Comments on: Giving it away – Advanced Link-Building Strategies through Viral Marketing

By: kokos

kokos — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:51:40 +0000

Some marketers wonder if viral marketing is worth the hassle since it is hard to create, and even harder to replicate. As mentioned before, the best laid campaigns appear to be self-igniting, where the brand and marketing agency do not seem actively involved. The campaign then needs to speak for itself, and to do so, strategy, planning, timing and execution all need to be flawless.

By: Arun

Arun — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 05:34:30 +0000

Thanks Hamlet Batista,

This is something new which i have read recently but creating the badges and widgets can be a daunting process. I think it is not as simple as that. Definitely some sites provides these facility but i think you should be little bit strong to do this.

By: Janni

Janni — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:28:49 +0000

Exellent post thank for sharing all the time your top ideas.

By: Hamlet Batista

Hamlet Batista — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 20:52:00 +0000

thanks, Jason. I am glad you enjoyed the post. Welcome to my blog.

By: Jason Pearson

Jason Pearson — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 02:48:40 +0000

This is a wonderful post! I really like the badge idea. I have never even heard of some of these concepts. Thank you for generalizing this for us so we can decide what we want to do with it. Keep posting such great information and I will keep coming back.

By: Hamlet Batista

Hamlet Batista — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 09:10:47 +0000

Mitchell – Thanks for stopping by. I am glad you enjoyed it.

By: Mitchell Allen

Mitchell Allen — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 00:40:02 +0000

Hi Hamlet,
I popped in here from Caroline Middlebrook’s blog. I was intrigued by the viral quizzes.

The whole post is very useful, as well!
Thanks for sharing this information.

Cheers,

Mitch

By: Size does matter when it comes to SEO | Attraction Biz.com

Size does matter when it comes to SEO | Attraction Biz.com — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 14:26:17 +0000

[...] just makes sense that large sites have a MUCH greater chance of getting links than a smaller site. Large blog sites also offer a wider variety of posts to attract these [...]

By: Link Building this week (28-09) | Wiep.net

Link Building this week (28-09) | Wiep.net — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 13:23:42 +0000

[...] The paid link debate is a discussion that probably will never end. And certainly not if you keep reading stuff like Rae Hoffman’s excellent post about how difficult it is for Google to determine which link is a paid one and which one isn’t. Jim Boykin explains why it’s unlikely that you get penalized for selling text links. I agree with him on the fact that Google just tries to identify a paid link and to not count it. However, in some cases, it might better to offer something else of value in stead getting a regular paid link. Another option is using viral marketing as a link building technique. [...]

By: A detailed look at what can (and can’t) be automated in SEO † Hamlet Batista dot Com

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 22:58:43 +0000

[...] is an interesting idea that might (or might not) work. As I discussed in my previous post about advanced link building, giving tests and rewarding test takers with badges is a really good way to build links. I think [...]

By: David Hopkins

David Hopkins — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 21:34:07 +0000

Bonjour Neil,

There are a couple of problems I see with widget baiting.

As you mention above, creating widgets can be a good way of getting more traffic, but how many of those people are looking to hand over their hard-earned greenbacks? Probably none. They just want to get their mits on your free tool. On the other hand, have a selection of tools and other goodies on your site is going to increase the reputation of your company and of course some of the link juice will flow back to your sales pitch page(s).

Antoher problem mentioned above is that your widget page could end up out ranking your sales page(s).

By: Hamlet Batista

Hamlet Batista — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 19:35:22 +0000

Andy – Thanks for your comment and for the tip to avoid being penalized by Technorati. I think that is the reason why SEOmoz is not listed in the top 100.

I will move my blog to a new server and upgrade wordpress to 2.3. Hopefully the new version doesn’t have such problems.

By: Web Design Newcastle

Web Design Newcastle — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 10:35:25 +0000

Very nice post. Thanks for the inspiration. I agree with David that this is the way SEO will have to go in future as traditional methods of link building will gradually see their power diminished.

Interesting point about quizzes and badges. I think this combined with some good Social Network exposure could really work well. It did for SEOMOZ anyway – http://www.seomoz.org/seo-expert-quiz

In the Guardian newspaper yesterday there was also a good article about people using Facebook Applications to gain traffic – and in particular how one florist receives 17% of their daily traffic from a facebook App they created. Not bad for something that took probably 2 developer days to write.

By the way – just found your blog and I’m really impressed. You’ve got yourself a new subscriber. Thanks.

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 09:11:17 +0000

Definitely something wrong in the URLs
-–-

If you go the widget route with noscript, use subdomains or alternative domains with 301 redirects.

This then allows you to still have a site blog and not get banned by Technorati.

By: Hamlet Batista

Hamlet Batista — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 18:46:05 +0000

David – I tried to go to the StumbleUpon page and was not able to access it as you described. I will have to review the slugs manually before hitting publish.

I fished one comment out of Askimet’s queue intended for the TC40 post, but it seems I missed yours. Sorry.

By: David Hopkins

David Hopkins — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 18:05:50 +0000

Hi, I just thought I’d call in a WordPress error (shortcoming) that your site has fell victim to:

This post has an ISO-whatever-it-is in the URL, which has not been removed by WordPress. This hasn’t cause any on-site problems, but it has brought up a strange character.

I wouldn’t have noticed this if I hadn’t stumbled the article and subsequently tried to visit the review page, only to find out that StumbleUpon has also succumbed to the shortcoming of not striping non-alphanumeric (plus -) characters from the URL. The outcome of this being that no one is able to access the StumbleUpon page for this article.

Another WordPress error I have experienced on this blog as well as others is I will post a comment but it never end up on the site. I have no idea why that is. For example, I posted a comment on you Techcrunch 40 article but its never appeard.

By: Hamlet Batista

Hamlet Batista — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 16:59:40 +0000

I exchanged a couple of emails with Jez and here is the recap.

He is referring to a site that has a link back pointing to one of the site’s images instead of a regular HTML file. Does that count for link juice? I think any link coming to a site, not matter the MIME type of the destination, helps build the site’s domain authority.

As I explain before, there are sites that rank high because of the anchor text boost and there are other sites that rank high because of their domain authority plus on-page factors.
When I first read Google’s original paper, one thing that shocked me as interesting was that they could show email addresses in the middle of search results. How? They used the anchor text as the relevance qualifier. I am not sure why they stopped doing it, though.

By: Hamlet Batista

Hamlet Batista — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 12:42:50 +0000

Please send me an email with the site you mention

By: JEz

JEz — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 09:56:50 +0000

Hi Hamlet,

The .edu site had hot-linked an image in another site I was looking at.

Yahoo recorded this as a backlink, which surprised me, and prompted my question.

Jez

By: Hamlet Batista

Hamlet Batista — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 02:00:44 +0000

Is there any value to links to images?

Jez – I am not sure I understand your question, but here are a couple of interpretations and how to leverage them for advanced link building.

Hot Linking. A site is hot linking your images, i.e: using your images by linking directly to them in your site. They use the IMG tag and that doesn’t count for link reputation.

You can create a script that serves all your images and checks to make sure the referrer URL is from your domain. In the event there are referrers from other domains, you can show them an alternate image with a message requiring them to link to you if they want to use your images.

Alt Text. When your link back contains and image instead of link text, you can use the alt text attribute of the IMG tag and that provides the same benefit as the regular link text for ranking purposes.