One of my favourite blogs to keep an eye on search engine patents filed is Bill Slawski’s SEOByTheSea.com. The reason I like Bill’s blog so much is that he goes into so much depth regarding patents filed by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

With so much information out there regarding how google ranks websites and serves up search queries, like chinese whispers, sometimes misinformation can be put out there or vital information can be completely omitted. It is therefore good practise to go back and look at the original patents filled and go back to basics.

Today was one of those back to basics days, so I was viewing Bills Google patent’s page. The google patent I decided to focus on was :

• 6,526,440 Ranking search results by reranking the results based on local inter-connectivity (Google, Inc.)

The abstract definition for this patent is:

A search engine for searching a corpus improves the relevancy of the results by refining a standard relevancy score based on the interconnectivity of the initially returned set of documents. The search engine obtains an initial set of relevant documents by matching a user’s search terms to an index of a corpus. A re-ranking component in the search engine then refines the initially returned document rankings so that documents that are frequently cited in the initial set of relevant documents are preferred over documents that are less frequently cited within the initial set.

Now everybody knows we should be building links from relevant or related sites. To give an example from Brian Johnson’s Halloween Costume site from this post, he had built links from a Halloween Cat site. Are these links going to be beneficial for ranking purposes? The answer is yes, they are related themes. Are they possibly the best links he could have obtained? Probably not, because although related I highly doubt that a Halloween Cat site would rank for the term “Halloween Costume” due to the level of compeition for this keyword term. If you look at the abstract definition for the google patent above to see what happens:

1. Initial Query
2. Google locates suitable websites for the query
3. Google then reranks these websites based on links from these sites to other sites within this subset of results.

So there you have it. When we’re looking to rank for certain terms, we should be looking for links from websites that already rank for these terms.

If you don’t know what PageRank is, PageRank is a number between 1-10 assigned to your site which classes how authorative your site is. The higher the PageRank, the better. PageRank is actually assigned to every page on your website. Usually your home page will have the highest PageRank, as in our case where our homepage is a 4 but a lot of our internal pages have been assigned a PageRank of 2.

Given the fact we’ve been assigned PageRank and do offer “do follow”, it makes it a no brainer for somebody link building to participate in the comments on this site!!

Well I’ve figured out the answer! It’s a two step process, outsourcing and then a new online app called BuzzStream! I read an interesting guest post on shoemoney’s blog recently by Justin Brooke from Sitefling.com. It was a very interesting post about outsourcing your link building to the philipines by hiring a full time virtual assisstant. Wages are quite low in the Philipines and $400 is a good monthly wage and should hire you a college graduate full time.

Justin recommends sourcing your virtual assisstant by placing an ad on craigslist. He conducts full interviews with all prosepective applicants. Once hired all employees sign on to skype every morning at 9a.m. and await to be assigned there work through the web. This process is quite similar to sourcing copywriters/directory submitters on getafreelancer.com

Now for the second part of this solution, BuzzStream. BuzzStream is a new online app to track your link building campains. It is currently in beta testing and is missing some of the functionality I’d like but is well on its way in becoming a great tool for link building.

Why is this app one to watch? Well the company is being advised by Eric Ward, one of the foremost experts on link building. So how does BuzzStream work? BuzzStream is a cms for your linkbuilding campaigns combined with a bookmarker for your browser which allows you to add prospective link partners to BuzzStream. It also offers the ability to setup employee accounts and assign prospective link partners to employees so that relationships can be built and links acquired.

BuzzStream Dashboard

The Dashboard will display your list of potential link partners, PageRank, site rating and relationship status.

The detail page of link partners has some excellent info, such as estimated uniques, technorati ranking, PageRank and it also pulls in the potential link partners twitter and linkedin contact details.

To add potential links to employees accounts is easy. Just click the Link Buzzmarker in your browser when your on a potential link partners site.

BuzzStream automatically gathers all details about the prospective partner including the webmasters twitter details.

When you click save you can assign it to an employee to develop the relationship and aquire the link.

Hope you find this post useful!

When your link building for your site it is always better to get relevant links. Now there are many ways of finding relevant links, search engines, direcories, forums but one of the best ways is to see whoose linking to competitor websites or high profile websites in your niche.

There are two ways available to analyse competitors back links, one is the “link:” operator in Google, the other is Yahoo SiteExplorer. Now Google’s link operator will only show a handfull of a sites backlinks but SiteExplorer will show all backlinks but will only let you export 1000 of them.

Another problem we have with backlink analysis is the “no follow” tag. Not all links are valued equal and Google came up with PageRank to aid in solving this problem. PageRank is a value of authority assigned to a single webpage. An outbound link from a page will carry some of that PageRank. To allow webmasters control over their outbound links as webmasters do not always want to dilute their PageRank, Google introduced the “No Follow” tag. The “No Follow” tag informs Google not to pass any PageRank to the link, thus making the link have no benefit towards search engine rankings.

Not all Search Engines adopted the “No Follow” tag and Yahoo is one of them, so the problem with SiteExplorer is that it includes “No Follow” links and “Do Follow” links in its results. Well I’ve found a solution.

I’ve just begun using a firefox plugin called SEO Link Analysis by Yoast de Valk. SEO Link analysis adds to Siteexplorer the PageRank of the page that the links originate from, the Anchor Text used in the link, and offers colourcodes to explain if the link is a DoFollow link or No Follow link.

Below is a screenshot of SiteExplorer, before and after SEO Link Analysis has been installed:

SiteExplorer before SEO Link Analysis

SiteExplorer after SEO Link Analysis has been installed:

SiteExplorer with SEO Link Analysis installed

I hope this helps you with your competitor analysis!

If your a webmaster like me, you should be used to analysing your logs to see where your traffic is coming from (If your not, your not doing it right!). I always check my logs to see who is sending me traffic, if I see a referrer, I’ll check them out to see in what context are they linking to me. RefControl allows you to overwrite the referer url that your browser normally sends to webpages with whatever web address you want including your affiliate website address.

What should happen now, is that the webmaster of sites you’ve visited on the internet will check your site to see how your linking to them. If you’ve got good content, it should earn you a link!

If you like this plugin as much as I do please leave a comment!