will critchlow - the future of link building

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The future of link building WILL CRITCHLOW

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Page 1: Will Critchlow - The Future of Link Building

The future of link building

WILL CRITCHLOW

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Here are the kinds of things we’ve seen today

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@hannah_bo_banna

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P.O.M.PPsychographicOnlineMassPublishing

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Info vs plain graphic

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Much of What Makes Leaders Great Also Makes Them Great Marketers

Via the White House Flickr Feed: http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/8191317327/ - Inbound marketing in action!

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Where did my “submit link” button go?

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Links are dead

I want to make it 100% clear that this is not what I am saying

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Links are dead

If you tweet that I said this, I will hunt you down

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It’s link building that is in trouble

I’ve been answering SEOmoz Q&A since it looked like this

All the answers to “why don’t I rank?” used to be “you need more links”.

Now?

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Dear GOD.Not those links

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I’m not here on a moral crusade

I just happen to prefer flywheels over explosive unsustainable growth

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…and I’m not risk averse

I have invested in all kinds of risky things (defined as “things that might not work”)

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This is the last linklove

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The future of link builders

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There’s a bigger problem

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We broke directories

They used to be the best way of finding great things on the web

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We broke comments

Now we all have to run akismet

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We broke forums

Many legitimate forums and communities closed under the onslaught of forum spam

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We took a 150-year-old form of communication

“Distribution of the slave population of the United States”, 1861

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As practiced by respected newspapers

“The Ebb and Flow of Movies”, 2008

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And ruined it

Thanks @ChrisLDyson

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Try to make the design support the data

Please tell me this was a joke

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Incidentally, a good use of Pinterest

Maybe the only one I’ve found yet - http://pinterest.com/scottcowley/ugly-infographics/

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Guest columns have existed forever

Does your process look like this? Please tell me no. [Hat-tip Carson Ward]

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We can’t even clean up after ourselves

Without hacking people off

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information tied to verified online

profiles will be ranked higher than

content without such verification

Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google

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You think:“how can I game that”

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There’s an even bigger problem

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Ad agencies are better than us

Honda Cog

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Artists are better than us

OK Go

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Celebrities are better than us

@willcritchlow

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Brands are better than us

Red Bull has videos of pigeons doing backflips

Image/Graph etc.

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STOP

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Stop worrying about your hosting IP

address

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Start worrying about CDNs, edge nodes and site speed

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Stop worrying about linking

C-blocks

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Start worrying about how many journalists you have in your address

book

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Stop worrying about anchor text

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Start worrying about being misquoted

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Stop worrying about nofollow

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Start worrying whether anyone will click

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Stop calling it link juice

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For the love ofGOD

stop calling it link juice

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Link equity plays much better in the board room

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The future of link builders

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Hire the right VP Marketing or you’ll just end up with a bunch of blue pens

with your logo on them

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If you aren’t naturally technical

Start here – incredible deck from Jamie @ SEOmoz

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Earn attention instead of shares

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Engage spidey sense

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We can instantly tell Mom & Pop from Thin Affiliate

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We know why no-one is linking to you

Your site is ugly, your content sucks, no-one knows who you are

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We know how influential a person is

Haha. Just kidding.

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Power searching

We can find out who people are, where they write, what they own

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Homework time

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Make yourself uncomfortable

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= 1 hour or less

= an afternoon

= day or more

See here

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Not extrovert?

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Get a journalist to run a story based on your tip

Call 3 journalists & tell them you thought they’d be interested in a story you found online

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Present to a crowd of 200+ people

See Justin Briggs’ explanation of how

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Present to a board

Bonus points for getting shouted at

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Negotiate with a salesperson

Get more than 10% off retail price of something (doesn’t have to be a car!)

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Record a screencast or webinar

Get it watched by more than 20 people. Camtasia / Google+ Hangouts on air

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Visit a newsroom

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Sell something door to door

Don’t want to go outside? Make 10 cold calls

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Run a live usability test

Offer to buy a stranger a coffee. Resist the urge to coach them

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Answer 3 customer calls

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and website instant chat

I highly recommend olark.com

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Read to a child

In some ways, they’re an easy audience. In others…

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Not technical?

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Install a web server

I’d start with Apache. Send enough traffic that it breaks. Fix it.

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Build a web crawler

Crawl 10,000 pages. Discover how little of the web is nicely-formatted HTML

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Search through some log filesImage/Graph etc.

Find 3 crawlers on your site that aren’t googlebot, slurp or bingbot

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Build a tool

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Contribute to an open source project

Github makes some parts of this really easy. The hard part is working out git

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Make something and sell a copy online

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Work out who someone anonymous is

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Run a conversion rate test end to end

I recommend Optimizely. Don’t worry if you don’t get significant results

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Install and play with r

Take some Google Analytics data and strip seasonality

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Not creative?

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Film and edit some video

Phone camera. iMovie / Premiere Elements. Lower third. Cut a scene. Improve audio.

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Make a graphicGet 20 shares

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Build a wireframe

Try Balsamiq. If you can’t think of anything, rework distilled.net homepage & send me it

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Rewrite / redesign a landing page

Cheri Percy wrote about our own conversion rate trials and tribulations

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Write for a publication you’ve previously bought

Bonus points for calling yourself a “published author”

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Thanks.

WILL CRITCHLOW

[email protected]

@willcritchlow

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Image creditshttp://www.flickr.com/photos/seandreilinger/440479819/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cabbit/5443790000/http://www.flickr.com/photos/ballookey/265114990/http://www.flickr.com/photos/latzko/6928444437/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/theseanster93/5027792986/http://www.flickr.com/photos/timriley/246432530/

http://maddieonthings.com/post/45025427385/austin-tx-sxswhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/johngreenaway/3356358479/http://www.flickr.com/photos/99411713@N00/6170567978/http://www.flickr.com/photos/mulmatsherm/2221223106/

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/New_York_Stock_Exchange_Boardroom_-_New_York_-_Flickr_-_hyku_(3).jpghttp://www.flickr.com/photos/wrherndon/4630505899/

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Al_Jazeera_English_Newsroom.jpghttp://www.flickr.com/photos/jfraissi/3710938389/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/alreadytaken/1338047903/http://www.flickr.com/photos/rcpl/5125999205/

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d2/TrakAxPC_Video_Editing_Software_Screenshot.png/1024px-TrakAxPC_Video_Editing_Software_Screenshot.png

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrsmagic/3300485968/http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Seattle_Ugly_Mug_02.jpg

http://www.flickr.com/photos/quinnanya/2596039804/http://www.flickr.com/photos/hugosimmelink/1505553447/