It’s an interesting question, and so it was with some interest that I stumbled upon the home page of one of my local TV stations, KVEW-TV, and discovered a “News Scanner” section that links not only to stories on the local newspaper web site, but also to stories on KEPR-TV’s web site — a primary competitor.

They’re not “clean” links — they’re being pulled from some kind of dynamic javascript widget, don’t show up in the source code, and so don’t pass any link juice. But still, it’s interesting to see one TV station posting links to a competitor’s web site.

The question for you… Do you ever link to the competition? If so, when? And, if you do, are they clean links or do you nofollow them? Share your thoughts and strategies in the comments…

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Do you ever link to the competition?

U2, my favorite rock band, is managed by a brilliant business man named Paul McGuinness. But he’s not endeared himself to the music-buying public lately. Twice this year, McGuinness has gone on the attack about the current state of recorded music. He’s called out ISPs for profiting off illegally downloaded music (in the form of bandwidth fees). He’s said that Radiohead’s 2007 release of In Rainbows, where they let fans download the whole album for whatever price the fans wanted to pay, was a failure because most fans downloaded it for free on filesharing networks — not from Radiohead’s official download site/page.

You can imagine how today’s free-music-loving public reacted to all those comments; they basically threw McGuinness and U2 under the bus. “Greedy”, “old”, “foolish”, “sh–y music” … those were some of the nicer things said about U2 and its manager.

In late June, Bono sent a letter to the UK music paper, NME, in which he said the band doesn’t agree with all of their manager’s comments; he defended Radiohead, too. We published the letter on @U2 and I thought this needed to be spread around the same way McGuinness’ comments were spread around earlier in the year.

End of background. Now we’re getting into the linkbuilding and content promotion discussion.

My U2 site is awfully popular with U2 fans and is well-known in most traditional media circles. But it’s not so familiar to a lot of the web-only news sites and Web 2.0-type sites where McGuinness’ comments were most heavily discussed.

One of the sites that really lit into McGuinness was the popular social networking blog, Mashable. (see this post) So, they were the first place I went. Using their Submit News link, I emailed the site, introduced myself as a Mashable reader and founder of @U2, and shared with them the link to Bono’s comments disagreeing with McGuinness and defending Radiohead.

I got lucky; they published a new article updating the story, and included a link to Bono’s letter on @U2. That’s an inbound link to a deep page from a high-quality site. In other words, Link Gold.

But that wasn’t all. News spreads, and once Mashable reported this update, it went mini-viral.

1. Two days later, PaidContent.org, another high quality site, picked up the story and included a deep link to @U2.
2. It turns out that articles from PaidContent.org are syndicated on CBSNews.com, which published an abbreviated version of the story, but with the link to @U2 intact.
3. A day later, Valleywag picked up the story, again deep-linking to Bono’s letter on @U2.
4. Thanks to that mention, TechDirt ran the story the following day and deep-linked to @U2.
5. And finally, on the sixth day of this viral news-a-thon, PCWorld covered it on their blog, and sent another deep link to Bono’s letter on @U2.

So that’s six quality deep links in six days. All thanks to having a piece of unique content, and promoting that content. I would’ve been thrilled with just the first mention on Mashable. But once you push something out, you have no idea how far it might spread and how many links it might collect along the way.

If you have something interesting, unique, noteworthy … don’t be afraid to tell people about it. Push it out there and see what happens. There’s no guarantee you’ll succeed. But if you don’t promote your content, it’s almost guaranteed to fail.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

You Have Great Content, But Are You Promoting It?

Traffic Marks helps you locate authority sites — sites that would make good places to acquire links. You supply a keyword and it grabs the Top 10 sites in Google for your keyword, and it crawls those sites’ first 100 +/- backlinks (I assume from Yahoo Site Explorer) to find sites/pages that link to the Top 10 most often.

Here are some screenshots using the keyword “canon digital cameras:”

As you can see above, Traffic Marks has identified the top 10 link targets for this keyword — what it calls your “Traffic Marks” — and also shows how often those link targets link to the sites that rank in the Top 10. From this example, we see that khake.com links to four of the sites in the Top 10. If you click the “Show Details” link, here’s what you get:

It shows you that khake.com links to the sites that are ranked #3, #4, #6, and #8 and tells you which pages those links appear on. Nice! So, if site #8, digitalcamera-hq.com, is your competitor, you should be looking to get a link on khake.com/page45.html.

You can also analyze the data by starting with the Top 10 ranking sites and seeing how many of the “Traffic Marks” links to each one. Here’s what that looks like:

It’s the same data, just organized differently. And there’s also a matrix view that presents the top 10 “traffic marks” charted up against the Top 10 ranking pages.

Does it Work?

After taking Traffic Marks on a handful of test runs, I’m impressed enough to add it into my linkbuilding tool bookmarks. It presents relevant, helpful information in an easy-to-digest format.

It does break down a bit, however, when you get into local search queries and other queries where authorities and hubs are more difficult to find. For example, use “seattle restaurants” as your keyword, and only seven “traffic marks” are found; search for “seattle italian restaurants” and that number drops to four. For queries like these, you may need to dig deeper than 100 backlinks to find common link sources. Traffic Marks just so happens to offer a “Deep Search” option which does exactly that — at a subscription cost of $397/year.

At the moment, the regular (non-deep) Traffic Marks tool is free, although on the MindValley Labs blog post announcing the tool, author Amir Ahmad says you should use it “for free, while it still is.”

Here’s one vote from a satisfied user that the regular version of Traffic Marks always remains free. If so, I’ll be using it quite regularly. It’s a terrific linkbuilding tool.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Traffic Marks: Terrific New Linkbuilding Tool

The question comes from “Bob” (not his real name), who owns a national company that provides local services all across the U.S via franchising. Just like hotel companies, Bob’s web site offers a unique page for each city where they offer services. Here’s Bob’s question:

We’re now looking at doing some link baiting. Any thoughts on where we should start? The key for us is that we have 340 franchise partners and we want them all to get out there and get links to their metro pages, i.e. ourdomain.com/seattle. Any thoughts would be appreciated, Matt.

I changed Bob’s domain, as you can see. My reply to Bob was pretty brief:

———
I think your line of work probably lends itself well to some linkbait ideas — 10 Biggest (redacted), etc. — but I don’t know how you’d do that while targeting 340 different city pages. You might be able to get a couple different URLs to hit the digg homepage, for example, but after a while, users will get tired of seeing the same URL with the same type of content, and you’ll get buried.

I think your best bet is just going to be trying to create something terrific that targets your main URL, and then allow the link juice pointing to that URL to filter into your metro pages naturally.
———

That was my response. How would you have answered the question about linkbait and locally-targeted businesses?

Have a question you’d like answered? Email me today!

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

SBS Mailbag: Locally-Targeted Linkbait

Here’s a look at the most recent photo on my personal photo stream, which includes a link to my personal blog, where I wrote about the photo in more detail:

The pink highlight = a nofollowed link. That link is in the photo description that I wrote about my own photo, so now there’s no linking benefit to sharing photos on Flickr. Links that other users place in the comments on a photo are also no-followed, so including a link in comments you leave on other photos is pointless from a linkbuilding perspective. As I said above, this was inevitable.

One thing that’s unchanged is this: Links in your user profile are still, at least at this moment, followed. Here’s a look at two links in my profile:

What’s the Impact?

1.) Using Flickr as a linkbuilding tool is almost dead. And, as a loyal Flickr user, if that cuts down on the amount of spam that masquerades as comments on photos, I’m all for it. But I’d also like the links that I place on my own photos to be able to pass juice — like in the first screenshot above. And, as long as they allow links in profiles to pass juice, you can bet Flickr will see more of this crap.

2.) Using Flickr for social media marketing is alive and well. Nowhere in my How to Market on Flickr article do I talk about using Flickr for linkbuilding. I talk about being part of the community that makes up your target audience and becoming a valued contributor. I have no doubt that still has plenty of value if you do it the right way.

BTW, credit for this discovery goes to Gab Goldenberg of SEOROI, who shared the news on Sphinn. There’s going to be a Sphinn button below this paragraph, but please don’t Sphinn this — go join the discussion on Gab’s post, instead.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Flickr No-Follows (Some) Outbound Links

In the past year or two, bloggers and other content developers have clued in to Flickr as a great source of usable photography. And that opens up an opportunity for anyone with a camera!

I’ve been sharing photos on Flickr since 2004. I use Creative Commons licensing to tell people, “you can use my photos as long as you give me credit in the process.” That credit typically takes the form of a link to my Flickr stream, or to the individual photo that was used.

I love when I find my photos on other sites. Why? Because it helps increase my exposure and, perhaps, sends a little bit of link juice when the link comes from an Important Site. Consider the three links my Flickr photos received this week:

February 7: Discovery Channel’s Planet Green blog

February 11: Wired Blog Network’s Epicenter blog

February 12: Consumerist.com

Those are Important Sites, and those are nice links. Not great, but nice.

Consumerist, one of my favorite blogs, has used my Flickr photos four other times that I know of:

• Still Not Sure What To Get For Mother’s Day? Consumer Reports Has A Guide For You
• United To Unveil Miserly Compensation Policy For Delayed Passengers
• Despite Ban, Fries From Burger King And Wendy’s Still Contain Too Much Trans Fat
• IHOP To Abandon Trans-Fats By Year End

Why Does it Matter?

When these other blogs/sites link directly to an individual photo of mine, I like to go in and edit the photo description to add a link to MattMcGee.com, or some other blog/site of mine. I’m just trying to take advantage of that inbound link to my Flickr photos however I can.

When they link instead to my photo stream home page, it helps make that page a little stronger. That page is already a PR5, so I’ll gladly take any more links people want to send to it.

Either way … every little bit helps, I say.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Using Photos to Build Inbound Links