Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [187]
In the block-level analysis, search engines do not apply benefit to links to advertising, so these areas are blocked out, as identified by the ad server code or by the site manager excluding purchased links with a “no-follow” code—a method of noting certain links that you do not want the search engines to follow (similar to robots.txt, discussed last week).
Social Links
If you haven’t been sleeping through the past few years, you have probably noticed additional “decoration” on web pages in the form of small “share” or “like” icons (see Figure 16-3).
Figure 16-3: Social sharing icon links
These icons represent various social-networking sites that allow you to post articles to “like” them. In doing so, you add a link to your profile that recommends the article to the people in your social network.
The social network links on the pages do not provide any link benefit, other than providing easy access for you to recommend the page, product, or article to others; in doing so, it builds external links to the website. Social networking sites have been one of the fastest-growing methods of building links to a website, because people are more than willing to share recommendations with each other.
The benefit is in the action of visitors recommending your page to their friends. So, there is additional work to be done, which will be addressed in Chapter 18.
Comment Links
Comments are a product of blogs. Blogging software allows site visitors to leave comments and questions about an article, and the site owner can directly interact with the commenters about a subject. When a visitor leaves a comment, they have the opportunity to leave a link to their website along with their comment.
This created an issue over time, because people looking to increase links realized that they could leave comments on blogs and get their link on the page of a highly authoritative blog, simply by adding it in the comment. As you can imagine, this caught on and created many problems for popular bloggers, many of whom had to deal with thousands of comments being made on their sites weekly or even daily.
The search engines then created the no-follow tag (as mentioned in the “Advertising Links” section). The purpose of the no-follow tag was for blog authors to be able to designate comment links as links that were not part of the editorial content but were comments from nontrusted sources. The development of the no-follow tag was to designate nontrusted links, which in this case made perfect sense. It gave site owners more control of the links and who they decided to give links. Trusted links were made in the editorial content. Commenters could link all they want, but no link benefit would be passed to their websites. The no-follow tag has been used in various other techniques by website managers, but the primary use is to designate untrusted links. Blog software now comes with comment links set to no-follow by default.
Wednesday: Understand How Link Development Mirrors Offline Networking
The more I study linking and link development, the more I realize that linking is remarkably similar to offline business networking. You are not going to link to a site that you have never seen or used, right? Of course not! We link to websites that provide us with value, good and timely information, or products that we recommend to others. We link to sites that we want others to know about, which is the same as offline networking and word-of-mouth marketing.
Making and Receiving Business Referrals
One of the best summaries of networking