Degrees of Separation in Links From Trusted Sites
Posted on March 5, 2008
Filed Under Link Building, Search Engine Optimisation |
A good Search Engine Optimiser should work harder at working smarter rather than pursue less fruitful, more arduous activities. Link Building serves as an excellent example to illustrate this point. With Google devaluing links left, right and centre in an effort to combat manipulative linking practices it makes sense to only focus your efforts on attracting high quality links from trusted sources. If you can’t get links from the top dogs, take the next best thing, links from sites trusted sites link to.
Two attributes of a successful SEO;
- smart
- lazy
Get Links From Trusted Sites
I will demonstrate a system of discerning the wheat from the chaff using the Australian Tourism Industry as an example. Within established industries there exists a hierarchy of authority with many stakeholders to categorise - from spammed MFA travel sites to OTA (online travel aggregators) to owner/operator travel retailers all the way up to Government sanctioned tourism organisations. Taking a top-down perspective, I want to find the source of influence (i.e. the Gov) and from there follow the stream of link love.
Finding Trusted Sites Within Your Niche
Since this a geographically specific exploration of Australia I will limit my search to Google.com.au >> Pages from Australia. I want to find the site that ranks for tourism +site:.gov.au because I know any site that can rank no.1 for a phrase like that on a local search must have incredible amounts of trust, authority and a .gov extension. That’s the kind of site you want linking to your travel site.
First result is tourism.vic.gov.au aka Tourism Victoria. Looking quickly at the site we can see they link out to visitvictoria.com - now it’s time for some sifting!
Find Outbound Links From Any Site
Jim Boykin used to have a free tool for checking outbound links but he’s since required users sign up to his very expensive IM Ninjas program to access it. Oh well, that’s his perogative and we needn’t worry ourselves - live.com has a very cool linkfromdomain: function that does the same thing for free. Querying linkfromdomain:visitvictoria.com will show us the sites considered to be trustworthy aka linkworthy.
Now it’s just a matter of going through this list of sites and finding out who will link to you!
Get Links From Sites Trusted Sites Trust
It’s probably not feasible to get links from all of your top targets. Don’t let this discourage you. It could be that a link to your site does not belong on such trustworthy sites and in such a case you need to follow the diffusion of trust from the top down. By identifying the sites linked to from the Alpha site, and the sites linked to from these sites (and so on), you should have a decent sized list of potential link partners.
Theoretically, the further down the hierarchy of trust a site sits, the less objection they should have to linking to your site if you’ve yet to build enough trust of your own. Of course this depends on individual webmasters and whether you have a compelling argument for them to link to you.
Know Your Place in the Food Chain
Not only this, you should be able to determine where your site fits into the overall heirarchy of this particular universe of websites. Knowing where you are now will help set a path to where you want your site to be. Acting as a useful participant in that space will enable you to attract the links your site needs to progress up the ladder of topical trust.
This approach to selecting topically relevant, trusted sites to get links from applies also to .edu.au’s and, to a lesser extent, .org.au’s. You could carry out this method for .com.au and .net.au, as well, if you wanted to be really comprehensive.
Not to suggest that sites without the .au localisation aren’t relevant but in order to target domestic search you’re going to need links from sites that exist within your local universe. Bear in mind, of course, that numerous Australian sites are hosted locally but not on .au ccTLDs so it may be worthwhile to keep them in mind. The “pages from Australia” function doesn’t mind if you haven’t got a .au!
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3 Responses to “Degrees of Separation in Links From Trusted Sites”
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Two attributes of a successful SEO;
smart
lazy
keep trying joe, you’ve got half the attributes….
lmao… prick
if you’re looking for more on this topic by someone who actually knows what they’re talking about, Peter van der Graaf wrote about getting links from any site quite some time ago. You should check out his blog anyway as there is a boatload of great content on there and this is just classic!