Somewhere like Engadget or your average online news outfit.

The problem is they’ll link any mention of an iPhone to their category or tag page about iPhones. As much as I’m interested in Engadget’s particular take on the particular service, I still want to be taken to the Web page of the service they happen to be talking about.

Certain Web properties do this in part because they’re petrified of losing link juice by linking away from their own site. Think of links to your site as trickles or gushes of water entering your pond, river, lake, or ocean of a Website. The better related to your site’s topic or authoritative the link tributary is the more juice will flow.

Linking Tributaries

Now, when you yourself link out from your Web site it’s a bit like opening another tributary that will invariably lose you some juice.

Sites like Engadget open up these tributaries only for you to come to a dead end. Sites that link out to the actual site provide a fully connected tributary from one to the other.

Imagine you’re the captain of a boat and you’re sailing through these waterways wanting to reach a final destination. You think that by going down the various tributaries and rivers that have been signposted you will be led to your destination, when all you’re doing is sailing around the same chop of water.

And that is the end of today’s ‘Bobby Jindal Talks Linking’ section.

Is Bobby Jindal is one of the people in your (linking) neighborhood?

I’ve never been a hoarder. For example, when I had a shop, or worked behind a bar, if somebody came in and asked for directions to anywhere – even a competitor – I’d point them in that direction. I didn’t point them in the direction of a side room that explained the place they were looking for in more detail.

Last week I came upon a rather intriguing post discussing the merits of linking out from your Website. They give four reasons as to why people think they shouldn’t:

• Harm their reputation
• Damage their search engine rankings
• Cost them PageRank
• Create exit portals where users will drop off

Then gave five reasons why they think you should:

#5 – Linking Out Sends Trackable Traffic
#4 – It Makes Your Site a More Valuable, Scalable Resource
#3 – Search Engines Likely Reward the Behavior Algorithmically
#2 – Linking Out Incentivizes Links In
#1 – Linking Out Encourages Positive Participation & Contribution

It’s a most enlightening read and requires your divided attention. Now I’d like to give a bit of empirical evidence supporting #3 if I may.

Go and do a search for ‘Prices of Potatoes’ on Google and see what comes up #4.

Yes, it’s a Tinbasher post. To be precise it’s a Tinbasher post consisting of 89 words talking about how another post ranks #7 for the same term. It doesn’t talk about potatoes in any meaningful way and it’s woefully short. It only manages to mention the keyword in the title and once in the post. The page doesn’t have any links and it was written over four years ago (when the blog was barely five months old). However, it does link out to a rather authoritative source of potato pricing information.

Now I recall on writing the post that if it were to rank again I’d be extremely annoyed to click on said post and it offer no information about the price of potatoes. Hence I slipped what I thought at the time the best link pertaining to potato pricing information I could find.

Now I’m hardly going to claim that potato prices are as competitive as gold or steel prices, but it’s still there.

And it’s also vilified by the only comment on the post thanking me for having put the link in there as they were looking for potato prices. (Although to this day it still strikes me as a bit of a spoof comment).

But, as I felt it was important not to lead people a merry dance via an empty referral click, I have a funny feeling Google takes this approach as well.

And that’s it, do unto searchers as you would have done unto you were you the searcher.

Be a user. Understand what they might be looking for and provide it. After all, is that not all search engines are trying to do?

It requires some chutzpah to think you can provide all the answers or are deserving of delivering them.

Paul Woodhouse

Paul looks after the SEO side of things here at Direct Online Marketing as well as trying to work out the best social media strategies for our clients.

The first time I referred to myself as a Webmaster I’d been taken to the NEC in Birmingham (West Midlands, UK, not Alabama) by the brothers Butler, who I was Webmastering for, to attend a sheet metal machinery trade show. On signing up I was asked to give my role within the company, and rather than have ‘technical buffoon dragged along for the ride’ that wouldn’t read legibly on my name tag, I offered Webmaster. Matt and John found this highly amusing, and for the next twelve months they’d refer to me as ‘The Webmaster’ in a quizzical Darth Vader tone.

A Webmaster is not only the single point of joy for businesses that entertain them, but they generally serve as the one administrative contact for all things mentioned in the definition above. One of the more common emails you receive that contain the term Webmaster are those requesting a link from your site. Yesterday I received one such email:

Dear Web Master

Apologise (sic) if I have already been in contact with you about this before. I was merely enquiring whether you offer any advertising on your Butler Sheetmetal site.

I have a client/s that would be willing to pay you an annual charge for a text link (advert) on your site. My client/s website are either in the Home Improvement industry or related to Home Improvement, also the websites are well indexed with quality content and I think your site is suitable for a link partnership.

Please let me know if you are interested as you have a really suitable site.

I thought I’d tag him along a bit as I was interested in his offer, especially as he’d sent me an identical email for their sister site Tinpot Alley. I’d once been offered $500 for an annual link on The Tinbasher, and I’m not ashamed to say that the thought of at least doubling that had me tempted as it’d free up a new laptop purchase.

However, I originally turned down the $500 link and really had no intention of taking this guy up on his offer either. It was nothing more than professional curiosity. You see, the whole link buying and selling thing along with the guy’s lame email pitch and his company’s odd reputation left me positively stone cold. Any one of the three would have been sufficient for me to turn heel, but put them all together and we’re talking the mother of all moonwalks.

Anyway, let’s break this this thing down.

Why Buying and Selling Links is Wrong

I’ve never bought a link and I’ve never sold one. This is because (to paraphrase some old chap who invented the Blackberry) the fundamentals of ‘teh Google’ are strong. When you search for something you want the results of that search to return you an answer as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Google and the other search engines know this and we, as searchers, demand it. Now before I go off on some tautological ramble, Google does this by factoring in over 100 elements within its algorithm, with the glue being that of links between sites. A link from one site to another vouches for that site and, dependent on how important and relevant the link and the site giving the link are seen as being by Google, will in some way determine where you rank for a given keyword. While it may seem to all concerned that there are search engine fairies that arbitrarily assign ranking positions, that isn’t the case. Google wants this to happen naturally out of the goodness of our hearts. Great, amazing, worthwhile information will get linked to and poor, redundant filth won’t. It’s beautifully simple until you throw a cash spanner in the works. If you pay for these links and artificially increase your rankings by doing so you game the system. Search engines then return nothing but sites that have the largest link buying budgets. Then the search engine is dead. Oh, and if you get caught by Google selling links your offending site will be dead to them.

You can read everything you ever wanted to know and more about buying and selling links that pass pagerank in this post on the Google Webmaster Blog.

Time for Tools: The Dreaded Impersonal Email Pitch

As much as I am entertained by my brother-in-law calling me ‘The Webmaster’ it’s darned lazy to pump off an email with that as a salutation. They don’t even know if there is a Webmaster, just an assumption. The time it took to find an email address couldn’t have been too long and it would only have taken an extra 8.4 seconds to find a name. Blimey, it should only take half an hour to craft a reasonable email tuned to the sender and less than a minute to run a spell check so you don’t look like an illiterate doofus when you start your email with apologise as opposed to apologies. And then you lie. Why say the sites are home improvement related when they’re home insurance sites? I’d have been all over a link to Tim Allen.

How Shifty an SEO Company Were They?

Now because I’m not as lazy as the bunch who’d just emailed me, or perhaps I can just multitask, it took me all of a couple of minutes to click on their company link. After all, the home insurance links they were asking for were big UK brands. One look at their client list and they were responsible for the SEO accounts of some very big UK companies indeed. Was this their general modus operandi? Do their link building efforts consist of buying links from whoever they can get them from? Can they string a coherent email together? Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised after this week’s financial escapades, but I do wonder how hapless and haphazard certain companies become. I could have forgiven myself for thinking they were some small fly-by-night outfit operating out of some illustrious part of West Virginia < ./sarcasm >. But we don’t buy and sell links against Google guidelines and we’d be appalled at the thought of firing off a thoughtless email such as the one above. We may make a mistake or two, but it isn’t because we’re shifty or unprofessional. They’re of the ‘honest’ variety – not because we’re short term blackhat SEO impresarios. I’d heard of this bunch before, but I couldn’t quite remember where. I’m also no snitch. But, if you read this post about shifty insurance SEO practices, they’re spoken of fondly along with a couple of sites that I was asked to link to.

And the clincher? The reason I’m tentatively outing these SEO shysters?

They only offered me $100 a year for each link.

Paul Woodhouse

Paul looks after the SEO side of things here at Direct Online Marketing as well as trying to work out the best social media strategies for our clients.

Yesterday I posted an interview with David Temple about paid search certification and SEO training. In case you don’t want to click back or try to split screen two browser windows, I offered:

We tried contacting Eric Ward to purchase a half day training program, but I guess he’s too busy to cash a check (read: he won’t get back to me and I’m going to feel like a giant jag-off if it turns out God forbid there’s some family or personal reason I’m not aware of…although I’ve tried contacting him a couple times on 2 different occasions….

Well, today I received a comment that temporarily got caught up in our akismet commenting spam box, an email, and a phone call from Eric. Apparently, Eric’s as big a fan of search engine reputation management as we.

The short version – Eric was sorry for not getting back to me either time. The first time was around when he became a father again and this second time?

Sadly, my father recently had a stroke that pretty much left him unable to care for himself, and my brother and I are handling the situation as best we can.

Backpeddle, backpeddle, backpeddle. What I meant to say before was that Eric Ward offers excellent link building training, is quite handsome, and should have a statue of bronze built in his honor and placed next to Abe’s in Lincoln Park.

Seriously – my public apologies to Eric (we already had our phone hug-it-out). While I tend to be flippant about a lot of subjects, family and stroke are not something I would touch.

On the positive side – Eric very graciously peace piped a one-hour link building Q&A to my firm. So now the question – what do we want to ask Eric?

Finally, it is my hope that this post will serve as a notice to any other folks that may have had trouble getting in touch with Eric that the delay has been caused by something very personal that he did not want – for obvious reasons – post on his site.

I’m going to go find someone to take me out to the shed now as we would say in West Virginia.

Update: I didn’t realize Eric was from Knoxville. He might not like this picture, which I had captured for a never-written Vandy-UT recap post:

Or this one:

Or this one:

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?