I read this today: Google Transit Comes Through: Best Customer Service EVER and was very impressed with the second coming of the evil empire, aka Google. For the price of a $10 cape Google satisfied a customer and turned a hater into a lover. Would Google have done this if the recipient wasn’t an opinion maker? I doubt it. But then again, they would have never heard about it. Well done Goog.
There’s a great case study on link bait at SEOmoz. The thing that really separates this is that he gives data on his results. Too often it’s general actions rather than specific ones. Still missing are the specific keywords he was targeting, but that doesn’t really change how you can take this case study and apply the specifics to your situation.
One great thing was that the topic of the linkbait: “8 Diseases That Give You Superhuman Powers”. You can completely see how this would garner attention. The page was buried on an inside page on a car dealership website. It was posted on Reddit and Digg and within five days, the site received almost 234,000 unique visitors.
“We knew from the beginning the traffic would absolutely be worthless… The purpose was to help a site that was relatively unknown get a little bit of authority. It was the backlinks we were interested in,”
Look at the links the site received…
Before the Digg: 207 backlinks
3 days after Digg: 1,270 backlinks
5 days after Digg: 2,642 backlinks
7 days after Digg: 3,545 backlinks“We already know that untargeted backlinks are not nearly as effective as targeted ones from authority sites with similar content. The Digg did, however, produce links from many sites with authority in areas that are not entirely unrelated, and in some cases, from some sites with very high traffic and trust…
Google’s latest crawl (7 days after the Digg) resulted in a huge increase in our rankings for our targeted keywords. We jumped up anywhere from 20-300 places, with most of our most important keywords ranking in the top ten (many in the top 5). Furthermore, Google has increased its rate of indexing, has increased the number of our pages that appear in the index, and have released over a dozen important pages from the supplemental results.”
That really does validate all the talk SEO heavyweights give to linkbait. I need to get cracking…
Cracking Google’s ’secret sauce’ algorithm at ComputerWorld is a great article on SEO and the money involved in it. It seems that online gambling is a pretty big market. (I wonder if there’s any money in Viagra online? I’ll have to look into that. Mortgages? Less savory content?)
Can a poker Web site rank high on a Google search using purely white hat tactics — meaning no spamming, cloaking, link farms or other frowned-upon “black hat” practices. Fishkin answered yes, provided the site also added other marketing techniques and attracted some media attention.
The rest of the panel scoffed. “Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight,” one chided. After all, this is the cutthroat online gambling sector.
But one poker Web site owner was intrigued, and he later approached Fishkin. “He said, ‘If you can get us a search ranking in the top five for online poker or gambling [using white hat methods], we’ll buy that site from you for $10 million,’” recalls Fishkin, president and CEO of SEOmoz in Seattle. Intrigued but skeptical, Fishkin consulted other gambling site owners at the conference. “They said, ‘If it really does rank there, we might be interested in paying you $10 million more.’”
Turns out, a single online gambling customer brings in at least $1,000 in revenue. With a recent Google search of “Texas Holdem Poker” yielding 1.64 million results, it’s easy to see why site owners would pay millions to crack the code for Google’s PageRank algorithm — the elusive Holy Grail of online marketing.
Here’s the best quote from the article:
People manipulate search engines because they are trying to get around creating what the engines want. The goal of search engines is not to make manipulation impossible, but to make the cost and complexity of manipulation prohibitive to where it is cheaper to rank by winning the hearts and minds of other webmasters.
If you just create good, original content, search engines will be working for you as they refine their algorythms.
SEO for WordPress - The Complete Guide very long but it’s exhaustive. Good work Jim.