So you might be thinking….is Ryan getting crazy in his old age? What’s this nonsense about guest blogging and paid links being mentioned in the same sentence? One of the major staples in our inbound marketing campaigns for clients is doing kick-ass content marketing on off site blogs. I’ve taken the time to compile the data just over the last year from all of our guest blogging outreach and the results were a little funny.
While paid links in all sorts of ways are still happening, guest blogging has been the “beacon of light” for a lot of agencies and consultants. It’s a great way to reach your target audience, and frankly, the link you “earn” isn’t the highest of priorities for myself and our clients. Overall brand awareness and reach is what I’m going for and what better way to earn that then providing amazing/unique/intelligent content to the targeted masses?
Two Plagues Of Guest Blogging
1) Shitty content and targeted anchor text
The majority of guest blogging taking place is just the same lame article marketing style of content Google has tried to tapper off in the past couple of years. There’s no value being put forth and all these clueless “SEO’s” are overdoing anchor text and its just all about the link.
2) Blog owners want money to allow you to guest post
I’m sure those that do a lot of guest blogging outreach like we do get asked all the time to pay to be able to guest blog for the site. The biggest blogs in your vertical will most likely ask for money and this is the majority according to our data. Google will definitely be cracking down on this in the near future as they will see this as a paid link. I, however, think you will be fine so long as you provide outstanding content, and the social media reactions are somewhat abundant. When you’re “guest blogging” on a large site in your vertical it should be all about the brand exposure. I can see why you’d need to pay because you’re also getting reach through their(hopefully) large social media following, newsletter and whatever else they have going on. Oh, and don’t bother picking anchor text that’s not normal and stick to a nice looking site/brand link.
Guest Blogging Results By The Numbers
From the numbers below you can clearly see that the larger sites wanting money had more to offer than just that link. If your content stays top notch, you’re putting it on a high quality blog in your vertical and you’re also paying for their follower base(social + newsletter), I don’t ever see a problem with Google in regards to those links. I’m sure there is room for argument so I will leave that up to you folks as you know I love hearing your thoughts.
99% of the “SEO” firms out there are nothing more than petty link spammers that have no clue how to do anything of value. Sadly most of them have no clue that what they’re doing is against Google’s TOS. So many real brands hire these snake oil providers because they themselves are not on the up and up.
If your brand offers nothing worth linking(or worth socially sharing) to then please stop every marketing tactic you’re currently doing and refocus. I get a dozen emails a day from people wanting to work with us and I sadly have to turn down nearly all of them. That or they get offende when I state they’ll need a few thousand dollars a month to compete in their competitive verticals. So please stop emailing me unless you want to actually, as Wil Reynolds puts it, “real company shit”.
Sadly, I also get a large number of emails from real companies who have hired these know-nothing consultants who have done nothing but keyword stuff their pages and build god awful links. I hope to help a little by ranting like an angry old man as well as provide you with the knowledge to sniff out a snake.
Audit 1: Their Link Profile
So let’s say you’ve gone to Google and typed in “whitehat SEO services” or “SEO services” or “link building services” etc etc…you will be presented with pretty much only companies who spammed to get their and do the same to their clients. Even some of the “big name” companies showing up here are just spamming to justify their rankings. I’m not one to out a company anymore so for that reason I won’t be naming names.
So in order to audit their links it’s quite simple, just use one of the free or paid tools out there such as Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs, MajesticSEO. For this example below I’ve used Open Site Explorer because you can signup with a free account and get quite a bit of data.
Just as suspected, the first result has the lamest links with all targeted anchor text. So much for Google’s updates…
Anyone who pays attention to the organic SERPs know that Penguin and Panda are a joke if you’re a spammer. You can still make tons and tons of money within a few month time period with nothing but a 2-3 page website and tons of link spam. The site in question here recently did a big blast to secure the top position for any link building service related keyword.
If you see a potential SEO firm with really unnatural anchors like that stay far away because they have no idea what they’re doing. Before you start commenting in anger at me, yes I know target anchor text ranks a site and thus they have an idea of what they’re doing. You just don’t want your legit company being handled by the likes of someone from Digital Point or the Warrior Forum.
Run!
Audit 2: Their Clients
The second thing I’d recommend taking a look at is if they list any clients on their website. A lot of SEO firms do this to establish credit, so take advantage of that. I recommend taking a look at the following:
Their link profile, specifically anchor text levels and types of links
Their on-page SEO and quality of content
What kind of social signals
Check the rankings for the clients main keywords
Check prices…if they’re a few hundred dollars you’re just going to get spam
You will quickly see a pattern emerge and should be able to tell if the SEO company is garbage within just a few minutes. If they don’t offer any clients(as we don’t) on their website just ask. If they don’t provide any you know you can move onto the next or just give me an email.
That’s It Folks!
As you can see it doesn’t take much effort to figure things out and please do investigate before handing over the life of your brand online. I don’t care if you don’t contact us to handle your brand, but please don’t let some scumbag SEO company ruin your organic rankings.
So we often hear that no press is bad press and in the case of Burger King’s Twitter hacking they certainly will come out on top. While a lot of nefarious things were mentioned and done on the account no one will really care, so in the end Burger King will definitely enjoy the buzz.
The reason I hope they don’t care? No one will remember this in a week and during that time, I imagine the will get thousands of links and social followers because of it…so what’s the big deal? Let this sink in and be a lesson on how to turn a bad thing into something good.
If I were them, I would also try and get interviews from highly authoritative places about the incident and perhaps talk about brand image and or social media security…it’s kind of a snooze fest but I imagine a lot of publications are looking to talk to someone over there while the news is hot.
For some reason SAPE links has not been touched by Google’s nasty magic ban wand but it looks like after a lot of chatter via SEO forums, Matt Cutts is a coming for them. While I hope no legit business has been running these links because if so, I’d get on the disavow train pretty quick. The majority of the other people I imagine are affiliate sites than an just turn and burn as they say. Either way, if you’re relying on lame link building like this for your legit business and want to stop, give me a shout to hear how we do it right.
Finally Google has told us that they will tell us, or at least gives clues as to which links they deem inappropriate and are potentially ruining your organic ranking. While the problem for a lot of companies is that they don’t screen which “SEO” company they hire, or their in-house team is as clueless as 99% of link builders out there.
If your brand isn’t even attracting any links at all you’re NOT DOING IT RIGHT. While we’re not against building links, hell our name even suggests it, we do however want our clients to do something that earns them links. We also don’t giv two shits about anchor text or any other manipulation because if your company isn’t the best choice to be shown to searchers, get off the field.
I can’t remember why I even chose to download it again – it might have been Aaron Wall’s face looking at me telling me to do it – but I found myself downloading a trial copy of advanced web ranking and setting up a new project with it.
First Impressions
I definitely did get a little bit overwhelmed when I opened it; probably the same reason I hadn’t fully committed to using the software up until this point. Walkthroughs are nice and everything but if you’re not in the right mood when you first see the “hey welcome to our software, let us walk you through this jungle” popup, it might be the last time you open it. Muscle through and read everything there; it shouldn’t take you longer than 30 minutes to feel completely comfortable with where everything is and what it does.
Similarly, Java is great and all – I love having support in all OS’ – but when it messes with the window management and how a program works, it might get to my obsessive compulsive brain. The first really unforgivable problem I ran into was not being able to display the entire window. On my 1440×900 pixel display, the bottom bit of the actual application window was, and still is, utterly unseeable. The green maximize button brought the application to the full width of the screen but wouldn’t adjust the height to fit my screen. Even Cinch, an app that sizes windows appropriately, was unable to change the size of the window, I assume because of the Java issue. Granted, this didn’t pose much of a problem – I missed out on a few keywords and update notifications that were below the cut – but it still struck me as unpolished for a ten year old piece of software expressly developed for this platform.
But I digress. We need to talk about what the software was built to do – track your web rankings.
Price
I was initially really attracted to the pricing model of the software. Being a risk averse person, I would much rather pay a lump sum than a recurring monthly payment. A lifetime license at AWR is $399. You get updates for twelve months, should you like updates after those twelve months, you pay ~$120. Similarly, if you’re going to be tracking links, that isn’t free. AWR gets its link info from SEOMoz on their link credit system. Read more about link credits here and don’t let this scare you off; they’re totally reasonable if you need them.
You can track all the keywords you want on as many projects as you want for as long and as often as you want. Previously, we had been using a few rank tracking apps, but RavenTools was what I most used and trusted due to its wealth of information and reasonable price at $99 a month. Still, at $99 a month, I could have bought 3 AWR licenses for a year of Raven. They are different products, don’t get me wrong, but in the light of Raven and SEOMoz losing all their rank tracking abilities this month, if you’re looking for rank tracking software, your options are becoming fewer.
If you’re going to be using it for the next year, I don’t think there’s anything out there than can hold a candle to the price you pay for this software.
Rank
As I tend to, I jammed in way too many keywords to track. Focus is important but the prospect of tracking as many keywords as I wanted got the best of me. The allowed use of Proxy servers around the globe will assure that the rankings you collect are the same rankings that your clients see. Importing data from whatever rank tracking software you have used in the past is totally reasonable. Simply tailor a csv file and import it to have access to whatever history you have. Tracking the competition has never been easier, either. Because of the unlimited keyword searches, feel free to track your competitors and see what their strategies are, how they rank compared to your site and what they’re doing to get there.
The searches are all done from your computer so it needs to be on to collect data. As mentioned above, you can set up proxies if you want to keep your IP clean for any reason, but I can assure you that after a month of searches, I haven’t seen a single captcha before a SERP in my browser.
Arguably, the best feature of the software is the ability to keep our clients updated on how their rankings are performing. Every week we have the application automatically generate a report and subsequently upload that report to our server so that the client can, at any time, come to our site and see how their rankings have changed in the last week with some pretty fancy white label flavour. The data looks good, it’s easy to navigate and it makes us look awesome.
Other Features
AWR will also keep track of a few things aside from a website’s rankings. Integrate analytics, get a little more info in the reports and fill out the site’s profile within the app. Why go to google when it’s open here? It will also keep track of what’s happening across a couple social networks. Twitter and Facebook also integrate nicely into the application to show you and your clients what’s been happening on those social networks as well as tracking social shares automatically. The research tools are a nice addition as well. While I tend to optimize a site naturally first, I still find it nice to use simple little tools to determine what the competition is like, which keywords might make more money than others and what can be tightened up on page. AWR has a surprisingly round set of tools for research considering it is meant to be a web ranking tracker first and foremost.
Of all the big names tracking keywords in the SERPs, I don’t think you can do better for your money than Advanced Web Ranking. After you’re in (and as long as your screen is tall enough) using the software is easy, pretty and totally usable. There are programs that integrate better with your OS, but beggars can’t be choosers and I appreciate that it had to be built on Java for accommodation’s sake. Still, you should use this software if web rankings are valuable to you or your clients. Consolidate all your ranking data into this one, ten year old, very comprehensive application built expressly for tracking the SERPs.
EDIT:
To deal with the issues of the window not fitting my monitor, all you have to do is go to settings, click on application settings and change the sidebar menu size to small. The sidebar was too long and pushed the window beyond my screen’s capabilities. I honestly think the small sidebar looks better anyway!
My apologies to the CognitiveSEO.com staff, and mostly to Razvan who gave our team some hardcore use of their seriously well thought out tool suite. We played around with the old version and now their freshly updated toolbox of digital delights and loved it so much we stuck half of our clients on the platform. I will mention first and foremost that I was in no way paid to write about the tool, and Razvan told me to be as critical as possible.
When it comes to tools, we prefer them being straight to the point and this is what I love the most about CognitiveSEO. I get my easy-to-read yet crazy-in-depth backlink analysis. Secondly, the rank tracking tool is second to none, in my opinion. That’s all I really care about, and perhaps one day we’ll see Google Analytics pulled into the dashboard, but really that’s not necessary.
I’m someone who does a lot of backlink analysis, and chances are if you read my ramblings that you do as well. I’ve tried most of the tools out there and don’t have anything bad to say about any of them, but CognitiveSEO really reels me in with their reports. The ease of reading and understanding is there, but I absolutely love the flow of the reports.
What our customers are saying:
Since testing the software out, we made the decision to get 10 of our clients on their platform as we usually don’t offer extensive reporting from our end. Most of our clients are medium-to-large brands, and they’ve brought on our team to just help out with the link attraction and guidance side of things. By now, most companies that are online have some sort of tool suite in their company infrastructure and shouldn’t be too intimidated with something like CognitiveSEO.
With that being said, so far we’ve had a lot of good feedback, especially for the managers we report to who have to deliver a weekly or monthly report. The majority of our clients using the system found the reports to be straight forward enough that I didn’t have to sit on the phone with them going through each little tid bit. We’ll take a look at a sample report below, and I’ll also provide a PDF download link so that you can view our entire link profile in depth.
Doesn’t get any more straightforward than that, and it gives you pretty much all you’d want to know… Especially if you’re just doing a weekly or monthly peek. When I’m doing an audit to determine what’s causing a site to rank over my competitor in a competitive vertical, most of this data is what I need and I can get a good picture of what’s going on real fast.
Link Management Made Easy
This part of the tool suite is REALLY handy dandy. In this day and age, everyone should be monitoring their link losses/gains quite closely, as it can reveal a lot of valuable information. There are not many tools out there that cover this specific link monitoring aspect, and when something bad or good happens, you’ll know just about every detail.
Now I don’t use any tools to monitor links for our website simply because I don’t care at all about them… Weird to hear coming from someone who’s job is to attract/build/buy them for a living. I would have shown this off but I cannot expose any of our clients’ data here, but from the image to your right you can get a look at a weekly snapshot of what’s going on. Notice that CognitiveSEO reports on broken links too, which is in my opinion one of the best features of the whole package.
Geoff loves to monitor our clients’ competitors heavily and wait for a broken link to pop up and snag their links right out from underneath them… So sneaky and devious, I LOVE it. Watching your links by the daily or weekly during content marketing and link bait campaigns is also a breeze. This definitely helps us respond quickly to mentions and get involved in the social conversation and complete the branding part of our job.
It doesn’t stop there, either… Took me nearly 2 weeks when I first started using CognitiveSEO to notice that I could scroll to the right and get even more data on the links coming into our client’s profile. If the link coming in is from a partner/contact, you can manage those details and see them on your monitored links. Besides seeing the AC Rank – and I LOVE this – is that it tells you what part of the page the link is on, ie body/footer etc. I will admit we also haven’t used the “Link Partners” aspect of the tool yet, as we mostly just do link attraction here, but it’s straightforward and yet another reason to start using this platform.
Rank Tracking Made Easy (And Pretty)
Knowing where you rank is not only important information to know, it’s yet another addicting statistic that I like to check on a daily basis. It’s pretty straightforward to use and review reports with CognitiveSEO, although the best feature is most likely the rank tracking compared to your competitors. This will alert you to their mega movements or losses, as well as allow you to report to clients or the boss about how you’re doing that day/week/month/year.
Pricing and Contact
I’d like to thank the whole team over at CognitiveSEO and Razvan for being so patient with me and giving me access to the tools for testing and feedback. You can click on the button to the right and try it yourself free for 14 days, and this is not an affiliate link or anything from me, just straight-up free goodies for your to try out. If you’re already on one of other other platforms then I highly recommend playing around with this, because it might just surprise you.
“With over 7 years experience in affiliate marketing and search engine optimization and 12 years in programming and web development, he has gone from Web Developer to Super Affiliate for large international networks.”
So WTF is “Future Bait” and is this quite possibly the creepiest post title in SEO history? Well to start, it’s definitely a term I’m going to try and coin (aka make up) here. It’s something we employ here as a tactic at Linkbuildr, although I never put too much thought into it until I talked with Jason Acidre (@JasonAcidre) and Jon Cooper (@PointBlankSEO) on their blogs about it, and then subsequently mentioned it in one of our latest posts. Basically, Future Bait is creating content that will be needed in the future for a product or service, in the hope that your content will be out ahead of time (or right on time) and ready to take in links. I won’t give away all our secrets, but I can definitely show you folks how to structure and create content that will get you links when the time is right.
While this technique doesn’t always provide links in droves, you still stand a really good chance of snatching up a lot of valuable organic search traffic. I can honestly say that this is always a #winning marketing tactic regardless of the outcome of either desired result.
So, what kind of topics can you prepare that will be highly searched-for and most likely lead to links? Here are a few we like to make sure are covered, but let’s hear your thoughts/ideas in the comments below”
How To’s
Product Reviews and Guides
Figure out what problems people will be having and prep the solution… Tricky, but this can be done
Videos
Link bait lists that you know will be done, so beat everyone to the punch
Meme’s
Video Reviews
Let’s take the new Google Link Disavow Tool as an example of how us SEO’s could have jumped on a lot of traffic and links in the coming weeks ahead. Dan Petrovic from DejanSEO quickly jumped on this and made a 70 minute video showcasing all the features and how to use the bloody thing.
This was a smart move and since Google/Youtube is starting to rank videos by watch time, this is sure to be an “authority” video on the subject quite soon. So, how is this video going to attract them links? Well, if it ranks well and people embed it, they’re likely to link to the creators like I did in this post. The video doesn’t also have to be on Youtube and they could have used a self hosted service on their end. Google will still rank their own embedded videos well, and you have the option of providing an embed code for others to use that includes a nice link back home.
Product Reviews
Product reviews can be conducted before an actual product launch. You should most definitely try and get your hands on “the product” beforehand and get a review done. Take DejanSEO’s video above as an example; creating a review pretty much on the day of it being released is also a great tactic.
Getting in early or on the day of launch is going to earn you a lot of traffic and hopefully links as rebloggers and sources like Wikipedia are going to be linking out. Make sure you come up with the most comprehensive review possible with regards to both written content and media like videos and pictures. So many reviewers use stock content because they don’t actually have the product in hand – and that’s the number one problem!
Obviously CNET is a really big brand and they have some serious authority sitting behind their domain. Even so, they are always early to adopt the best product reviews. Their Samsung Galaxy S3 review was hot off the press as soon as they got their hands on it, and it’s as in-depth of a review as you’re going to get.
This page is seriously linked up. This page more than likely has more links than most of my readers’ sites, so while this kind of link bait is better for bigger brands, do what you can. Keep doing amazing product reviews and you will eventually burn that into your readers’ brains, and they’ll keep coming back to the source (your site) for more.
Affiliate Marketers Should Pay STRONG Attention To This Section
Google is not a big fan of affiliates, and they have good reasons for that. I see a lot of you folks’ affiliate-based websites and they’re usually absolute shit in regards to content, social activity, and especially the content itself. I think it’s safe to say that 90% of the affiliate sites reviewing products have never actually touched or seen the product, and that is a major problem. If I’m buying something, I sure as hell don’t want to read a review by someone who doesn’t actually know the product.
If you turned it around and actually created amazing product reviews yourself with HD video and high res pictures, well you’re off to a great start. Go beyond that step and do something whacky and wild with it like Blendtec does by blending all sorts of crap in their blenders. It gets attention, it gets links and it has netted them hundreds of thousands of social followers to remarket to all day long baby.
How To’s Are Easy Future Bait
“How to” content is extremely useful, as it’s always a sought after ranking need and best of all it is brilliant link bait. There will always be a need for “how to” content, so sit down with your team or yourself and a beer and figure out what’s coming up in your niche.
I sure do talk a big talk eh? As you may have noticed, I’ve never even written one for Linkbuildr, but we sure have brainstormed and done a bunch for our clients. I will however give you yet another example of something that has turned out quite well for one of my favorite sites: ArtOfManliness.com. In 2009 they created “How To Tie a Tie,” which is something I’ve used way more than I should have.
Regardless to say, this post has done wonders for their link profile and has attracted many links over the past few years for them. Notice the structure of it as well! Mostly great videos which keep users on longer, and there’s a lot of user interaction via the comments and social shares… This post is sending a lot of good signals to Google, and they’ve been rewarded for it. This is not an easy keyword to rank for either!
Top x Lists!
These are easy pickings, folks! Lists are loved by everyone, especially those of us with monkey-like attention spans who just need the goods as fast as possible. If you can get in early on a really good list, you’re definitely going to score some link loving, and the content doesn’t have to be that extensive.
I’ll use one of my favorite marketer’s lists as our example this time. Paddy Moogan from Distilled published a list of infographic sites for submitting to a while back, and it’s extremely useful. He graciously linked us in his post but he has WAY more sites to submit to, as well as in the comments so many others have dropped their sites that he missed. You can read his infographic list here but let’s take a peek into the links that this post has acquired.
That’s a nice number of links just for a post! I imagine Paddy will do an updated version at some point and he can double up those efforts and really bring the link juice home with it. Now that it’s up, it will continue to score more links from other bloggers as time goes on, but most of all from SEO/Webmaster forums.
Solutions To Future Problems
With new products and services coming out, there will always be related problems that people will seek out solutions for. Chances are that if one person has that problem, others will as well, so you know that your fix is going to be linked to other people in all sorts of ways (normally, socially etc). If you don’t already have a FAQ/Help center then here’s yet another reason why you should perhaps start one up.
Companies that don’t have an extensive help section are certainly missing out. You’re also going to be left in the dust for natural links if you don’t allow UGC either. The ability for your brand fans to post their problem will lead to unique searches/problems you initially left out, and voila, now you have a linkable asset! If you don’t do it, you’ll lose out to other Q/A sites and forums whereas you could be drawing those people into you.
I would also recommend bringing in the dev team and having them code up all sorts of embed codes for common answers and/or custom help videos and other media. We even had one startup request where we developed infographics for their top 10 most common questions and answers. These infographics provided a work flow solution in a clear and easy-to-follow design, and will continue to build them links as time goes on.
If you look at this page’s link profile you’ll see the diverse link types coming into this place and get a good idea of what can happen for you. I know Apple is one of the largest brands in the world, but for this post it gives you enough data to hopefully spark some ideas of your own.
The goal here is to diversify your link profile, as people seeking help and answers are going to be linking from their blogs, social profiles, forums, Q/A sites and other relevant spots around the web. Again, sit down and brainstorm some ideas that will be “future link bait” and keep doing that every few months… Twice a year at the very least.
Find out the results of a year of high volume content marketing on guests blogs taught us money still talks. Read the results!
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Negative SEO Attack?
Check out the anatomy of a "negative SEO" attack on our own site in our latest post. There's too much worry about these attacks happening, but I wouldn't worry too much about it. Come read what I think and just what to do if anything like this happens to your brand.
Similarly, Java is great and all – I love having support in all OS’ – but when it messes with the window management and how a program works, it might get to my obsessive compulsive brain. The first really unforgivable problem I ran into was not being able to display the entire window. On my 1440×900 pixel display, the bottom bit of the actual application window was, and still is, 
Now I don’t use any tools to monitor links for our website simply because I don’t care at all about them… Weird to hear coming from someone who’s job is to attract/build/buy them for a living. I would have shown this off but I cannot expose any of our clients’ data here, but from the image to your right you can get a look at a weekly snapshot of what’s going on. Notice that CognitiveSEO reports on broken links too, which is in my opinion one of the best features of the whole package.
Web: 
So WTF is “Future Bait” and is this quite possibly the creepiest post title in SEO history? Well to start, it’s definitely a term I’m going to try and coin (aka make up) here. It’s something we employ here as a tactic at Linkbuildr, although I never put too much thought into it until I talked with Jason Acidre (
These are easy pickings, folks! Lists are loved by everyone, especially those of us with monkey-like attention spans who just need the goods as fast as possible. If you can get in early on a really good list, you’re definitely going to score some link loving, and the content doesn’t have to be that extensive.
