How Google Rates Links from Facebook and Twitter
The first Matt Cutts Answers Questions About Google video of the year has been posted, and in it Matt addresses links from Twitter and Facebook, after talking about his shaved head again. Specifically, the submitted question he answers is:
Links from relevant and important sites have always been a great way to get traffic & acceptance for a website. How do you rate links from new platforms like Twitter, FB to a website?
Do you rely on links from Facebook and Twitter updates? Discuss here.
Essentially, Matt says Google treats links the same whether they are from Facebook or Twitter, as they would if they were from any other site. It’s just an extension of the pagerank formula, where its not the amount of links, but how reputable those links are (the company uses a similar strategy for ranking Tweets themselves in real-time search).
While Facebook and Twitter links may be treated like any other links, they do still come with things to keep in mind. For one, with Facebook, you have to keep in mind that a lot of profiles are not public. When a profile is not public, Google can’t crawl it, and it can’t assign pagerank on the outgoing links if it can’t fetch the page to see what the outgoing links are. If the page is public, it might be able to flow pagerank, Matt says. With Twitter, most links are nofollowed anyway.
“At least in our web search (our organic rankings), we treat links the same from Twitter or Facebook or, you know, pick your favorite platform or website, just like we’d treat links from Wordpress or .edus or.govs or anything like that,” says Cutts. “It’s not like a link from an .edu automatically carries more weight or a link from a .gov automatically carries more weight. But, the specific platforms might have issues, whether it’s not being crawled or it might be nofollow. It would keep those particular links from flowing pagerank.”
There you have it. Matt’s response probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise to most of you, but it’s always nice to hear information like this straight from Google.
Do you like the way Google handls links from Facebook and Twitter? Would you do it differently? Share your thoughts.
Related Articles:
> Tips for Getting Found in Real-Time Searches
> Google Makes a Second Real-Time Search Announcement
> Yahoo Rolling Out Something Kind of Like Real-Time Search
Twitter Turns On Opt-In GeoLocation Feature
Filed under: Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Marketing
Twitter has just activated its GeoLocation feature which will let you opt-in whether you want your tweets to be tagged with your current location. The feature is carried not on your Twitter.com account but on third-party Twitter apps which will use the Geolocation API released by Twitter.
If you’re using Twitter apps such as Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare among others and those apps implemented Twitter’s GeoLocation API all your tweets will then be tagged with your current location. Seeismic has implemented geotagging features already. So if your using it as a desktop client for Twitter, you might want to check out how this geatagging feature goes.
So, what’s good about this feature? There’s plenty actually. For one, it could spark up more local conversations between you and your Twitter followers as well as the people you follow on Twitter. You can easily find out events that are happening in a nearby locality just by checking out your Twitter timeline. ReadWriteWeb has several suggestions and creative ideas, you might want to check them out.
You can enable geotagging on your Twitter account by going to the Settings, and selecting the enable geotagging option.
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
Twitter Turns On Opt-In GeoLocation Feature
5 Simple Tips for Better SEO Value from Your Feeds
Posted by randfish
I’ve been connecting with a lot of site owners who are re-entering or ramping up their efforts in the blogosphere. I suspect this has something to do with the focus on content creation + linkbait in the SEO world’s dialogue as well as the potential new traffic streams bloggers are feeling from the surge of linking via Twitter. Whatever the case, there’s a few critical pieces that can help make for greater SEO value from blogging and feeds in general (and most of these haven’t been covered in my previous posts on blog optimization).
#1 - Control Your Own Feed
It’s hard to write something better than Danny Sullivan’s terrific piece on Staying Master of Your Feed Domain. The concept is that you can utilize services like Feedburner, but you want those feed URLs to originate from your domain (so you keep the link juice you’re earning):
To make this work, you need your hosting provider to create a CNAME entry for a new subdomain you’ll create. If they can’t do that easily for you, find a new hosting provider. I highly recommend ours, Tiger Technologies. Cheap, easy for you to do this yourself, plus Digg-tested.
For me, I simply make a subdomain called feeds for any domain I’m dealing with. Since searchengineland.com is our main domain, our feed domain is feeds.searchengineland.com.
Once I’ve created this, the MyBrand magic lets FeedBurner take control of where the domain points to. That let’s me turn the FeedBurner feed address for us into http://feeds.searchengineland.com/searchengineland.
But wait — I thought it was about keeping control? Relax. I’m giving them control because I want to. If they went all evil, I’d just change the CNAME record and point that subdomain to wherever I want. I own the domain. I control where it ultimately points to.
Sadly, SEOmoz doesn’t do this, and it’s a pain to switch (though at some point, it may be worth that trouble). If you’re new to feed publishing or are early in the game, it makes a lot of sense to move now, before it becomes more painful.
#2 – Get Your Feed Listed Across the Web
There are some great directory lists like this one from TopRank Blog and this one from Ari Paparo. However, my advice here would be to go after not just the generic lists, but the more specific feed lists, aggregators, portals and yes, other blogs & news sites that can put your posts in front of an audience that’s passionate about your topic.
In the technology field, for example, places like Alltop, Techmeme, PopURLs, even the NYTimes technology page list feeds from a variety of sources. Those are amazing links and incredible sources of traffic, too (Alltop recently entered SEOmoz’s top 30 referring domains for traffic to the site). If you’re committed to getting the most out of your feed, you need to identify the portals in your niche that command share, traffic and page views, make a feed worthy of being posted and get their attention. Emails are surprisingly effective, but nothing beats an in-person conversation.
#3 – Use Absolute URLs in Your Feed
Scrapers, both good and bad, are going to scoop up your feed and re-publish it, including the links. If you use absolute URLs in your markup (e.g. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/rand-loves-the-nfl) rather than relative URLs (e.g. /rand-loves-the-nfl) your chances of getting link equity and PageRank back from those who re-publish goes up significantly. Note that this is a general disagreement with JohnMu (who posted on this topic last year, though not specifically as it relates to feeds).
#4 – Record Feed CTR & Links You Earn as “Conversions”
Through feed tracking, you can determine the posts that received the greatest/fewest clickthroughs. You can also use your web analytics or tools like Linkscape, Yahoo!, Technorati or Blogscape’s SMM Prototype to see how many links each post has earned (Backtweets is another good one if you want to record tweets). Treat those links andd clicks like a conversion – write more posts like the ones that have success and shy away from the posts that don’t earn much love/attention. Great bloggers don’t start out great (I certainly didn’t). They learn over time what’s successful and effective and get consistently on that track.
#5 – Full Text Feeds are Generally Better for SEO
The argument over partial text vs. full text tends to be about earning the clicks and interactions on your site (full text means people can read off-site and may never click through, while partial text really annoys some subscribers), but from a raw SEO perspective, full text has a few benefits.
- All things being equal, you tend to get more subscribers with full text than partial, which boosts your numbers, gives you wider distribution and increases the liklihood you’ll earn a link from those readers.
- Full text feeds get re-published in full, and that means links further down in the content potentially pass value back to you.
- Blog and feed lists are sometimes picky about partial feeds, and may opt not to include your site.
- Potential distribution partners like full text, because it gives them the opportunity to keep the visitor on their site (but if these deals get done, they almost always mean link juice back to you).
Obviously, business goals may overrule this recommendation, but it’s wise to be aware of the possible impact.
Since it’s a short list, I’d love if anyone in the comments can link to posts or recommendations (yes, even if it’s your own stuff!) that can also be helpful on this subject.
What is a Backlink?
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Backlinks (or back-links [UK]) are incoming links to a website or web page. Inbound links were originally important (prior to the emergence of search engines) as a primary means of web navigation; today their significance lies in search engine optimization (SEO). The number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page (though other measures, such as PageRank, are likely to be more important). Outside of SEO, the backlinks of a webpage may be of significant personal, cultural or semantic interest: they indicate who is paying attention to that page.
In basic link terminology, a backlink is any link received by a web node (web page, directory, website, or top level domain) from another web node (Björneborn and Ingwersen, 2004). Backlinks are also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links.
Search engine rankings
Search engines often use the number of backlinks that a website has as one of the most important factors for determining that website’s search engine ranking. Google’s description of their PageRank system, for instance, notes that Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B.[1] Knowledge of this form of search engine rankings has fueled a portion of the SEO industry commonly termed linkspam, where a company attempts to place as many inbound links as possible to their site regardless of the context of the originating site.
Websites often employ various techniques (called search engine optimization, usually shortened to SEO) to increase the number of backlinks pointing to their website. Some methods are free for use by everyone whereas some methods like linkbaiting requires quite a bit of planning and marketing to work. Some websites stumble upon “linkbaiting” naturally; the sites that are the first with a tidbit of ‘breaking news’ about a celebrity are good examples of that. When “linkbait” happens, many websites will link to the ‘baiting’ website because there is information there that is of extreme interest to a large number of people.
There are several factors that determine the value of a backlink. Backlinks from authoritative sites on a given topic are highly valuable. If both sites have content geared toward the keyword topic, the backlink is considered relevant and believed to have strong influence on the search engine rankings of the webpage granted the backlink. A backlink represents a favorable ‘editorial vote’ for the receiving webpage from another granting webpage. Another important factor is the anchor text of the backlink. Anchor text is the descriptive labeling of the hyperlink as it appears on a webpage. Search engine bots (i.e., spiders, crawlers, etc.) examine the anchor text to evaluate how relevant it is to the content on a webpage. Anchor text and webpage content congruency are highly weighted in search engine results page (SERP) rankings of your webpage with respect to any given keyword query by a search engine user.
Increasingly, inbound links are being weighed against link popularity and originating context. This transition is reducing the notion of one link, one vote in SEO, a trend proponents[who?] hope will help curb linkspam as a whole.
Technical
When HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) was designed, there was no explicit mechanism in the design to keep track of backlinks in software, as this carried additional logistical and network overhead.
Some website software internally keeps track of backlinks. Examples of this include most wiki and CMS software.
Most commercial search engines provide a mechanism to determine the number of backlinks they have recorded to a particular web page. For example, Google can be searched using link:wikipedia.org to find the number of pages on the Web pointing to http://wikipedia.org/. Google only shows a small fraction of the number of links pointing to a site. It credits many more backlinks than it shows for each website.
Other mechanisms have been developed to track backlinks between disparate webpages controlled by organizations that aren’t associated with each other. The most notable example of this is TrackBacks between blogs.
Strategies to Spend Money & Earn ROI from Link Campaigns (without buying links)
Posted by randfish
Last week at Pubcon Las Vegas, I presented on How to Buy Links with Maximum Juice and Minimum Effort with fellow panelists Roger Montti (Martinibuster), Aaron Wall (SEOBook) and Todd Malicoat (Stuntdubl). I was a bit of an odd choice for this discussion, as I’d only recently announced SEOmoz’s Stance on Paid Links & Link Ads, but Pubcon’s organizers decided it would be interesting to have a divergent point-of-view.
Below is my presentation, which covers the perspective I come from and why I’m so risk-averse as well as strategies I recommend to capture value from investing in link acquisition campaigns:
Not surprisingly I had a lot of people talk to me (and email me) after the presentation and express some really valuable opinions and questions. The presentations started late due to a misfunctioning projector, meaning there was no time for formal Q+A. I thought I’d take the opportunity in this post to address some of those missed questions.
Do you ever recommend link buying for any site? What about hyper-competitive industries?
Because of my distaste for risk of any kind when it comes to Google’s webspam team, my answer is consistent – no. I don’t ever suggest that businesses buy links from brokers or in the form of link ads that carry the primary intent of boosting a site’s ranking. To be fair, many of my colleagues who practice SEO in competitive industries (dating, gaming, pharmaceutical, real estate, e-commerce, etc.) don’t agree and do engage in buying links to boost their rank. I even know folks at Fortune 500s who use link brokers successfully for specific pages and targeted keywords (this group is probably in the lowest risk category).
Despite these examples and my respect for my colleagues, whenever I’m asked, I’m going to give the same reply – it’s my belief that in the long run, your money will be better spent on link acquisition that runs no risk of being flagged as manipulative by Google. The penalties and problems of link buying simply outweigh the benefits in my mind, so while I have no problem with paid links from a moral, ethical or legal standpoint (nofollow is most definitely not a way to disclose advertising to consumers as per the FTC’s guidelines), the pragmatist in me says link buying isn’t the way to success at Google.
What about directories that require a payment?
The short answer is – it depends. I’d wager a lot of money that some directories which do require payments pass great link equity. These include sites like:
- The Yahoo! Directory
- The Better Business Bureau Directory
- SEMPO’s Member Directory
- Apple’s Web Apps Directory
Then there’s the opposite end of the spectrum of directories that exist primarily for the purpose of selling PageRank. Google took action against many of these a couple years back and I suspect they continue to identify and discount their links as new ones crop up. In 2007, I wrote a lengthy post on What Makes a Good Directory and I’d still stand by nearly all of that today.
The message here is that just because a site requires payment to get a link doesn’t make it a “paid link” that Google will penalize or discount. As with many things in life, SEO and the web, there are shades of gray and nuances that require paying attention. If stuff like this were simple, SEO would be, too, and we know that’s not the case.
If I see my competitors engaging in link buying, how can I compete if I don’t do it, too?
I think a big misnomer with link analysis comes up when people scroll through a list of their competition’s links via something like Yahoo! Site Explorer. There’s no metrics indicating whether the link is passing juice, no metric for trustworthiness or quality, just a notation that a link exists on the page. Even if you’re using something more advanced like Linkscape, there’s nothing to say which links Google counts and which they don’t. You can easily get pulled into the idea that paid links are what’s propping up the competition’s rankings, when in fact, it’s a few great natural links that are doing all the heavy lifting.
I remember a site clinic several years back featuring a Google’s webspam chief, Matt Cutts. He was reviewing a site’s link profile on stage using an internal tool and commented that while Google saw several hundred links to the site, only three (yes 3 out of hundreds!) were passing link equity. Cearly, the search giant does a tremendous amount of filtering on the web’s link graph, so don’t presume to be sure which links are passing value.
Even if you feel very confident that paid links are winning the battle for your archnemesis, I recommend taking the low-risk road. In the long run, they’re likely to get penalized/devalued and you’re likely to overtake them with a link profile that’s clean and continually increasing in value.
Where do you draw the line between money that’s spent to acquire a link indirectly (as with event sponsorship, ads that turn into links, etc.)
This gets at the crux of the issue, but I think I’ve got a reasonably good methodology for determining which links requiring funds fit with Google’s guidelines and which violate them. I like these three questions:
- Does the organization offering the link tout SEO, PageRank, customizable anchor text or Google rankings as either a portion or the whole of the benefit you’ll receive by paying this money?
- Does the money go towards little else besides the link itself?
- Does the organization/website provide links via this acquisition methodology (whether that’s an event sponsorship, a charitable donation, an advertising relationship, etc.) to the more aggressive side of the SEO/web marketing field (niches like porn, pills, casino, legal, real estate, etc.) often with anchor text heavy links?
If the answer to any of these is a definite “yes,” the source is likely to fit into Google’s “suspicious” pile and possibly will lose the ability to pass link equity in the future (or already has).
How can you be sure that linkbait and viral content won’t be treated the same as paid links by Google in the future?
Just a couple months back, I wrote about Why Linkbait is a Tactic the Search Engines Will Always Value, so it’s probably not worth re-hashing here. Certainly, there are ways to be manipulative about virtually anything in the link acquisition world, and Google may well take action against some forms of these, but I believe natural links acquired through great content are going to stand the test of time (and are likely to benefit from future ranking signals, whatever they may be).
This is just Google FUD – we shouldn’t let them dictate how to do our jobs!
But we already do! The only reason we try to build these links, research the right keywords, create and submit XML sitemaps, etc. is because Google is dictating the way their crawling, processing and ranking systems work. In their ecosystem – the one that drives 85%+ of all search traffic on the web – there are guidelines, best practices, rules and regulations. If you want to play on their court, you’ve got to abide by those rules or be ready to face the consequences. I’m not ready for those consequences and thus, have low risk tolerance and the attitude you’re reading about.
None of this is to say that a more risk-heavy appetite and more gray-black hat methodologies for link acquisition aren’t worth trying; just make sure you do it on sites you’re willing to get tossed out of the playground.
As always, I’m looking forward to the conversation in the comments.