by brightedge on August 25, 2010
Rand Fishkin, CEO SEOmoz
We asked Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz’s CEO, to give us his views on backlinking strategies and how to identify white hat versus black hat backlinks.
Here is Rand’s commentary on this subject.
Separating black hat from white hat link building is no easy task. It’s generally the case that links that require payment are in the black hat territory, yet buying a listing with the Better Business Bureau or joining a local Chamber of Commerce that requires a membership fee can get you a great, white hat link, yet have a direct payment associated with it.The best method we’ve found to think about black vs. white hat links is to consider the intent. If you’re acquiring a link through any method (buying, asking, cajoling, trading, etc.) with the primary intent of manipulating the search engine rankings, you’re likely in a danger zone. If, instead, you’re either producing content that will naturally attract links or marketing your site to those who have a natural interest in sharing/spreading your works, you’re in the clear.
Some forms of link acquisition will always be black hat – hacking, UGC-spamming (blog comments, forums, guestbooks, Q+A sites, etc.), most forms of paid linking and text link advertising, link farms and many forms of reciprocal linking. These are nearly always intended to manipulate search results, rather than add a valuable node to the web’s link graph that real human users will find useful and valuable.
Great white hat link methodologies are nearly infinite (limited only by your marketing creativity), but include natural link acquisition through content, social media links from people/sites referencing your material, content syndication, producing badges/widgets/embeddable content, promoting link-worthy content to link-likely audiences such as bloggers, speaking at conferences and events where a profile link is included, publishing papers/books/guides on sites that offer links back, investing in research that others cite in their own publications and many, many more.
At SEOmoz, we universally recommend white hat link building over black hat, not for moral or ethical reasons, but because, practically speaking, white hat links continue to add value forever, while black hat links may not work, even the day they’re created. The high risks and limited life expectancy of the rewards mean that for virtually every web business, save those that have a “churn-and-burn,” temporary ranking goal, black hat link building simply doesn’t make sense.
Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOMoz
by Jim Yu on August 25, 2010
We are thrilled to announce our partnership with SEOMoz – bringing the power of Linkscape’s index to enterprise marketers by showing them backlink strategies that work. Through BrightEdge Connect and the SEOMoz partnership, we are bringing Linkscape’s 450 billion links directly into our Enterprise SEO Platform. With BrightEdge becoming the SEO system of record for enterprises, it was important to provide this information directly inside BrightEdge so that everyone from the CMO to the SEO manager are operating from the same information and metrics, including backlinks which are a key signal used by the search engines.
Legitimate Backlink Strategies That Work
We are continuing to lead the enterprise SEO market with this new offering and are taking another step in simplifying how marketers manage SEO. This integration gives marketers at Fortune 1000 and Internet Retail 500:
- Competitive Link Intelligence – Key information on how their competitors are using backlink to beat them in natural search is available directly in the BrightEdge platform.
- ROI of Link Campaigns - Visibility into the ROI of SEO helps marketers invest more into the backlink strategies that work and stop investing in the ones that don’t.
- Automated Recommendations – Specific and automated link building recommendations for each targeted keyword and page enable enterprises to execute a scalable SEO strategy that drives organic revenue.
We are very excited to partner with SEOMoz because of our shared values on openness and transparency, and the shared belief that white-hat link building is the best strategy for long-term SEO success.
by Albert Gouyet on August 3, 2010
We are very excited to announce BrightEdge Connect. In a nutshell, we are connecting the world of SEO to the universe of marketing with a new integration capability in our SEO platform. This will – for the first time – bring SEO into the CMO suite. It is already in production and is integrated with Webtrends, Omniture and other web analytics vendors.
Challenge: SEO is disconnected from CMO Suite
The problem in SEO today is that natural search is disconnected from other marketing channels. And the reason for this is simple. Web analytics are not integrated with SEO. If you think about it, paid search has a nice API that anyone can call to get information about a campaign but there is no equivalent for organic search. If you want to find out what happened in SEO, you need a technology stack that – among many other things – can crawl the web at scale and connect it back into Web analytics.
Because of this disconnect, we find CMOs don’t fully understand SEO and as a result they typically underfund SEO – even though the evidence shows that SEO is one of the most profitable channels.
Solution: BrightEdge Connect – An Open Integration Layer
When we first launched BrightEdge, we talked about how after three years of development we were announcing the first platform that would allow marketers to manage SEO as easily as paid search. We are very excited to now announce the next major step in turning SEO into a first class marketing channel.
BrightEdge Connect is a new integration technology in our SEO platform that provides complete access into the BrightEdge SEO platform and also connectors that bring data into the platform. The open bi-directional integration technology has many applications that we will talk about over time but our customers told us loud and clear that the most important priority was to integrate with Web Analytics, so that they can connect SEO with the rest of their marketing universe.
BrightEdge Connect Brings SEO to the CMO Suite
With BrightEdge Connect, we are bringing the whole universe of SEO into the CMO’s suite to finally connect the dots across all marketing channels. For the first time, companies can create complete marketing dashboards that combine SEO with the metrics they use to measure and run their business.
CMOs can now get a dashboard with a full view across all marketing programs, including SEO. And the benefit is quite simple: it allows marketers to finally make the most out of all these opportunities without forgetting SEO, which may very well be the most important channel.
