The reason Directory Journal and some other directories can still survive is because they do editorial reviews of sites they list in their directory, and as far as I've been able to tell, they really do a pretty good job of those. If you check out a category like Business Software, you'll see a couple of listings, and when you click one, like the one for Fuel Quest, you'll see that along with the homepage link you get up to 3 deep links you can submit. Now Fuel Quest doesn't rank top notch with those links yet, but they do rank second page on some nice terms when they've only got 2-3 links, one of them being from Directory Journal.

I've investigated some more sites, and it seems that these links do help. After seeing that I dove into why that is true, after all, to be able to give away link equity, a site must have some of it first. If you check out the Majestic SEO report for the site, you'll see they've got an awful lot of nice pages with pretty good backlinks, acquired through multiple methods. They've got some free WordPress themes to download, not one but a couple of very decent blogs with some real quality, unique content and some nice tools for webmasters as well. In all: they've earned their links, and have quite a few of them, which explains why a link from the domain would help in your rankings.

So I think I can honestly say that I think investing the $159.95 for a permanent listing along with 3 deep links is worth it if you need a couple of extra links, and that Directory Journal belongs in the small list of directories that you can still use and feel good about.

DirJournal: a directory still worth submitting to is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Microsoft has also updated their webmaster portal, I'm currently figuring out how to include that again, but have for now disabled it. So go check it out and enjoy the new tool!

SEO Link Analysis 1.0.4 is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

In this third article of the series about B2B SEO we'll be talking about link building. We expect the reader to have a basic knowledge on link building. We won't name the standard B2C link building techniques and focus us on the differences between B2B and B2C link building. What are those differences? We first mention some differences so we can explain them later on:

• There are less linkerati in a B2B market
• A B2B website needs lees links

There are less websites capable of linking to you. A B2B market is much smaller than a B2C market. Compare the travel market with the market of industrial pumping systems. The number of blogs in the travel sector is hundreds of times higher than in the sector of industrial pumps. This means it's much more important to keep being friends with your linkerati. Keep in contact, comment on their blogs and give away a nice scoop.

On the other hand: you need less links in a B2B market than in a B2C market. This is because of the simple reason that your competitors don't have a lot of links as well. Of course this doesn't work in the situation of polysemy: if one of your B2B keywords is an important keyword in a B2C market as well, it won't be easy to rank for it.
However, specific terms like 'peristaltic pumps' are not that competitive. And for those terms, your competitors are having problems finding links just like you.

Enlarge your linkerati group

AS we just said, one of the biggest problem in B2B link building is the small size of the linkerati group. Therefore, it's important to keep in touch with that small group. It is even better to enlarge your potential linkerati. Your niche might be very small but there are always enough related topics whose linkerati might be willing and able to link to you too.

B2B Link Building tip #1

Every B2B company has suppliers. Take for example the case of our industrial pump client. There must be another company building the machines which are used to build the pumps. Make an arrangement with your supplier and let him write a case on their site about how they build your machines. Make it interesting for their visitors, but don't forget the backlink. In this way, you can transform your offline network to be your linkerati.

B2B Link Building tip #2

For some niches, there is not much interesting to say. In such a case, you might want to enlarge your linkerati by blogging about other company related issues. Start a blog about running a B2B company. Corporate blogging isn't as easy as it sounds, but of course it's an option. Doing link building for such a blog shouldn't be a big problem.

Linkbait in a B2B market: knowledge

In the more B2B markets, knowledge is your USP. It's not strange that most B2B companies are somewhat afraid of sharing their expertise. But there is another side of this coin: if you are afraid of sharing your knowledge, other people will be looking for it. A website showing off your expertise and knowledge will attract many visitors. If your niche market isn't that big, people will soon recognize you as an authority in your area. And good content always attracts some links. This is the main advantage of B2B link building: you do have the capacity to write good content. Content is still king, even for link building.

B2B Link Building Tip #3

Start a blog in your niche. Don't only tell about your successes but also share linkworthy content. Make usable checklists, compare products or solutions with each other, tell about new developments in the market. Let users comment and react on their reactions. Write in a personal way to build friendships, to increase the chance of those people linking to you.

B2B Link Building tip #4

Another way to share knowledge is setting up a wiki. Put a wiki on your site and let everyone participate. Start with a lot of enthusiasm and keep networking with the people who write on your wiki as well. After a while you'll be an authority within your market. Everyone writing about your niche has to mention you.

Linkbait for a larger crowd

Even if your product is so boring, there are always opportunities to do something with. Industrial Search Enige Marking quotes Danny Sullivan:

Find a way to make your topic relate to nerds or a large society that frequently expresses their opinion online. (…) With most link bait you are not trying to gain topical expert links… more likely citations from people with a mild interest in the topic (and how you related it to their nerdy interests).

B2B Link Building tip #5

Create a link bait action for your market, that has a strong focus on a different but related market with more linkerati. Place this link bait on social media sites, use press releases (if your link bait has some news value) and promote your link bait in different ways.

Which kind of link bait you have to use depends from case to case. Let's give a few examples:

• Let BMW write a piece of content about their open source Telematics system. Let them say something about what innovations have occurred. Sent press releases to blogs of open source fanatics.
• Let our industrial pump provider make a movie in which all things are placed in the cutter: car tires, potatoes, bottles of shampoo etc. Let 'Will it blend?' on YouTube inspire you. Put the movie on your site and spread it through social media.

Expert knowledge and link building

You don't have large numbers of competitors as a B2B company. However, you do sell a complex product. Therefore, it's quite easy to make yourself an expert within your market. This gives plenty of room for doing link building.

B2B Link Building tip #6

Suppose that our industrial pump manufacturer is looking for high quality links. There must be a few high quality websites about technical stuff which are looking for interesting case studies. Make yourself the authority within your market and place such a case study on a big, high authority website.

Concluding remarks

B2B link building requires different goals than B2C link building. It's less important to get high PageRank backlinks, because your competition doesn't have them as well. The quality of B2B backlink isn't measured in PageRank but in relevancy. B2B link building is easier and more difficult than B2C link building. Easier because you have good content; more difficult because your linkerati group is relative small.

B2B SEO: Link Building is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Nofollowing your internals can affect your ranking in Google, but it's a 2nd order effect.

My analogy is: suppose you've got $100. Would you rather work on getting $300, or would you spend your time planning how to spend your $100 more wisely.

Spending the $100 more wisely is a matter of good site architecture (and nofollowing/sculpting PageRank if you want). But most people would benefit more from looking at how to get to the $300 level.

Ok, so it's of a "2nd order effect". Let's say, you could increase your traffic by 2% if you did it (and for the record, to my experience it's a bit more, more like 10%). If you have 2 million visitors a month, 2% more visitors are 40,000 visitors a month, 480,000 visitors a year. Let's say your conversion rate is as low as 1%, with a revenue per order of $25. That's not too much, is it? Well... It's $120,000. I can spend a few hours doing some sculpting for that, and still make a profit...

There's of course a lot of "mis use" of PageRank sculpting. A lot of people are trying to compensate for bad site architecture and information architecture by nofollowing a lot of links, I'm even guilty of that on this site. Or people are calling the whole process of creating a good site architecture PageRank sculpting. It's not. Good site architecture is one of the few main pillars of on-site SEO.

So, in all, PageRank sculpting is a nice technique. It's useful for sites which have a lot of traffic to play around with. I agree with Matt, that if you have $100, you shouldn't start with it. If you have $100,000,000 though, I'd definitly put it on my list.

PageRank sculpting: my view is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

These pages were notorious for selling links and creating very weird link profiles for loads of Dutch pages, and luckily enough, these clones have recently been dropping hard in the rankings. Not the original startpagina.nl though, which is still a source of a lot of traffic, traffic that often converts very well. As such, people are very willing to pay for links on these pages, and in my opinion loads of companies should be buying those links.

The problem is that the company which sells a lot of those links wrote an article on MarketingFacts today, one of Holland's biggest marketing blogs, highlighting the traffic and conversions these links provide, but also highlighting the search ranking aspects of these links. I'll try to literally translate the sentence I took beef with: "Google sees paid text links as spam, unless (bolding mine) they're placed in a relevant context."

Now my personal opinion on this doesn't really matter, but by putting it like this, in my opinion they claim to have gotten some sort of "ok" from Google, or know that they're doing the right thing. Now of all I've seen in the discussion around paid links over the last months, my conclusion is that Google does not look at it that way, and instead just thinks that all paid links should be marked as such with a nofollow link, whether or not they're relevant doesn't matter.

Because the debate about this can go on forever in Dutch, since there's no one from Google to chime in, I've made the above post, and hope that allows for feedback from Google. I also hope that if I'm drawing things out of context or putting them wrongly, the Dutch people who followed or joined in the discussion at MarketingFacts will correct me.

Update: while checking out the site of AdLantic, the company selling those links, I found this:

AdLantic adverteert uitsluitend op thematische linkoverzichten met een hoge pagerank. De linkoverzichten hebben meestal 1 specifiek onderwerp (bijvoorbeeld: hypotheken, vakantie, dating, computer, etc), waardoor ze bij Google een zeer hoge relevantie hebben.

In English: "AdLantic advertises solely on thematic linkpages with a high PageRank. The link pages usually have one specific subject (f.i.: mortgages, travel, dating, computers, etc.) which makes sure they have a very high relevance in Google."

I'd like to say: case closed.

A Dutch discussion on paid links is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Hello,

I recently came across your blog: example.com while I was looking for good blogs to link to from the website HiSunglasses.com. I am trying to link to blogs that my visitors might like to visit once they are finished on the site.

Since HiSunglasses.com is visited by 1,000s of people daily, I am sure many of them would be interested in visiting your blog. I figured since we are not competitors in any way, you wouldn’t mind if I link to your website. Please email me back and let me know if this is OK with you. Would it be possible for you to link back to my website HiSunglasses.com? Please let me know. Thanks.

Magdiel

Now, it won't surprise you, that I do not own example.com, and that this is an extremely bad way of asking me for a link... I hardly ever link out to people I don't know unless they've written something link worthy, and if she had really taken taken the time to look into my blog she could have guessed that.

Link request mistakes… is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Now I make it a habit to try and comment when someone links to me in a post, have a bit of a look around the site, and if I like it, I'll throw it in my feed reader. You get that chance only once though, since in the statistics program I use to track that, Mint, you'll only be a unique referrer once.

I might notice you through other channels too: you might show up in my vanity Google Alerts, Technorati blog reactions feed and Google Blogsearch feeds. And still, people manage to stay hidden for a few weeks. So here's the deal: if you know you're a low traffic blog, or you're linking to someone and for one reason or the other you're not sure people will click that link within 24 hours, click on it yourself! Make yourself and your link known to me, and that goes for any other blogger too.

Every blogger likes getting links, and there are more bloggers who use the same policy towards the people linking to them as I do, make use of that, make sure we notice you!

Linking out? Make sure people notice! is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I didn't do that because I thought you guys couldn't find my blog. It was actually a plugin requested by Shoemoney, who wanted to make the scrapers work for him too, by getting some more backlinks from them. I thought it was a great idea, and this is actually quite a simple plugin: you upload it, enable it, maybe change the default text (which is "This is a post from <link><blog name></link>"), and you're done.

It's called RSS Footer, and a few people, like my friend Marcus, picked it up and ran with it already, I hope it works for you too!

Update: based on a quote from Matt Cutts in a post by Patrick Altoft, "How to foil scrapers on your blog", I've added the option to add a link back to the post itself, with the title of the post as anchor text. This looks like this:

Make the scrapers work for you! is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

If you're not convinced yet you should go get it now, here are some screenshots:

So here is the SEO Link Analysis extension!

Update: just updated the script to 1.0.1 to fix a change in Yahoo!'s interface.
Another update: 1.0.2 is now available for download.

SEO Link Analysis Firefox Extension is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Link Value Factors is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

There are a few things which I've noticed and I wanted to share with you:

Sitewides
I don't know if it's always been like this when it worked before, but the way it handles sitewides is awesome:

Nofollows
Live search seems to be the first to not show any backlinks which have nofollow on it at all. That's kinda great, because that means this is now the most reliable link data out there.

API
Perhaps my biggest discovery: if you add the + in front of the query, you can now also get all this data through the API again! I updated my domain info tool to take advantage of that (and fixed that tool completely).

Combinations still work
You can still use link:, linkdomain: and linkfromdomain: in combination with other parameters like site: or -site:, so you can get all the links to a domain, without the internal links, by doing "+linkdomain:example.com -site:example.com".

In all, it rocks that the commands work again, let's hope they don't kill them.

Live Search’s link command work again and they’re awesome! is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Matt, Adam, Please let me report linkspammers! is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

He's always been risking this, and he'll take the punishment with a smile, respecting his "enemy" for his cleverness in finding him.

Now imagine a second client, who's bought links all across the globe, with only one single purpose: increasing his PageRank. At one point in time, some 4 years ago, an SEO told him that's what he should be doing and he hasn't changed his tactic since, unaware of the search world, and the changing ethics within it, and thus unaware of the fact that he's doing something wrong.

If the first one decided to do a reconsideration request, and Google decides to let him wait for a while before they reinclude him, that sounds fair, right? But if the second one finally finds out what went wrong, and decides to do a reconsideration request, they shouldn't make him wait too long, right? Or is it perhaps not so simple?

Now you'll hear people say that it all boils down to one thing: intent.

Bullshit.

They both did what they did with the intent of increasing their search engine rankings and traffic, knowing full well, that what they did was game the search engines. The important thing here is whether they knew that they were breaking rules or not and how Google treats that. After all, under most governments, breaking a law that you didn't know about is still breaking a law (ignorantia juris non excusat).

The other important thing to know is: did they do the buying before or after Google had said that buying links to increase your PageRank was wrong, and how does Google treat that. In a lot of countries only very specific laws can be applied to you if you did something to break them before the law was invented (ex post facto laws).

All this then boils down to: what is Google's reason for punishing anyone? Well, they're probably the same reasons as sanctions are used within criminal law: retribution, deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation and restitution. The question is though whether retribution is any good in this case, as most people will never openly tell that they've got this problem...

While Michael Gray was very right in saying that Google is not the government, they do have the right to "do as they please" within their own search engine. If Google were a government though, you'd probably have a court of some sorts, deciding on how to deal with issues like this and creating openly available jurisprudence in the process.

Now that's what we're missing here, and that's what makes decisions on whether to reinclude people or not and how long you will "punish" them, seem arbitrary. So what we need is openness, jurisprudence to go by, and a judge. Basically, what we need is a Google court!

We need a Google court! is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

The second thing I noticed was the result #5 in there, the geocities page. That page was created back in 2003, and hasn't been updated since. For a subject like CSS3, that basically means the page is completely out of date. Now it's a known fact that search engines tend to like "old" things, whether it be pages or domains, and favor them in their rankings. But you'd think, that if these pages don't get linked to anymore, they'll slowly drop in the rankings. Consider this history:

The geocities page is created in 2003 and acquires 27 links in the six months after it is created. It rules the SERPs for the keyword it targets and is left there to age. In 2006, css3.info is created. It acquires an enormous amount of links, and is updated every few weeks. Yet it takes until the beginning of 2007 for that page to "beat" page 1. Since 2003, the keyword it targets has become way more popular, and people have been writing all kinds of great articles about it. And still, that page is there at #5 in Yahoo!, mostly because the page and it's links are old and the geocities domain is strong.

What's going wrong? Well, the geocities page might have old backlinks, and some authority due to it's age, but it hasn't been acquiring any links any more for the last 2 years. On the other side, a lot of other pages about the same keyword have been gaining lots and lots of links. Search engines should use link-data over time to determine whether a page should be ranking or is not "up to date" anymore. However, from the fact that the page ranks #13 in Google, and #19 in the new Live search, I determine that the search engines aren't using this data as much as they could...

Now it could be that the geocities domain is just too strong, but I think this is something the search engines should fix...

Are search engines using link-data over time? is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Another Dutch SEO wrote a week ago that Google "can't algorithmically detect paid links" (translation mine). Well, if you agree with him, I beg you to reconsider that. If you had 200 links on day 1 with all sorts of anchor text, and you went out and bought yourself 500 links with only 3 different anchor texts, you don't think Google (or any other search engine) can detect that? Then I'm very glad you're not doing my link building. (And I'm not even talking about the horrible code patterns some of these guys have, you can recognize an awful lot of TLA "blogroll" lists without any trouble if you know how their WordPress plugin works.)

You have to remember, that Google doesn't only have the current snapshot of your domain and it's links, it has the entire history. Your link building profile is coming along with your domain for the rest of it's existence. Eric Ward talked about that on SearchEngineLand back in April, and we've had quite a few new clients at Onetomarket over the last year with the same problem: a link profile full of spammy links. And believe me: a spammy link profile is not something easily fixed.

Back to your natural link profile: it's natural for me to have a lot of links with the anchor text "Joost de Valk", "yoast.com", or even "Joost de Valk's SEO Blog". It would not be natural for me to have twice as much links with just "SEO Blog" as with "Joost de Valk". That would raise flags. So using "click here" as an anchor text every once in a while might be a great idea. It's not "wasted anchor text", it's just a natural addition to your natural link profile. And if you're smart, you'll use it in places where you actually want people to click, because, as Brian pointed out, people work that way. Want to test it?

Click here to get my WordPress Google Analytics plugin, and it will automatically tag all your outbound links in posts.

Click here to read all about a natural link profile is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Now pay attention: within 36 hours after doing that, my account was disabled!

I'd put quite some work into that account; I was editing 9 categories at the time my account was disabled. I did NOT put all that hard work into it for some meta to come along and ban me on sight when he sees something he doesn't like, without sending ANY email or other notification.

If AOL is serious about wanting to improve DMOZ, this would be a good place to start. For now, I'll join the crowd of people saying Google should stop using DMOZ. Of course there are editors who do a good job, but these mob like practices make it impossible to work with and for.

Login removed screenshot
Screenshot of my DMOZ profile

Update: Having seen some of the discussion in the DMOZ forums, it looks like I was banned because I had BOOKMARKED shoemoney.com, with the simple reason of wanting to add a note to it... My god.

The DMOZ mob strikes again… is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

It's way more difficult to check for sites for which you can't look into the logs though.... 301 redirects can be picked up (and thus affect the ranking) within a matter of days, whereas the backlinks to that 301'd page or domain might take months or even up to a year to show up in your backlink checks, if they ever do that all. (Think about it, 301 splitting still works...)

This is one of the reasons why you shouldn't be checking just your own rankings, but entire top 100's for your keywords. If one site goes up incredibly, and another one is suddenly gone, it might well be that the one was 301 redirected to the other... I've seen up to 4 sites disappear at once, with their complete juice being redirected to 1 other site, which was skyrocketed into the top 3 on a competitive keyword, from being down in the top 20...

The trouble with 301 redirects and backlinks is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I got a request to do a sponsored review for Bidvertiser for Advertisers. Requests like this are always fun, and this one started off even better, since the people at Bidvertiser really get how this market works. They encouraged me to sign up for their referral program and use the code in there to link to them, because that would give new advertisers a nice $20 in free clicks. Apparently they do not mind at all that I will get paid for that as well, which shows that they really like to be reviewed!

I must say I'm pretty impressed with their interface, it looks nice, reports well and fast and does pretty much everything you'd want it to do. Searching for cars gave me a load of sites on which you can advertise, and quite a few subcategories to do even more targeted niche advertising.

After I had selected a few for my car advertisement, I got the option to set up geotargetting. I chose US only for this testrun, but having the option to target your ads as easy as this is pretty nice. After that I got the possibility to set my bid prices, and what I found really good to see is that they're not inflating expected clicks. If they expect you to get 12 clicks a month from a site and tell that honestly, I'm impressed.

I think that using Bidvertiser you can get some pretty nice exposure if you pick your sites right (there is some crap in there, just skip through that), for a pretty low amount of money. Now what more would you want? So go sign up already!

Bidvertiser.net – Text-Link-Advertising is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Blogspam works, but only in large quantities is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I wonder why they blocked it... I've sent in that question through the feedback form, you'd think there is good information in there which they'd want people to be able to find through the search engines...

What’s more frustrating than having a link from dev.live.com? is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!