The explanation began when I mentioned the word “link juice,” which can be defined as positive ranking benefit within a search engine algorithm passed through a link. For example, if a link to Project Paradox appeared on someone else’s site, that link would be said to be passing link juice. A separate but related term, “link love,” can be defined as the act of passing link juice.

I went on to further explain the nature of the “link condom.” A link condom is a use of the rel attribute of the anchor HTML element that allows a webmaster to indicate that a link has no trust. A link with a link condom applied (e.g. <a href=”http://www.projectparadox.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Project Paradox gets no love</a>) does not grant any algorithmic ranking benefit to the destination site. In essence, a link condom prevents the transfer of link juice.

Link condoms are particularly useful for webmasters because they also prevent any negative impact of linking out to bad neighborhoods. Some websites are marked as spam by search engines for various reasons and linking to them can incur a ranking penalty for the linking website. By automatically applying a link condom in such high-risk areas as blog comments, forum posts, and wikis, webmasters can ensure that user-submitted links do not negatively impact their websites.

So, does any of this sound like the safe sex lectures we all heard in high school? It’s almost as if those bad neighborhoods everyone warns about linking to have some sort of search engine STD. Considering the logical progression of terms, I don’t think it would be far-fetched to say they’ve got “link herpes” or that, “If you link to someone, you’re linking to everyone they’ve ever linked to.”

Yes, I admit I’m being juvenile, but it’s hard not to be with this sort of industry jargon floating around. I wonder what sort of dirty SEO terminology I might’ve missed.

Given how nofollow links are supposed to work, then, you wouldn’t expect to see such links showing up in backlink reports. The weird thing is that Yahoo and Google are doing just that. A quick look at Project Paradox’s inlinks on Yahoo Site Explorer reveals more than a handful of them. Comments I made on Slashdot and several blogs show up in the first two pages of results. And while I can’t link you to it, I see the same sort of links showing up in my External Links Report on Google Webmaster Tools.

My first instinct is to question the freshness of the index. Perhaps some of these links weren’t previously tagged as nofollow but got changed since they were last crawled. Considering the comments from Slashdot, however, this simply isn’t the case; user links on Slashdot have always been tagged with nofollow.

How, then, are we to interpret this? It’s definitely great if you want to see more of the links coming into your site, but it’s confusing as hell from an SEO perspective. Are the two biggest search engines weighing these in their linking algorithm, or simply reporting them in its backlink reports?

By all reports, neither Google nor Yahoo pass any link juice through nofollow links. They do, however, follow such links (counterintuitive as that may seem), spider their destinations, and record them as backlinks. To us users, then, it appears as if they’re handled in exactly the same way as ordinary links. I guess we’ll just have to take it on faith that such links don’t count for anything in the ranking algorithms.

That got me to wondering what sort of unsung SEO feeds are on other prominent SEO professionals’ reading lists. I’m sure I’m not the first to ask that very question. What unsung feeds are on Garrett French’s list? What about Adam Schultz? What about JP Sherman? What about Jeremy Swiller or Jon Revill? Why not start up a meme to share those wonderful resources?

(Yes, I realize I just listed a bunch of old friends. The reason is simple. These are people who I can forcibly coerce politely convince to post follow-ups. Sure, I’d love to know what oddball SEO feeds Bruce Clay, Matt Cutts, and Danny Sullivan have on their feed readers, but I doubt they’d post a response for little ol’ me. )

I’ll go ahead and get the ball rolling with three of my favorite oddballs.

• SEO Egghead by Jaimie Sirovich – When I was writing about the paid link debate the other day, I actually went back to an old post on SEO Egghead for inspiration. It’s not a chart-topper, but it’s managed to avoid numerous feed reader trimming sessions nonetheless.
   
• SEO Speedwagon – I found this one the other day while researching feeds for my boss. Good, up-to-date news with funny commentary; a decent read.
   
• SEOrefugee Cartoons – The first feeds I read every morning are my comic strips, and let’s face it, there aren’t a lot out there geared toward the SEO community. SEOrefugee is a good blog in general, but their comic strip enjoys a special place on my reader list. I only wish it was updated more often.

To those I’ve already mentioned as well as any I didn’t who might be interested in participating, here’s the meme. Post the unsung SEO feeds off of your reading list that you think might be useful to your fellow SEO experts, then link about to one another so everyone can find everyone else’s resources. Post a comment here if you have any questions.

I look forward to increasing my SEO feed consumption to even unhealthier levels.

You’d think, then, that I’d have a problem with paid links. After all, Google does. Matt Cutts went on a paid link tangent recently that has the whole SEO community buzzing. In reality, though, I endorse the use of paid links, both as an SEO expert and a publisher. They’re a viable means of improving your rankings as well as monetizing your website. More to the point, though, I don’t think Google’s smart enough to stop paid linking.

It’s pretty clear why Google wants paid links out of the equation. If paid links count, then someone can simply pay their way to the top of the SERPs. No doubt this is happening in a lot of niches. By telling webmasters to clearly designate their paid links as such, Google wants to eliminate the efficacy of the practice and maintain an index of naturally valuable results.

Now, I don’t have a problem with great results, and I think Google is entirely within its rights to hunt down and devalue paid links wherever they find them. However, I recognize something that Google doesn’t…

Popularity is always for sale.

This is true in any context, including online. If someone wants to be popular (in this case, have more/better links), and they’re willing to pay, they will be. Heck, that’s why presidential campaigns cost so much. Google may find ways of detecting the more obvious links, but link buyers and sellers will simply make them less conspicuous, taking the money-changing signals behind the scenes where no algorithm can reach. They’ll blend the paid links seamlessly with the real ones until no spider or human can tell the difference.

Recognizing that reality, I believe paid links are here to stay. Google will try its best to devalue what they find, which will only serve to make them less visible. In the end, website owners will still be able to pay for algorithmically advantageous links and gain rankings illegitimately. Google will never be the wiser.

I, for one, will be doing exactly as Google says by tagging my paid links as “Sponsored Links,” at least until my link broker tells me to start hiding them. Sure, I like to play by Google’s rules, but until AdSense starts paying more than my text links, I’ll do what I have to in order to protect my revenue.

Why is this so important? One word: Visibility. Search engines have been plagued with visibility issues throughout their existence. Webmasters would make web pages and wonder why the search engines didn’t include those pages in their indices. At the same time, search engines would encounter hurtles to indexing based on how webmasters put their sites together. Thus was the practice of search engine optimization born.

The sitemap protocol allows a webmaster to provide a well-defined list of URLs in a format that search engines can easily read. It’s the communication link that’s been missing from web standards for ages. Webmasters can rest easy knowing that search engines can see and index (although not necessarily rank) every page on their site. Meanwhile, search engines can improve their indices with pages that they may not have known about previously. Everybody wins.

The new autodiscovery feature makes it even simpler to communicate with search engines. It uses a preexisting web standard, the robots.txt file, to define where your sitemap is for any search engine spider that wanders by. Once upon a time, you had to manually submit your sitemap to each search engine. And while it’s still a good idea to do so (some of them give you some great metrics if you do), it’s not necessary to ensuring that your pages are crawled.

The syntax is simple enough. Just add an extra line to your robots.txt file that looks like this:

Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/

It’s that simple. All things considered, I don’t imagine it will be long before any naysayers (if there even are any) are sold on the sitemap protocol. Get it up now if you haven’t already implemented it. Seriously, what are you waiting for? I already did.

Honestly, I can’t think of anyone involved in web marketing who shouldn’t be flipping over this data. Beginners should be educating themselves on every point and comment. Experts should be learning well how the experts are disagreeing with their established preconceptions. I’ll admit, even I was surprised on a few points, although on the whole I felt validated in my practices. Viva la Title and H1 tags!

Information like this doesn’t come along every day, folks. Seriously, I feel like I should have to pay for such delicious data. If you’ve got any interest in SEO whatsoever, read it.

So here it is, the secret that will tantalize search engine spiders and make your site rank above all others. Drum roll please. The trick to successful search engine optimization is…

…don’t use tricks. That’s right. What? Not what you were expecting? Sorry to disappoint, but it’s the honest-to-Google truth. The most important thing I learned in the SEO industry was to avoid illegitimate tricks first and optimize second. Spamming search engines through cloaking, cross-linking, keyword stuffing, or any of the other techniques collectively referred to as “black hat SEO” will inevitably hurt your rankings more than they’ll help, possibly even getting your site dropped. Thus, the most important thing to succeeding in SEO isn’t what you do; it’s what you don’t do.

You’re probably wondering how that can be, when there are plenty of anecdotal examples of sites using tricks to rank well and getting away with it. It’s true that these sorts of things can work, at least in the short term. In the long term, however, the search engines will find out. What was accepted as a viable trick yesterday is getting sites delisted today as the search engines update their algorithms to catch it.

Thus, in the end, there is no trick to succeeding in search. You create an accessible website, fill it with valuable content, network with other site owners, and you’ll rank. It’s that simple. Tricks just get in the way.

Search Engine Optimization is the process of increasing a website’s organic search engine rankings. It involves researching keywords, increasing the algorithmic visibility of on-site HTML elements, and developing inbound links, among other things.

Search Engine Marketing, on the other hand, is a general term used to describe all methods of marketing to search engines. Any practice that leverages search engines to generate demand for a website technically falls under the SEM umbrella.

Strictly speaking, then, SEO is a part of SEM. Recently, however, SEO has started to become important and distinct enough to demand its own term. Depending on where you hear it, then, SEM can either stand for all search engine marketing practices in general or simply everything but SEO. In the latter context, it most often carries an emphasis on paid linking through services such as Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing.

Why the distinction? Well, as the industry matures, its experts become more specialized. SEO and paid linking are two very different beasts that demand different approaches and skill sets. I, for example, am an expert at SEO, but I’m probably not the one you’d want optimizing your AdWords campaigns. In my last job, that sort of thing was handled by a dedicated SEM specialist, who in turn rarely did much in terms of SEO. Using the blanket term of SEM to describe both of our jobs would get confusing, especially for clients. Hence the need for separation.

Knowing how these things go, I have no doubt that people, even those who should know better, will continue to get these terms confused. I only hope that, after reading this, you won’t be one of them.

My wife would be very amused to find that I’m not posting as consistently as promised, since I’ve been griping at her about our inactive photo album. Oh well, she doesn’t read Search Engine Lowdown anyway, so what she doesn’t know won’t hurt me. At least, not until she reads this post…

That’s why, when changing domain names, it’s important to start a link recovery campaign. Link recovery is the process of informing other webmasters who link to you (also called link sharers) that your site has moved and asking them to update their links accordingly. Generally speaking, the more links that get updated in this way, the more likely it is that your site will enjoy the same search engine rankings that it did before the move.

Link Recovery Preparations

Starting a link recovery campaign requires some initial research and preparation.

1. Identify your site’s inbound links. A good way to start is by plugging “link:” followed by your old domain name into Google, Yahoo, and MSN, which will return the URLs of your most important link sharers. If you’re a blogger, plugging your old domain name into Technorati or similar blog indexing services will likewise return your most important links around the blogosphere.
    
2. Prioritize your link recovery efforts. Older sites may have hundreds or even thousands of inbound links, so it’s important to know which to target first. Starting with the most recent links is always a good idea, as the freshest are the most likely to bring in traffic. On that same note, any links bringing a lot of traffic into your website should be prioritized. These can usually be identified through your web analytics software. Following these, any links from high authority sites, which can be identified through measures such as Google PageRank or Alexa Rank, should be recovered next.
    
3. Create a link recovery spreadsheet. I find it best to organize your links according to category (e.g. directories, blog posts, etc.) and priority. You’ll then want to create additional columns for information such as the URL(s), the linking webmaster’s name, their contact method, the date you sent the update request, the status of the update, and any other additional notes that might be helpful.

Requesting Link Updates

Now that you’ve got everything set up, it’s time to start recovering your links. Of course, how you go about communicating with your link sharers will affect how many links are recovered. Here are some guidelines to use when composing your link update request.

• Only recover a link when it’s practical. Generally speaking, most people consider links in their blog comments or guestbooks to be too trivial to deserve revision, so it’s best not to bother them about such links in the first place. Stick to prominent links, such as those found in directories, the main body of blog posts, link pages, etc.
   
• Ask nicely. A link sharer is under no obligation to update the link, so be sure to phrase your request politely. It pays to compliment their website, because people are more likely to take action on a personable request than a dry one. It’s also considered polite to thank them for linking to your site in the first place. The more respectful you are, the higher your chance of a successful recovery.
   
• Do the work for them. Track down and provide the exact pages on the link sharer’s site that contain links to your site. Unambiguously identify the link you’d like changed, being sure to provide the new URL. If you have any reason to believe that the link sharer isn’t very savvy with HTML, it might help to provide hand-edited code that they can copy and paste right over the old link. Make it as convenient as possible and the link sharer is more likely to update.
   
• Track your progress. Whenever a link is updated to your satisfaction, mark that URL as complete on your spreadsheet. Be sure to go back and check manually, since some link sharers may update without responding.
   
• Don’t ask twice. Chances are good that, if a link sharer doesn’t respond or take action from your initial request, they’ll simply get irritated by repeated pestering. If a link sharer responds, be sure to reciprocate the communication, but don’t hound them into updating your link; they’re more likely to take it down entirely, and a redirected link is better than no link at all.
   

Link Recovery Message Template

If you’re not sure how to phrase your update requests, the following template can provide a good starting point.

Hello <THEIR NAME>,
My name is <YOUR NAME>. I run a <YOUR WEBSITE’S CLASSIFICATION> named <YOUR WEBSITE’S NAME>, which is currently linked from <THEIR PAGE’S NAME> (<THEIR PAGE’S URL>). I have recently moved my site’s domain and would appreciate having the link to <YOUR PAGE’S NAME> changed from <YOUR PAGE’S OLD URL> to its new location at <YOUR PAGE’S NEW URL>. Please let me know if you have any questions, and thanks for linking to my site.

Best regards,
<YOUR NAME>

Concluding the Link Recovery Campaign

Done correctly, a link recovery campaign can give your website real traction in the search engines, possibly even as much as it had prior to being moved. It’s important to note, however, that even the most successful link recovery campaign will only recover a fraction of the site’s old links. This is normal and should be expected as you track your progress.

Link recovery efforts should be concluded a reasonable amount of time after all of the update requests have been sent. A month or two at the most is a good benchmark. After that time, most if not all of the recoverable links will have been recovered.

The next step, of course, is to start building new links to replace those that couldn’t be recovered. The goal, of course, is to eventually surpass the popularity of the original domain. Normal link building through blog comments, directory submissions, linkbaiting, and the like should be an extension of, and even concurrent with, your link recovery campaign to ensure the long-term health and growth of your website.