.  Instead of ignoring the request or saying no, 9To5 Mac decided to publish the email in a blog post and draw parallels between what happened to them with what happened to JCPenney.

Ouch!  Trying to fan the paid link flames when there is no fire is ridiculous and serves no purpose.  I’m not afraid of any aspect of link building but I am afraid of people who spread misinformation for the purpose of creating buzz.

There are a lot of ways to build links, one of the more basic but sound tactics involves sending link building requests.  If you’re not familiar with how this works, here’s a quick outline:

1.  Webmaster A wants to build links, brand and traffic to her website so she identifies and “targets” a handful of sites in her industry who fit the profile.  Because she’s a smart webmaster, she goes after highly visible sites her customers frequent when they’re not buying from her or doing something more mundane like sleeping.   She makes sure those sites aren’t linking to crap and the majority of pages are in the index.  As an added bonus, she checks to see if they are active in social media and their offline community.

2.  Webmaster A also makes note of what the target site publishes and when, she reads their content and becomes familiar with it.  This is what makes Webmaster A so smart, she knows she has to convince the target site to give her a link so she learns everything she can about it.  She even sets a Google alert for her keyword terms so she’s instantly aware when the target site incorporates new content relevant to her interests.

3.  Satisfied the potential partner sites are leaders in her niche, Webmaster A drafts a well-written note to target Webmaster and asks if he would add her link.  She makes a case why her content would be an asset on the target site and how both sites will benefit by the action.

4.  The Webmaster on the target site receives the email and decides what he wants to do.  If the email is convincing and he feels there is value by adding Webmaster A’s link, he’ll make an editorial decision to add her link (content) to his website.

The key term in this process, or any link building tactic sanctioned by the engines is  “editorial decision“.   When a webmaster gives a link or adds content  freely based on it’s merit, that’s an editorial decision.  This is the same concept used by newspapers and magazines to run stories and features, if the piece doesn’t add value, the editor won’t include it.  Presenting content (a link) to someone and asking them to include it doesn’t negate the editorial decision, the editor still has to decide if there’s value before adding it.  There’s no harm, no foul in bringing your content to someone’s attention, that’s called good marketing.

For reference, here are the definitions of ” link schemes” from both Bing and Google (actually, Google has two, here’s the other).  Both are good resources to keep handy and reference if you’re unsure about anything you read in cyberspace.

There’s a fine line between marketing and manipulation, but in this case, outside the fact the SEO company did a lousy job with their initial link request, I don’t see where this remotely resembles what JCPenney did or can be considered a “no-no”.  Do you?

Requesting editorial links via email shouldn’t scare anyone, it’s a sound tactic used by many with great success.  Not only can you secure links but this type of link building can opens doors and stimulate additional promotions and special events between two companies.

Sometimes all you have to do is ask.    

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from: Link Spiel

For more link building information, ideas and the occasional rant, visit LinkSpiel .

This is a long one, you might want to freshen up your coffee and get comfy! 

99% of the time I’m pretty easy going, I don’t particularly care about industry drama nor do I get too caught up in over-analzying the latest algorithm shifts. Whatevah.  But.  I do get a little testy when I find someone’s taken content from my site without asking and without linking back to me.

I’m not a good writer, some of it I blame on being dyslexic, some on lack of time, some on lack of talent.  When I do manage to string three words into a cohesive sentence, I’m proud and extremely protective of what I’ve written, it’s why I get upset when I find my content being used without permission.   This stealing of content is what’s known as copyright theft, and it’s against the law.  The minute you create original content, you become the copyright owner which means it’s yours and yours alone, even if you share, rent, or pass it out.

Last week I found a website using almost all of the content from my training pages.  Because the site is in an ancillary marketing niche, I  made courtesy contact via Skype, pointed out my content  and  nicely asked the webmaster to remove it.   The webmaster (a woman) acknowledged my comments and promised to look into it after meeting a deadline.   After a couple of days and no action, I contacted her via email (twice) and again requested my content be removed.  I made sure to include copies of my site from the Way Back Machine (which pre-date hers) and my contact information.    No response to either email so I went into action and started DMCA proceedings.

Now….what’s sad here, beside the fact she stole my copy and then repeatedly ignored me,  is the hosting provider not only removed the page I was complaining about, they also removed the rest of her site after receiving and checking my DMCA notice.   Her entire site was taken offline for a couple of days, think about what that means in terms of lost potential.  Hosting companies don’t fool around when DMCA’s are submitted to them, they have to act since it’s the law.  If the woman had just responded to me and taken down the page hosting my content, I would not have used the DMCA against her.

Like I said, hosting companies take the DMCA seriously, here’s part of what her host (GoDaddy) sent to me 48 hours after I submitted my DMCA complaint:

Thank you for contacting Go Daddy’s Copyright Claims Department.  We have suspended the site in question pending a resolution of this matter. Please allow up to 30 minutes for these changes to take effect. …. We have provided the specifics of your infringement claim to the owner of the site, along with your contact information… If the site owner indicates they are prepared to remove the infringing content, we will re-activate the hosting account in order to allow that to happen….

Bold/red mine.  It’s really too bad the woman didn’t listen initially, not only did her entire site go offline but – she may have lost inbound links to her pages as well.  Once I knew I was going to write this post, I checked for links pointing to her main page plus the page I wanted removed.  She has several hundred inbounds, plus a couple of dedicated deep links pointing to the page hosting my content.  Those two deep links were from directories which are known to run broken link checkers regularly on sites in their index.  If they ran the checker while her page was down – POOF – there go two inbound links to internal pages on her site.   And. then. there. were. none. 

If you’re developing content and want to make it exclusive to your brand, you need to protect your material.   Here’s a step by step outline for how I deal with copyright infringement and sometimes build a link or three in the process:

Step One – Discovery

Run your pages through a plagiarism checking tool like CopyScape or Plagiarisma ( I use both)  The tool brings back a list of sites hosting your content.

If the pages are hosting stolen/duplicate content, you’ll see highlighted text.  Here’s one I ran on the LinkSpiel, as you can see someone lifted the entire post!

Tisk tisk.

Once you’ve found your content you have two choices: be nice or go straight for the jugular. If you’re nice, you can send an email and point out they’re using your material without permission and want it removed immediately.  You’d be surprised how many SEO’s, even well known SEO firms, lift content. Don’t be swayed by the “ we hired a copywriter and they must have taken your copy” nonsense,  the site owner is responsible for what’s on his/her site.  (Sidenote: next time you see me at a conference or meetup, ask about the well-known New Jersey SEO firm I had a scrape with on this issue, it’s a juicy story)

Step Two – Nice or Not?

If you decide to go straight for the  jugular, you can use the DMCA to fight your case.   Start by finding out where the site is  hosted, I use  Who Is Hosting This Site .  Here’s a screenshot:

Visit the hosting company and use the search box (or site map)  to find their “Copyright Infringement Policy” section.  On Godaddy you can find it by going to Site Map -> Legal Agreements -> Copyright Infringement.  There you will find a step-by-step outline of what you need to provide in order for the hosting company to act.   Here’s what I open with when I contact the hosting company:

To Whom It May Concern,

I am writing to you to avail myself of my rights under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). This letter is a Notice of Infringement as authorized in § 512(c) of the U.S. Copyright Law. I wish to report an instance of what I feel in good faith is an instance or Copyright Infringement. The infringing material appears on the Service for which you are the designated agent.  You are registered with the U.S. Copyright Office as the Designated Service Provider Agent to receive notifications of alleged Copyright infringement with respect to users of the Service for which you are the Designated Agent.

My quote is taken from http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/stock-letters/, you’ll find other helpful verbiage and form letters there.  You’ll also need to provide the following information to prove you are the rightful copyright owner:  (these are the questions/statements the hosting company asks you to answer to prove copyright)

An electronic signature of the copyright owner, or a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner, of an exclusive copyright that has allegedly been infringed.

A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the Complaining Party is the owner, or is authorized to act on behalf of the owner, of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single online site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works on that site.

Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity and that is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled, and information reasonably sufficient to permit Go Daddy to locate the material.

Information reasonably sufficient to permit Go Daddy to contact the Complaining Party, such as an address, telephone number, and, if available, an electronic mail address at which the Complaining Party may be contacted.

A statement that the Complaining Party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.

Once the information is sent, the hosting company has three business days to respond.  I find this varies, most of the time they respond within 24 hours, sometimes longer but they DO respond.  From there, the offending site gets a letter and provided you’ve shown the content is yours, the pages go offline.

In order to make my case with the hosting company, I always copy and paste pages of my site from the Way Back Machine (WBM) to show I was  first.  Since there are recording holes in the WBM,  you may need to screenshot posting dates and cache dates to make your case.  I’ve even used comment dates to establish time of creation and show my piece came first.  This is another reason why it’s a good idea to include dates on your blog posts! This might seem like a lot of work but once you’ve done it, you have a template for future use.   

So…is there a silver link lining here?   You bet, always is with me

I don’t particularly like to reward thieves with a gift but I’m a link builder which means I have almost no shame.  If I find someone using content from my blog, I do demand they take it down but I’ll also offer them a link embedded, alternative piece to put in it’s place provided the page has been indexed and isn’t a piece of crap.  This is a win-win for both of us, I get a new source to host unique, link filled content,  they get fresh original material and we both avoid the DMCA.  Want a cookie with that lemonade?

Don’t let people use your content without being compensated for it, know your rights and always look for the silver link lining. 

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from: Link Spiel

For more link building information, ideas and the occasional rant, visit LinkSpiel .

from: Link Spiel

For more link building information, ideas and the occasional rant, visit LinkSpiel .

I read a great article this morning by George Diaz sharing his opinion on Reggie Bush giving up the Heisman Trophy.  For what it’s worth, I agree with George,  Bush only did this as a way to save what little face he has left and avoid the inevitable.  What a shame.  Bush will forever be cited and remembered as the first person to give up the Heisman.  Not how you want to become a historical figure.

Anyway, of course the whole Bush/Heisman/lying-cheating-payoff thing made me think of paid links and how the two issues almost mirror one another.  Just for fun I decided to compare the two situations and draw similarities…

 There’s drama, stupidity and risk in link building  AND football!

from: Link Spiel

For more link building information, ideas and the occasional rant, visit LinkSpiel .

 Both Read Write Web and Nicholas Carr’s Rough Type Blog  featured articles today on the pros and cons of on page linking.  Read Write Web asked if links were

     a net negative for readers online

and wondered if 

      Placing links at the end of articles is more respectful of a person’s intentions and concentration. 

Hmmm.  Nicholas Carr was a bit more entertaining  and explained his views on why links shouldn’t be in content:

Links are wonderful conveniences, as we all know (from clicking on them compulsively day in and day out). But they’re also distractions. Sometimes, they’re big distractions – we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we’ve forgotten what we’d started out to do or to read. Other times, they’re tiny distractions, little textual gnats buzzing around your head. Even if you don’t click on a link, your eyes notice it, and your frontal cortex has to fire up a bunch of neurons to decide whether to click or not. You may not notice the little extra cognitive load placed on your brain, but it’s there and it matters. People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension.

Bold mine for emphasis.  In case you can’t comprehend what he’s saying, there’s a study out there saying your concentration is diminished when you click a link because you’ve clicked a link.  We’ll have to take his word for it since he didn’t offer us the study link and I can’t figure out which one it is from the list he left at the bottom of his post. 

Read Write Web offers multiple takes on why you should leave links in content.  They say:

I like to add links out to other sources at every opportunity in order to enrich what I’m writing, to broaden the conversation, and frankly because I think linking to other blogs is a good faith way to encourage other blogs to link to us. To act as if our blog is the only place online to learn about what’s important is the height of arrogance and a real disservice to readers. Internal linking is good business practice, but I think a balance is best

Bold is mine ‘cuz I like the arrogance angle but…then they have to go and mess things up with this:

Search indexing is largely powered by links, and the words linked inline are key. That’s a tough one. Links between documents are the foundation of much of the most innovative analysis being done online, but maybe those links could just be placed well away from a body of text.

Shades of 1999!!!  I’m not really sure what “innovative analysis”  is since there’s no link or description to help educate poor-confused-me  but I do know webpages rank based on the concept of link popularity which has been around since the dawn of the engines and uses both links and content in it’s calculations.   Hope that’s clear and you’ve not lost your train of thought.

If you think all this sounds a little far fetched, don’t.  There’s a number of people who feel putting links at the end of the page is a better way to do it, check out my link and the comments on the ReadWriteWeb article.  I’m thinking they’ll be early adopters of a warning label like this one:

SURGEON GENERAL LINK BUILDER WARNING:  Outbound links can cause confusion, loss of comprehension and may complicate your pregnancy and life”

Here at the Link Spiel we’re going to stick with linking out from the body of the copy, we know our readers can handle clicking, reading, and returning to our blog.    We feel the whole link clicking thing is akin to walking and talking or eating and reading, it’s possible to do it without getting distracted.   Hopefully we’re in the majority with this line of thinking, I’d hate to see people change what’s natural, helpful and algorthimally efficient.  Nobody puts our link baby in a corner.  

Power to the people and links!

from: Link Spiel

For more link building information, ideas and the occasional rant, visit LinkSpiel .

One of the comments left after my link building interview on SearchEnginePeople (thank you Ruud) made me raise an eyebrow.  It said:

 

Good advice but they are completely basic and well known . i always think whether their are some hidden secrets which make the link building very easy

Bold is mine.  The comment was made in response to a list of link building tactics I supplied in the SearchEnginePeople interview.

Whenever I speak at a conference or workshop,  people pull me aside after my spiel and ask if I’d share the “real insider tips” on link building.   Never mind the fact I had just spent the last 45 minutes on stage sharing how we use the media, customer surveys, website elements, RSS, directories, content development and offline sources to build quality links.

Nope,  they still think I’m holding out.  So they sidle up to me and start asking questions.  The conversation usually goes something like this:

Person:  Good talk Debra, got a few nuggets but  can you share a couple “easy” ”secret”  tips with me?

Me: Thank you for saying that.   Sure I’d be happy to share my favorite insider tip with you, it’s super-super ”easy”, effective and can be summed up in one word!

Person: (laughs and breathlessly scrambles for a pen)  One word – oh boy this must be a great tip!

Me: Yep,  and best of all, it’s very inexpensive to implement.

Person: Really?  WOW!  What is it?

Me: Postcards.

Person: (blinks rapidly) Wait, what did you say?

Me: Postcards.

Person: (sounding a little confused)  Do you mean postcards.com?  Is that some incredibly high PageRank site with free dofollow links?  (gets breathless again)  How do you get them?

Me: Nope, I mean postcards as in those little paper things you send in the snail mail.  We use them as part of our link building campaign to increase email open rates.  That’s the ”secret” “easy” link building tip I have that works every time.

Now… some people press me for details and I’ll explain how we use the postcard to increase  our email open rates, build trust and brand.  It’s a “secret” communication weapon I’ve used for years and works everytime.   They get it, smile and leave happy.

But others don’t smile and don’t get it.  They’re convinced there’s a cache of  “easy”  ”secret” tactics known only to link builders and using postcards simply couldn’t be one of them.  I get asked about redirects,  widgets,  comment dropping and paid links  because people think these are link building “secrets”.  I’m not sure why but believe it has to do with the fact they’re not talked about as much and people equate them with some degree of difficulty since they’re more technically related.

I get it, I used to be under the same impression until I actively worked with these techniques.  Redirects are awesome and can point a lot of link juice in a short period but you still have to have the pages in place to redirect from.   Widgets work too provided you target the right demographic and have the money to get them launched.

Thinking about it, I consider the technical tactics the ”easy”ones  since they’re (mostly) automated, dependent on scripts and require little if any marketing strategy.  They’re certainly faster than the tactics I recommend but fast doesn’t always equate to long-term and in marketing, you want long-term.

So… my two cents about this comment:

i always think whether their are some hidden secrets which make the link building very easy

No, there really aren’t any ”secret”  link building tactics, what you hear  is pretty much what’s out there.  But there is some secrecy around website sources and where to find them so the answer to the question is yes and no.    Focus on finding partner sites that have been:

• online for a couple years
• have been indexed
• will allow links in content areas
• use clean links
• are host to your demographic
• are in the major directories

And so on.  It’s going to be hard to meet all the criteria I listed so go for as many as you can.  If you do, you’ll find it “easy” to rank well no matter what tactic you use.  That’s the big “secret”. 

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from: Link Spiel

For more link building information, ideas and the occasional rant, visit LinkSpiel .