SEO

Infuse Your Back Links With Sweet Sweet Juice

August 8, 2008 By: Justin | 16 Comments

So I just put up a post where I talked about diminishing marginal utility of links from the same IP. Basically, there is a limiting factor to how much juice your site can receive from a single IP. The amount of juice each link from the same IP decreases with each new link, so how do we use this knowledge? Well I promised you that I’d expand on this.

Ok, so I have a bunch of links from an IP, I’m maxing out? Is the linking capacity of that source spent? NO! And I’ll show you how in a moment. There is a way to squeeze more juice out of each IP.

Here is the explanation briefly. Those with their grayhat on will catch on quickly, the rest of you can see the illustrations below. Here it is:

You have maxed out your links from a source, but have the people who are linking to you?

That’s the whole post in a nutshell, but I’ll expand on it.

Here is brief diagram of what your affiliate site link profile might look like.

You’ve got a few links from article, directories, social sites right? And you have a few dofollow comments right? You’ve got a few legit links from a few sites from some link bait type stuff. Well now you’re scratching your head? You feel like you just maxed out your linking ability? Well, now you go and set up a blog farm because you’re desperate to get more links to dominate your niche. But still, you seem like you’re coming up short?
(Well before I expand, if you have done everything in the previous paragraph, you should be dominating almost any long tail niche. If you’re not, you’re doing something wrong)

But lets say you need some more linking power and just don’t know what to do. Due to diminishing returns of sites on the same IP, simply spamming the same sites will not improve your situation.

Well, here it is:

Your legit backlinks, in purple in the diagram, have they made use of all your resources? Does each one of them have 30 blog farms pointing to them? Do they use BMD? Do they publish articles?
Most likely, no.

They have not reached the capacity those IPs can pass them.

Lets say each of those purple sites is a PR 0. How sexy would it be to turn all your PR 0 links into PR 1 links?
Anyone who hasn’t gotten the point yet, will go “OH” when they see this next picture.

=P

Ok, so the fact is that 90% of everyone ignores any link building advise you give them. I will tell people to do article submissions and 90% will ignore my advice for one reason or another. This means they have not taken advantage of article marketing. Well, I write a couple 400 word articles, anchor the post that they made that links to me, and submit it to article marketer. Yeah, I helped him out for free, BUT the authority of that page just went up… and so did the authority of my back link =P

I make a blogger blog. I make a few other free sites. I point them at a page that points to me.

Simply, use your legit link sources to launder your links!

Your site may have hit a limit on blogger blogs, but the other sites that link to you, may have not. So link to them, build their authority, and now you’ve boosted your authority.

The success of your supporters = your success. They all raise and you raise with them.

Sneaky Uber Cool Tip (well maybe not that cool):
So what decides what keywords a page has authority for? Backlinks? Right
Ok, so when anchoring your supporters… what keywords do you use? Use something that includes parts of your keywords. Obviously you don’t want them to out rank you or anything, but if it is a post about plugins… I’d anchor “Cool Plugins for Wordpress SEO”.
You have now given their page extra authority for YOUR keyword. Now a page with “some” authority for your keyword (via linking) is now linking to you. You just increased relevance of that link, so it is now passing more juice =P

Filed Under Sneaky

Diminishing Marginal Utility of Links

By: Justin | 7 Comments

It is important to understand that search engines note the IP from which a website is hosted when reviewing a link. This is done in large part to detect link manipulation patterns. Too many links from a single IP is an indicator that all those sites have the same owner. To help prevent link farms, search engines have been known to discount links from the same IP address.
I want to cross SEO with a concept from Economics, which is diminishing marginal utility. Which is a complicated way of saying: each new link will count for less and less. (from same ip)

So when you get a link from a particular site (ip), let us pretend it sends you 80 units of link juice. The next link you get from that IP may only send 20, and the next 10, and the next 5, then 2, then 1, then 0.5, and so on. These are estimated numbers, but help explain the concept. For you visual learners, here is a graph that illustrates diminishing utility.

The blue line on the graph represents the amount of link juice / authority that is passed in total with each increase in links from the same ip. It will continue to increase, but the slope decreases until it nearly plateaus off. At a certain point, the value of the link has diminished so much, it is almost useless.

The concept of diminishing returns is a very common math model, which is also very similar to the S curve which you see with carrying capacity. I always try to think of math models that might explain what Google is doing, since they are a math heavy business model. I think this is a solid approach to looking at what Google is doing.

This model may even extend on beyond the graph, when it begins to discount value as the number of links gets too high. This may play as a method of “punishment” for “link spam”. Visually, this concept could be seen in the following graph.

If you get “too many” links from the same source, this may flag your site for link manipulation. And each addition link might result in negative juice.

So Why Does This Matter?

Consider your link building methods. If you are using a method that gets links from the same places over and over again, they will begin to get discounted. For example, the first few articles you publish in a article directory will carry some weight, but those links will get less and less effective with each new article. You might pump out 50 articles to 300 article directories, but you will not be getting 50 solid links from each domain. You will get a few solid links and the rest will be highly discounted.

Now if you are using BMD. You are tagging the hell out of your submissions on scuttles. Each submits may give you 5 to 10 links. And over time you might collect 100’s of links. Your links will become heavily discounted at a point.

Important to stop now and cover my ass a little. No, I am not disagreeing with anything anyone has said. Vic says to throw out 1,000’s of links to scuttles. Yes I’m saying they get discounted. I am not disagreeing with Vic’s methods of mass automated links. Google’s ability to catch and discount links is not perfect. So automated methods like BMD will slowly increase your link juice, but very slowly. Your authority growth will stagnate if you do not diversify your link sources though. This is why you should not simply use the same methods continuously. If you did 3 scuttle runs on a site, and not seeing the SERPS you want, 50 more won’t do the trick. You need to go get different links.

The difference between my posts and Vic’s posts, is that Vic focuses primarily on “make money online”, but my focus is more aimed at conceptual SEO. If you are targeting long tails like Vic suggests, your competition will not be fierce enough worry about concepts like this. If you want to play with the big boys, you have to dig a little deeper.
I am 100% positive Vic understands concepts like this, but it’s of no concern for ultra specific niches with no competition.

The Marginal Utility of your Link Farms

Are you running link farms? Got 35 blogger blogs? Wondering why it is not pushing you over the top? BLOGGER BLOGS ARE ON THE SAME C CLASS IP. Yep, they are suffering from diminishing marginal utility. The first couple of blogs really helped, but each additional blog helps less and less. All of a sudden, they seem to have no impact…? Right?

So what is a farmer to do? Mix it up. Mix it up! Compile a list of free webhost and set up one at each.

** 5 blogs on 5 different hosts is worth more than 5 blogs on the same host! **

Let’s Discuss Hosting

Ok, Hostgator is awesome. But guess what… They are a network of shared servers with very similar IP’s. And all your sites are sitting on the same server. All your sites share an IP (generally). So what is a grayhat to do?

Use another hosting company. Do not drop hostgator, I’m not saying that.

I mean: Get a Hostgator account. Get a Dreamhost account. Get a Bluehost account.
We’re talking $5 to $10 a month here guys, less than a cell phone bill. If you are serious about this stuff, $30 is nothing and it gives you 3 IP’s to play with. All off a sudden, your linking power tripled.

So Now What?

Still a little lost on how to use this knowledge?

No worries. I have a couple of useful posts in mind that will be coming up soon all using the concept.
Disclaimer: As always. Some of the stuff I talk about is shady… use at your own risk. I’m just telling you how it is. Your 35 blogger blogs won’t cut it. What does cut it… 2 to 5 link sources on 30 different IP (hosting services).

Filed Under Link Building, SEO, Sneaky

Adventure Tour | SEO Wordpress Theme

August 6, 2008 By: Justin | 5 Comments

Here is another SEO friendly Wordpress theme. This time I took the Adventure Tour theme and made a few tweaks to improve its search engine optimization. I made a post about how to SEO a Wordpress theme, if you’re interested in what types of changes are made to themes when I optimize them.

This is a simple black, green and white theme. Like most themes I use, it has a right side bar, which helps place the sidebar after the page content. It has a jeep header image, which can be changed, and has a widgetized sidebar. A really simple / clean theme.

I have a series of themes come, but you can always request a theme to be optimized.

Adventure Tours SEO Wordpress Theme

Theme is free to use. All I ask is you leave the footer in place to credit me for my time =)

Download adventuretour Version 1.0

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Filed Under SEO Wordpress Themes

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