Jan. 19: Google Inc.’s fourth-quarter earnings report shows that the Internet search leader fetched less money per click on its ubiquitous online ads. That came as an unsettling surprise because investors had assumed a surge in online holiday shopping in the U.S. would enable Google Inc. to charge more for its ads. Instead, the average price decreased by 8 percent from the same time in 2010.

Microsoft Corp. reduces losses in its online services division, which includes the ad-supported Bing search engine. It lost $458 million in the latest quarter, down 18 percent from a loss of $559 million a year earlier. Revenue grew 10 percent to $784 million.

Jan. 24: Yahoo Inc. says that after subtracting advertising commissions, revenue totaled $1.17 billion. That was $20 million below analyst projections. It’s the 13th straight quarter that Yahoo’s net revenue has declined from the prior year. Yahoo predicted its net revenue in the first quarter will range from $1.02 billion to $1.1 billion. The mid-point of that target works out to $1.06 billion, unchanged from last year’s first quarter.

Meredith Corp., which owns women’s magazines such as Better Homes and Gardens and local television stations, says quarterly net income and revenue fell in late 2011 because of weaker political advertising.
Jan. 26: Time Warner Cable Inc. says advertising revenue fell 10 percent to $242 million in the latest quarter, primarily because of decreases in political advertising.

Monday: Gannett Co. says revenue in its publishing division fell 5 percent in the latest quarter. The company attributed that to lower advertising amid the economic softness in the U.S. and the U.K. Broadcasting revenue fell 14 percent, mainly from sharply lower political advertising than a year earlier.

By The Associated Press | Associated Press

The story starts with link generation tactics. SEOmoz has a great community who are very loyal. It makes immense sense for SEOmoz to use “I Love SEOMoz” badges as a part of its branding and we at Majestic SEO certainly see people using them. (In fact, all we need to do is to filter image links going to SEOmoz and we have most of them right there).

But what to do when you are competing with a tactic where you are behind? We could not simply replicate this with our own badge, because we are a technology, not a community, and whilst @MajesticSEO is now near 10,000 followers, we doubt that an “I Love Majestic SEO” badge would really add value or stack up. We had to innovate if we wanted a widget based way to expose our brand. This led to a discussion internally about what might be useful to website owners. We wanted a badge – but we had to have one that did something different. Something useful.

The idea of a badge that showed users where your website ranks in the world was born. What if we used all our immense crawl data to give website owners a new tool that they could use to demonstrate their place in the world? One that showed where they ranked in the eyes of all those other websites out there? What if we changed the badge motif so that links become a measure of reputation in their own right?

Such a badge would:

• Instil trust for people using a site with a badge
• Create a simple new way to see a website’s reach and importance
• Give website owners a badge that meant something
• Was something we were ready to give away for free

We hope it will be something that SEOmoz users and other webmasters alike might happily use alongside the SEOmoz badge and add something useful to the world wide web.

Now having an idea is one thing. Implementing it was quite another! What started out as a simple idea rapidly turned into a massive exercise – such is the way when you deal with data at scale. Do the maths on adding a single byte of data to each record in a 3.5 trillion record database. I can say you don’t have enough memory at home and for most of us not in the office either. We had not ranked the billions of websites that we have before. It was not just a case of doing a quick API call on the fly. We had to create a new data set to do this.

To keep it all running at lightening speed, and also to give the badge an air of exclusivity, we limited the list to the top 1 million websites. It is a goal that we can all strive to achieve, but it is not a badge without meaning. If you don’t have enough gravitas on the web, your site won’t get in to the list. You can go and check if your domain (or any one else’s) is in the list here.

Once we had the list, we could work on creating a simple widget that let you put a badge on your own site (if it qualified for the Majestic Million) and we have now created a simple widget that gives you the code to do so. Since the data is updated all the time, your rankings will go down as well as up, so the win for us is that we hope it will encourage users to check the numbers regularly.

But now we had found a way to build a badge widget that might actually be useful, we also found ourselves with a database of 1 million of the best websites, ranked in order. We found that this had other uses and before we launched the badge, we decided to build an entire interface to support the badge idea, so that the data had a commercial application too, allowing people to easily compare sites within a vertical and see how there backlinks profile is changing day by day – and with it their rankings. These Buzz Tables are like a stock market ticker for links.

So thank you SEOmoz for providing us with some competition. It may have been harder to produce than we initially envisaged when we decided to make it free – but that’s living proof that competition inspires innovation.

By Dixon May 19, 2011

The Bulk Backlink Checker is essential to find out the key backlink information from the broad range of websites you want to compare. This short video will explain how to use the Majestic Tool and how we can use this information in Excel to gain a greater understanding of link building strategies.

Speakers are recommended, but the essential learnings are also shown in text on the video.

I would assume that Majestic’s users are pretty much exclusively from the Internet Marketing community. There are also quite a lot of them these days. So it may be significant for a few geeks to see that Firefox 3.6 now has just over HALF of our user base market share.

People with less understanding of our industry might also be surprised at the small percentage of users using Internet Explorer these days. But without a great number of useful SEO plugins, that’s probably not totally surprising.

For me, though, the big surprise is the large percentage of Chrome take up within the SEO community. Majestic SEO took the decision a long time ago not to use Google Analytics or indeed any code or technology directly related to search engines. It’s a great product, but a proportion of our users, we felt, would prefer that we did should not give every minutiae of our user’s habits out to third parties.

Most people understand by now that links have a very real influence on rankings in search engines. How it works and in which ways a link can influence your ranking is often unclear though, resulting in many myths. This link building 101 tries to explain the basics of link building and to refute some of the myths around it.

How does a link help your site?

A link to your site “helps” in four ways:

It adds value to the “receiving page”, allowing it to improve its visibility in the search engines.

It adds value to the entire receiving domain, allowing each page on that domain to improve its rank ever so slightly.

The text of the link is an indication to the search engine of the topic of the website and more specifically the receiving page.

People click on links, resulting in so called “direct traffic”.

The value of a link for the receiving page is determined in part by the topic of the page the link is on. A link from a page that has the same topic as the receiving page is of far more value than a link from a page about an entirely different topic.

On top of that, a link from within an article is worth way more than a link from a sidebar or a footer. Furthermore the more links there are on a page, the less each individual link is worth.

So what makes a good link?

Imagine, you’re working on a link building campaign and you get to choose where to place a link and what page to point it at. You’ll have to consider the following questions:

How strong is the site / page that’s going to link out?

Which receiving pages on my site make most sense as far as topic is concerned?
Which page of this set of sensible pages would deliver the best ROI when it’s ranking?
Which page is most sensible for the visitor of the linking page, clicking on the link?

The last question is often the one best to ask of yourself: link building delivers, if done well, better rankings and more direct traffic. You have to keep in mind though that in most cases those visitors coming to you directly from the other site will behave differently from people coming from the search engines. Say you get a link from a site aimed at elderly women, these people will behave drastically different from the diverse public you’ll get from the search engine when the page starts ranking. In your design of the page, you’ll have to account for both.

How strong a site and/or a page is can be judged on several criteria, PageRank being one of them, though often not very accurate. MozRank is useful at times, but the most useful and sensible check often is the following: does the page that you want a link from, rank in the top 20, 30 or even 50 for terms related to the page you’d want it to link to? If the answer to that is yes, a link no that page is usually a good idea.

The anchor text

If you’ve decided which page you’re going to be linking to, the second question arises: which anchor text will you be using? The anchor text in itself influences two things:
The anchor text indicates to the search engine what the topic might be of the page the link points at and it can therefor help that receiving page rank for that term. If you want to rank for “WordPress SEO”, you’d want to have links to that page with anchor texts like “WordPress SEO”, “SEO for WordPress”, etc.
The anchor text also has an effect on how many people will be clicking on the link. While from the above bullet you might have gathered that “click here” is a horrible anchor text, as you probably don’t want to rank for it, it does tend to get clicked well and therefor gets you more visitors.

Of course, don’t overdo this. If all links, or a too large percentage of links to your site and / or page have the same anchor text, you’ll look like a spammer. So if you’re actively link building, vary your anchor text.

As you see, these are not trivial decisions, ones you have to make on a site by site and page by page basis. You don’t always have the luxury of controlling anchor text and to be honest, that’s a good thing; way too much sites out there would have a far over optimized “link profile” if they had such a level of control. Because you have to make these decisions on a site by sate basis, buying a “backlink package”, something still far too common these days, is often a wrong decision.

Are there any rules about links?

There are two kinds of rules that influence SEO and thus link building. First of all, there are the rules of the search engines, with Google having said most about links. Then there’s the law about advertising, these laws differ per country but especially within the EU they tend to have the same “ring”.

What Google says about links and link building

In their article on link schemes Google gives some examples of links that can influence your ranking negatively. This deals with both links to and from your site (f.i.: don’t link to spam sites). They’re most clear about paid links though: they’re a violation of their guidelines and can lead to a ban of your website.

This isn’t to say that such links would have an immediate negative effect. In fact, in the short term they might even boost your rankings, as quite often Google has to take manual action to discount those links, as not in all cases Google see whether a link has been paid for or not. But, especially keeping in mind the recent debacles with JC Penney and Overstock.com, both of whom have been penalized by Google and publicly scolded for their behavior by the press, this tactic is seldom worth while.

Google recently published an article on quality links on the Google Webmaster Blog, it’s worth reading to get their perspective.

The law about links

I’ve talked about the Dutch specifics in an article on Marketingfacts recently, which in trun goes back to an article on eConsultancy: if something is an ad, it has to be visibly (for the visitor) marked as such. A paid link could under these new rules be called an ad and would therefor have to be disclosed. I don’t see a court case just yet, but it’s a good thing to keep in mind.

Want to read more about link building?

Outside of this link building 101 a lot is being written about the topic and a large part of it is, excusez le mot, crap. Because of that I’d like to point you at some sources that I do consider worth while:
Wiep.net – The blog of my fellw countryman Wiep Knol, an amicable guy and great link builder.
Eric Ward aka LinkMoses – When I went to my first class in high school in ’94, this guy was already doing link building. His insights are therefor based on a treasure trove of experience.
LinkSpiel by Debra Mastaler – She has more of a wider marketing approach to link building and is therefor very usable for each and everyone.