3 SEO Musings on Outbound Link Structure,Keywords and TrustRank

Just a short and sweet post for this week. (I am exhausted after riding a roller coaster of emotions while at the NCAA tournament).  I have 3 musings for this week.  Why 3?  Because I figure that for those of you who hate my longish rants on internet marketing and SEO will be able to carve up a post that is broken down into 3 parts.  Here are the things that I will be discussing (SEO is the subject, by the way)

1. Do Outbound Links Really Matter in the grand scheme of SEO?
2. Is that competitive keyword really as competitive as you think?
3. TrustRank and why it matters more than PageRank…..

Outbound Links, the BlackHole Sites and my Observations

Just like everyone else who is interested in ranking online for keywords, I like to watch what others do that are actually ranking in their niche to see if they are doing something cutting edge or going against the grain.  And I think that most marketers are a bit confused when it comes to the internet and outbound links.

Will too many outbound links hurt your rankings?

Marketers hate “page leak” not only from an SEO perspective but from a potential lost customer perspective.  Think about it for a second.  Have you ever seen a sales page that actually gave you, as a visitor, a way “out” of their page other than the back button or buy now button?

Now obviously, you wouldn’t want page leakage on a sales page but some have taken it a step further and horde their page rank like it actually means something (which it doesn’t).  There are some sites that refuse to link out to any other website on the web with the thought that it would somehow hurt their rankings(once again, it doesn’t to when used within reason).  Just an FYI here…this is known as Black Hole SEO and even big companies with tons of trust rank are guilty of the practice.

So what does this have to do with your website, right?  Well, actually a lot if you have a new site and are trying to form that “relationship” with Google.  The bottom line is this….

• The internet operates the way it does because of links….
• When you link to another site similar to yours, you are not only giving a vote to the site but helping Google see the relevance between the your new site and the older, more established website in your niche.

Trust Rank Through Osmosis??

This is something that black hats have known for some time and many of the grey hats who build their link farms know as well.  Build a post and at the end of it, add links to sites with high trust rank.  It is like obtaining trust  through relationships (and links are relationships).

The reason why I even mention this is because I have seen several prominent SEO sites who link up very liberally.  In fact, one of Aaron Wall’s latest posts has 7 outbound links on it…only one links internally to one of his other pages.  And just to be clear, this isn’t an anomaly.  Almost all of his pages are littered with tons of sites he links to.

So what does this have to do with SEO and your site?

While I can only theorize as to why this is done, I do know that linking to other sites in your niche will help springboard your site in the SERPS.  I believe that it will help get that trustrank that most of us in competitive niches need in order to get to the next level.

It is really all about connections.  It is the way the internet operates.  It may not be the best thing for a marketer that is trying to keep all the traffic on his page so he can make a sale but you have to think that you could technically be “guilty” by association, right?  At least that is how I would view it outbound links.

Randfish kind of mentions this in one of his Q & A posts (membership side):

the value of a single outbound link to a high quality, relevant website creates a better user experience for your visitors…..

….Outbound linking is a good thing, and it should be used naturally, not just for engines, but for visitors. Linking out to sites makes your site a part of a community.

While Rand doesn’t suggest randomly linking to CNN.com just for the sake of linking to it (although a lot of blackhats do so), there is something to be said about sites that freely give out links.

Oh, and one more thing…

For those of you who think that you can simply “no follow” the links and get the same benefits, think again.  Google won’t even recognize the link…and if they don’t follow it, how would they know what neighborhood you are trying to live in?

Believe me when I say this...if there was a penalty for linking to other sites OR if you were to risk your rankings by linking to others in your niche, then the prominent SEO companies would be the first to drop the practice.

Just a musing of mine this week though for those of you who think that the road to getting ranked has something to do with controlling how many outbound links you allow….

Is Your Competitive Keyword Really that Competitive??

Right now, as I speak, the keyword Internet Marketing has nearly 112,000,000 competing pages when I do a search query.  Most marketers wouldn’t touch this with a ten foot pole.  After all, ranking for such a term with a new site could take every bit of a year or two of hard work.  However, I just wanted to point out something that most don’t really consider when they are looking at the competition….

We all research who ranks 1st in the search engines for our keyword….have you ever wondered who ranks last??

It has to suck to be them, right?  And what if it was your site? In all seriousness though, when you do a search query for the search term internet marketing, you will see millions of competing pages.  However, if you do an advanced search and make it so 100 results show per page and then move down, you will find 943 total results with the other millions of search results omitted for relevancy issues.

In essence, the terminology that Google uses is “some entries very similar”…..

Why should this matter to you?  Maybe it should, maybe it shouldn’t.  However, I noticed something quite odd when I was building a test page that targeted “article marketing secrets” for my ezine articles case study.  When I first made it, it ranked rather quickly and this was expected.  I built a couple links from mid level pagerank sites and watched it go from third page to second page and then….well, then it disappeared.

I did a manual search for my page and found it was nowhere to be found.  This was despite the fact that my google webmaster tools showed that it was still indexed.

Where did it go?

My hunch was that it went to the supplemental index because the content was essentially a rewrite of a couple articles I found on the web.  My hunch was that it was deemed not relevant enough and therefore it didn’t rank for it (Article marketing secrets was my title tag for it).

So what does it take to be “relevant” to Google?

So, if Google is striking out over 100,000,000 million pages as “not relevant enough” what makes a site not relevant?

• Is it duplicate content? Maybe but you have to think that there surely isn’t 100,000,000 duplicate pages…it must be something else, right?
• Is it the content itself? Since the algo can’t justify what is good and not good, I have to think that this isn’t the case.  Perhaps there are some LSI formula though.  Perhaps the search bots can pretty much build a summation from all the keywords on a page and add and/or change modifiers.  Perhaps I am giving Google too much credit….
• Is google only indexing trusted sites? Probably.  I think that there is a waiting period for high dollar, high competition keywords.  I imagine that if you are willing to wait it out, eventually your page will show up….
• Is it a matter of building backlinks? This is probably the most likely case.  After all, if Google search bots can’t make “quality” judgements based on the writer’s ability, then it will have to depend on other websites to vote it up.  This said, I think that if your site is brand new, you can expect a penalty or filter if your backlinks look funny.  I think it really depends on who is linking to you though.

Anyway, my point to this rant is this.  Perhaps competitive results aren’t as competitive as you may think.  After all, while 100,000,000+ search results for Internet Marketing may sound like a lot, the reality is that google is really only showing >1,000 search results for it.  The trick is not to fall be one of those “similar” results, right?

Just a thought anyway…

Why Page Rank doesn’t hold a candle to Trust Rank

In my Internet Marketing “113 things” post, I mentioned that page rank really doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things and we, as marketers, focus way too much time on who has the most page rank and we wear our google page rankings like it was a badge of honor that actually meant something.

…and then we discover a blog with a page rank of zero that is ranking for the competitive keyword term make money online.

What the heck, right?

Listen, the reality is that page rank is nothing more than a tool that helps you see how many potential traffic streams you have out there.  That is it.  Period.

I am not saying it is a bad thing.  After all, the more links pointing back to your site, the greater the chance that you will receive traffic.  But from a SEO perspective it doesn’t mean much.  It has no bearing on what you are ranking for. In fact, all of those comments that you make on do-follow blogs with your name does very little more but boost your rankings for your name.

Of course, this is necessarily a bad thing (ranking for other words other than your primary keyword) because Google expects this to be the case in natural link building.  In other words, those of you who are pummeling your site with highly targeted anchor text and ignoring how someone would naturally link a site are probably  setting off red flags.  I wrote a quick blurb on how to naturally build backlinks a while back for anyone interested.

This site, which is currently a pagerank 0, will probably get to PR4 after the next update.  But it means very little to me…..

Page Rank = Link Popularity

That’s it.  Get a lot of links with whatever anchor text you want…could be the url or something generic…could be a thousand different anchors….and you can gloat when google releases the next page rank update.  You likely won’t be ranked for anything that brings in traffic BUT you can always have a good pagerank to make you feel better when you are daydreaming about quitting your day job at McDonald’s.

Trust rank is completely different though.  While you can grab page rank coming out of the gate, trust rank is something that has to be earned through time.  In other words, if you think that a new site (like this one) that is completely legitimate (I don’t purchase links…there is no stuffing involved, ect.) can earn google’s trust as a new domain, then you have to think again.

Why doesn’t Google “trust” my site?

Google has a dilemma.  If they automatically trust a site from the get-go, then they are going to be inundated with web spam and black hats killing it with back link automation tools.  Plus, it is probably no secret (although it is ironic since google makes its money serving ads) that they don’t view “commercial” websites with the same trust that they would with a site that isn’t commercial.

Many Web spam pages are created only with the intention of misleading search engines. These pages, chiefly created for commercial reasons, use various techniques to achieve higher-than-deserved rankings on the search engines’ result pages. While human experts can easily identify spam, it is too expensive to manually evaluate a large number of pages.-Wikipedia.com

And if they were to trust everyone out of the gate, we as internet marketers, would be able to rank fairly quickly for competitive keywords b/c we would be able to get away with things that sites that have earned trust do…shoddy links, link schemes and other things that will get a new website sandboxed. It would be a good day for marketers and not such a good day for searchers…

There is a Waiting Period for the Competitive Terms(probably)…

So, what is Google going to do?  Well, they simply don’t rank new websites for competitive terms for a while.  I like to think of it as a cooling off period.  They wait for that new blogger who thinks that they are going to get rich overnight to prove himself.  And that comes with backlinks from authority websites in thier niche or simply be able to stand the test of time (or whatever time limit google gives them).  As time passes, the website will earn a little respect and consequently their rankings will rise….provided that they are actively promoting their site.

There are, of course, some exceptions to this rule.  If you are promoting an affiliate product that is new, then the playing field should be somewhat level with all of the competition.  BUT, if you are competing with an affiliate marketer who already has a small list of websites that he can link to AND that is trusted..well, then the road will be more of an uphill battle.

How to get Google to trust you when you are “new”

There is a reason why I mention this. It was an a-ha moment I had roughly a year ago.  Here is goes…..

Rather than promoting a brand new website that is already untrusted, what if you instead rode the backs of social networks and websites that were already trusted?

Last week, I kind of mentioned a trend of what black hat marketing mavens are doing to rank for competitive keywords.  If you don’t want to read it, here it is in a nutshell….

• You build a web 2.0 property OR you use a forum profile page on a forum that is already trusted.  You build the page with your offer.
• You build a ton of links to that page…doesn’t matter if they are shoddy or suspect because google already trusts the site.
• Google ranks your page because in its eyes, the platform has “paid its dues” and wouldn’t possibly be thinking about link manipulation.

That’s it.  It is Howie Schartz’s Conversation Domination in a nutshell (whom, by the way, is one of the few “gurus” out there that actually does what he says and shows real ways to make money on the quick)  You won’t be able to quickly dominate Google listing with a new website BUT you could, at least in theory, dominate it if you are using trusted platforms to launch your marketing campaigns.

Next Article: Keyword Research Tools Give Accurate Data?  I don’t think so….

Picture Sources: BlackHole,Trust