The Future of Great LinksWhere link analysis is heading and how marketers can

win today and tomorrow.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/director-of-bing-discusses-holistic-search-and-clickstream-data-whiteboard-friday

“Essentially, we've been doing the same kind of search now for over a decade, right? It's basically anchor text and PageRank and inbound links, and that's how we've kind of decided what page is best for a particular term… But there are signals beyond this.”

Stefan Weitz, Director for Bing Search

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/business/media/11search.html

Matt Cutts, Head of Web Spam, Google

“One piece of advice I give to SEO masters is, don’t chase after Google’s algorithm, chase after your best interpretation of what users want, because that’s what Google’s chasing after,”

Link Building Signals Today

Diversity of Domains + Linking C-Blocks

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.htmlhttp://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements

# of Linking Root Domains to URL

# of Links to URL

Anchor Text

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/business/media/11search.html

# of Links w/ exact match anchor text

# of linking root domains w/ exact match anchor text

Features of Linking Pages

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.htmlData via http://www.opensiteexplorer.org

Features of Linking Domains

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.htmlData via http://www.opensiteexplorer.org

Topic Modeling / Topical Relationship?

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.htmlhttp://www.seomoz.org/blog/lda-and-googles-rankings-well-correlated

TL;DR – Quantity & Quality of Links

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.htmlhttp://www.slideshare.net/randfish/big-budget-link-building-advanced-analysis-5566731

Link Building Signals of the Future

Social Signals

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.htmlhttp://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-do-tweets-influence-search-rankings-an-experiment-for-a-cause

Page A646 links from 36 root domains

2 tweets

Page B1 link from 1 root domain

522 tweets

Social Signals

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.htmlhttp://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-do-tweets-influence-search-rankings-an-experiment-for-a-cause

Page A646 links from 36 root domains

2 tweets

Page B1 link from 1 root domain

522 tweets

Page B – the tweeted version –

ranks #1!

Social Signals

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.htmlhttp://www.seomoz.org/blog/tweets-effect-rankings-unexpected-case-study

Social Signals

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.htmlhttp://www.seomoz.org/blog/tweets-effect-rankings-unexpected-case-study#jtc133590

Author Authority

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.htmlhttp://searchengineland.com/what-social-signals-do-google-bing-really-count-55389

Danny Sullivan: Do you try to calculate the authority of someone who tweets that might be assigned to their Twitter page. Do you try to “know,” if you will, who they are?

Google: Yes we do compute and use author quality. We don’t know who anyone is in real life :-)

Bing: Yes. We do calculate the authority of someone who tweets. For known public figures or publishers, we do associate them with who they are. (For example, query for Danny Sullivan)

Brand Signals

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.htmlhttp://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-next-generation-of-ranking-signals

Brands Generics

• Have real people working at a physical address

• Have authentic, followed social accounts

• Display obvious, robust contact information

• Register with government/civic organizations

• Receive traffic from diverse sources

• Generate branded search query volume

• Run offline marketing/advertising campaigns

• Often exist only online

• Rarely have significant social accounts

• Frequently use email forms only

• Stay “under the radar”

• Search is often 90%+ of traffic

• Have little-no branded search demand

• Ignore the offline world

Domain Name / Brand Name “Mentions”

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.htmlhttp://www.seomoz.org/labs/blogscape

Depreciation/Filtering of Anchor Text

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.htmlhttp://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-recommendation-for-googles-webspam-team

Some Future-Looking Link Building Tactics I Love

Q+A Sites

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.htmlhttp://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/question_and_answer_sites.php

Building Your Own Social Community

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.htmlhttp://mashable.com/2010/11/15/biggest-facebook-brands/

Media Coverage

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.htmlhttp://www.madetostick.com/excerpts/

Comment Marketing

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.htmlhttp://www.seomoz.org/blog/recommendations-blog-commenting-marketing-strategy

Competitive Analysis of Top “Brands”

http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.htmlhttp://www.opensiteexplorer.org

Where do these brands earn their links?

Facebook page

Blippr?

Crunchbase profile

App profile on Blackberry

Twitter account

BusinessWeek Profile

Chrome Extension

Mashable Article

Investigating Brand “Mention” Sources

Q+ARand Fishkin, CEO & Co-Founder, SEOmoz

• Twitter: @randfish

• Blog: www.seomoz.org/blog

• Email: rand@seomoz.org

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