You need links to rank, period. We can talk all we want about great content, social signals, brand signals, and all that jazz but quite a bit of that is subjective.

If you practice SEO, and have success with it, then you are well aware that a claim of “you need links to rank” is an objective, true statement without a bunch of false positives.

The gray areas come in to play when we talk about things like anchor text, quality, volume, and so on but the overarching truth is without links you are largely invisible in the SERPS.

Ok, enough of what you already know. Wordtracker recently updated one of their core tools with some cool new features and functionality.

What is Link Builder from Wordtracker?

Link Builder is designed to address a most of the core, key functions of a link building and prospecting campaign.

• Locate potential link partners via competitor backlinks or based on specific keywords
• Setting up a link building campaign and sorting your links properly (blogs, directories, social media, etc)
• Tracking the status of your link campaign’s efforts

Wordtracker uses Majestic SEO’s Fresh Index by default but you can use the Historic Index as well.

I might opt for the Fresh Index initially, because Majestic tends to have dead links in the historic index (thanks to the significant churn on the web) but if you can’t find enough decent prospects in the Fresh Index, using the Historic one isn’t a bad option.

There is a lot I like about this tool and a few things I’d like to see them add to or improve on.

Step 1: Setting Up a Campaign

I’m a fan of clean, easy to use interfaces and Wordtracker definitely scores well here. Here is the first screen you are presented with when starting up a fresh campaign:

Researching competing link profiles is not enough with respect to link prospecting, in my opinion. I really like the option to not only research multiple URL’s at once but also to research keyword-specific prospects.

You can research lots of countries as well. Below is a snapshot of the countries available to you in Link Builder:

Step 2: Prospecting With Competitor URL’s

I am craving some chocolate at the moment, as you can tell from my selected URL’s

Here’s a good example of my decision making process when it comes to using the Historic Index and the Fresh Index. My thought process usually involves the following information:

• The bigger/older the link profiles of the URL’s the more likely I am to use the Fresh Index to avoid lots of dead links
• If the site is a well known brand I will be more likely to use the Fresh Index given the likelihood that the link profile is quite large
• Smaller link profiles, newer link profiles will probably benefit from using the Historic Index more

In this example the sites I’m researching have big link profiles and have been around for quite awhile in addition to being large brands, so I will use the Fresh Index to cut down on potential dead-ends.

I selected the “Edit Sources” box because I want to make sure I pick the URL with the most links (or you can just go with both) but I wanted to show you the options:

I’ll leave all selected just to maximize the opportunities. Sometimes you’ll find pages ranking for specific keywords you might be targeting, rather than just the homepage ranking, so you can use both or one or the other if that’s the case.

In this scenario I’m looking at the URLs ranking for “chocolate”, and they all happened to be homepage’s anyway.

Wordtracker is pretty quick with getting the data in, but while you’re waiting you’ll see the following screen:

Step 3: Working with the Analysis Tab

In order to keep the results as targeted as possible, Wordtracker automatically removes the following links from the results:

• Image Links
• Redirects
• No-follow links

One thing I’d like to see them do is let no-follows through because even though they might not pass any juice they certainly can be decent traffic sources and link building isn’t just about passing juice, it’s also about brand building and traffic generation.

I’d even say let image links through. I understand they don’t want to be a pure link research tool but image links can be valuable for some of what I just mentioned as well. I would say, give us the data and the ability to filter it rather than just taking it away completely.

Here is a snippet of the result page and a description on what it represents:

On the left are pre-designed buckets that Link Builder groups your links into. This is helpful but I’d like to see more flexibility here.

They also offer a tagging feature to help you group links in another way. The tagging can be helpful for things like assigning links to specific people within your group or really any other custom setup you have going on (maybe stuff like grouping keywords into priority buckets or whatever.)

The prospect tab gives you the domain (chow.com in the below example) the link sits on, the page it links to on a competing site or sites, and the page the link is actually on from the linking site:

All you have to do is click that “links to” button to see where the link is pointing to (in this case chow.com is only linking to 1 of the sites I inputted).

The column to the right shows the page on the domain where the link is originating from and the number in the middle is a measure of how important that particular prospect might be.

The furthest most right column shows columns that tell you whether the domain is also linking to you and how many other sites, out of the sites you inputted, that domain is linking to. The idea being that the domain might be more likely to link to you if they are linking out to multiple competing sites as well:

The grayed out button to the right of the co-link count is the “target” button. This is the button you’d click to let the tool know that this is a prospect you’d like to target.

You have the following toolbar available to you in the Analysis tab:

These are generally self-explanatory:

• Delete – removes selected prospects from the campaign
• Export – export your results to a CSV file
• Copy to – copies prospects to another campaign within your account
• Tag – allows you to tag selected prospects to help create custom grouping fields
• Filter – filters Top Link by “contains” or “does not contain”. An example might be if you wanted to target a link prospect or prospects which contained the word “chocolate” somewhere in the URL

You can also click on any of the groupings on the left to view those specific groups only. I find that the groupings are fairly accurate but I personally prefer the ability to customize fields like that rather than being boxed in.

I created a sample tag titled “for eric” that contains 2 links I want a team member named Eric to work on:

Step 4: Working with the Contact Tab

The Contact tab has most of the same toolbar options as the Analysis tab with one exception:

• Find Contact and About Links – click on the links you want to find contact information on and/or find the about page on

Link Builder works in the background to find this information and you can continue working in the application. There is a notes option as well. There’s no specific way to leave multiple, time-stamped notes (for team environments) but the input box is expandable so you can leave an ongoing contact history.

You have the same contact flag on the right and to the left of that is an email icon that turns yellow if you click it and is designed to let you know contact is in progress or has been initiated.

When the contact request comes back (just refresh the contact tab) you’ll see the following, new fields within the Contact tab that denote the contact/about pages for the prospect:

Step 5: Reporting

The Reporting piece of Link Builder has the following reports:

• History – options for the Fresh/Historic Index of Majestic SEO via cumulative and non-cumulative views for the chosen domains
• Spider Profile – the link category breakdown (the aforementioned pre-defined link sources Wordtracker assigns your prospects to) of each domain
• Target Summary – number of targets, number/% of targets contacted, number/% of targets not contacted, number/% of targets linking to you

This gives you a quick overview of the growth of competing link profiles, current link building rate, types of links they have, and your own Prospect metrics. All the reports are exportable to PDF.

Here’s the History report:

Here’s the Spider Report:

Here’s the Target Summary:

Additional Campaign Options

As we discussed earlier, you can either input a list of domains to search on a specific keyword.

If you search on a specific keyword to start you are able to select URL’s to include in your prospecting search. Everything else, in terms of options after the URL selection is the same as if you were to have started with domains.

Having a keyword search to start a campaign is helpful in case you are looking to go beyond competitors you already know of and get a real deep look into link prospects across that keyword’s market as a whole.

Also, right next to your campaign name you can sign up to be automatically notified of new links and prospects for your campaign:

Firefox Extension

Link Builder also has a Firefox extension that allows you to grab all the external links from a page and save them in your Link Builder account.

I find this is helpful on directory sites (for gathering a list of topic-specific URLs), as an example. The extension is really easy to use. You can install it here. Once you arrive at a page you want to use it on you just click on the LB logo in your toolbar:

Then once you click on the option to gather the links, you get the following interface:

You can save the chosen links right into your Link Builder account.

What I Like

The features that I like in Wordtracker’s Link Builder tool are:

• Ability to prospect by multiple URLs or by choosing a specific keyword
• Option to use Fresh or Historic Index via Majestic SEO
• Simple ways to keep notes and contact information
• Ability to search for contact and about information on selected prospects
• Robust selection of countries
• Initial, intelligent link grouping
• Exporting capabilites
• Fast results and a really clean, easy to use interface

What Could Be Improved On

I think Wordtracker could do some things to make this tool even more functional and useful:

• More flexibility with the naming and assigning of link types
• Have profile-wide settings to include all links (no-follow, image, etc) or exclude some rather than excluding without a choice to include
• More filtering options around the data points they offer and whether a prospect has been targeted or not
• More robust link tracking (if the status of links change send me an alert). Though I realize that is getting into link tracking versus link building, it’s still a nice option
• A bit more flexibility with notes and timestamps for a more defined contact history (especially if teams use this)

A Solid Link Building Product

Overall I think this tool does a good job with its intended use, link building. I think some users would like to see more done to make it more team friendly but I think you can accomplish a lot with their tagging feature.

As stated above, I’d like to see some more done with notes and such but as a link prospecting and building tool Wordtracker’s Link Builder is worth your time to try out.

You can grab a free trial over at Wordtracker.

Authoritative, but Often Wrong

Trusting a powerful authority is easy. It allows us to have a quick shorthand for how things work without having to go through the pain, effort, & expense to figure things out. But it often leads to bogus solutions.

This video does a great job of explaining how nothing replaces experience in the SEO industry.

A combination of numerous parallel projects, years of trial and error experience & a deep study of analytics data is far superior to having the God complex & feeling 100% certain you are right.

Change is the only constant in SEO.

Grand Plans

Big plans often get subverted before they pan out & the more obvious something is the shorter its shelf life. By the time everyone notices a trend then jumping on it at that point probably isn’t much of a competitive advantage. You might still be able to make some money for a limited time (or for a longer time if you apply it to new markets), but…

• investing in exact match domains was generally far more profitable in 2006 than it would be today.
• after Wired’s The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model article in October 2009, the business model was torched within 16 months
• even the current “brand” trend that is in place now will peak out within the next 24 to 36 months. (more on that in a future post)

It is the contrarian investors who are taking (what is generally perceived to be) big risks who are allowed to ride a trend for years and years.

Options & Opportunities

When Panda happened a lot of theories were thrown out as to what happened & how to fix it. Anyone who only runs 1 website is working from a limited data set and a limited set of experience. They could of course decide to do everything, but there is an opportunity cost to doing anything.

Making things worse, if they have limited savings & no other revenue producing websites there are some risks they simply can’t take. They can still sorta infer some stuff from looking at the search results, but those who have multiple sites where some were hit and others were not know intimately well the differences between the sites. They also have cashflow to fund additional trial and error campaigns & to double down on the pieces that are working to offset the losses.

Success Requires Failure

A lot of times people want to enter a market with a grand plan that they can follow without changing it once the map is made, but almost anyone who creates something that is successful is forced to change. Every year in the United States 10% of companies go under! And due to the increased level of competition online it likely separates winners from losers even faster than in the offline world. Those who stick to a grand plan are less able to keep up with innovation than those who have an allegiance to the data. Sometimes having a backup plan is far more important than having a grand plan.

Incremental Investing, Small & Large

Almost anything that I have done that has been successful has started ugly & improved over time. This site was an $8 domain & I couldn’t even afford a $99 logo for it until I was a couple months into building it. Most of our other successes have been that way as well. If something works keep reinvesting until the margins drop. But when the margins do drop off, it is helpful to have another project you can invest in, such that you are not 1 and done.

The earliest Google research highlighted how ad-based search business models were bad & the now bankrupt Excite.com turned down buying Google for under $1 million. It turns out everyone was wrong there. One company adjusted & the other is bankrupt.

Overcoming the God Complex

We don’t control Google. We can only influence variables that they have decided to count. As their business interests and business models change (along with the structure of the web) so must we.

The God complex always look a bit interesting from afar, no matter how reasonable it sounds to the true believer.

Want a good example of Google’s brand-bias stuff being a bunch of bs?

Niche expert value-add affiliate websites may now lack the brand signal to rank as the branded sites rise up above them, so what comes next?

Off-topic brands flex their brand & bolt on thin affiliate sections.

Overstock.com was penalized for having a spammy link profile (in spite of being a brand they were so spammy that they were actually penalized, counter to Google’s cultural norm) but a few months later the penalty was dropped, even though some of the spam stuff is still in place.

Those who were hit by Panda are of course still penalized nearly a half-year later, but Overstock is back in the game after a shorter duration of pain & now they are an insurance affiliate.

prnewswire.com/news-releases/oco-launches-insurance-tab-125739128.html

And this “fold the weak & expand the brand” game is something the content farm owners are on to. Observe:

• When TechCrunch was redesigned they folded a couple other sites into it. (Nice sponsored deep link Dell, yet another brand advantage!)
• AOL has folded 100 brands down to 20.
• Some of the smaller AOL brands that focused on celebrity stuff were killed, the Huffington Post over the past year has been adding categories like divorce, doing tie-ins with BET & most recently added sections for culture and celebrity.

While most the content farms were decimated, that left a big hole in the search results that will allow the Huffington Post to double or triple the yield of their content through additional incremental reach.

And, yes, this is *the* same Huffington Post that is famous for aggregating 3rd party content (sans attribution), wrapping a Tweet in a page & ranking it, and gets mocked by other journalists for writing 90’s-styled blocks of keyword spam:

Before I go on, let me stop and say a couple of more important things: Aol, Aol Acquires Huffington Post, Aol Buys Huffington Post, Aol Buys Huffpo, Aol Huffington Post, Huffington Post, Huffington Post Aol, Huffington Post Aol Merger, Huffington Post Media Group, Huffington Post Sold, Huffpo Aol, Huffpost Aol, Media News.

See what I did there? That’s what you call search-engine optimization, or SEO. If I worked at the Huffington Post, I’d likely be commended for the subtle way in which I inserted all those search keywords into the lede of my article.

And, of course, AOL is a company with the highest journalistic standards:

I was given eight to ten article assignments a night, writing about television shows that I had never seen before. AOL would send me short video clips, ranging from one-to-two minutes in length — clips from “Law & Order,” “Family Guy,” “Dancing With the Stars,” the Grammys, and so on and so forth… My job was then to write about them. But really, my job was to lie. My job was to write about random, out-of-context video clips, while pretending to the reader that I had watched the actual show in question. AOL knew I hadn’t watched the show. The rate at which they would send me clips and then expect articles about them made it impossible to watch all the shows — or to watch any of them, really.

Doing fake reviews? Scraping content? Putting off-topic crap on a site to monetize it?

Those are the sorts of things Google claims the spammy affiliates & SEOs do, but the truth is they have never been able to do them to the scale the big brands have. And from here out it is only going to get worse.

We highlighted how Google was responsible for creating the content farm business model. Whatever comes next is going to be bigger, more pervasive, and spammier, but coated in a layer of “brand” that magically turns spam into not-spam.

Imagine where this crap leads in say 2 or 3 years?

It won’t be long before Google is forced to see the error of their ways.

What Google rewards they encourage. What they encourage becomes a profitable trend. If that trend is scalable then it becomes a problem shortly after investors get involved. When that trend spirals out of control and blows up they have to try something else, often without admitting that they were responsible for causing the trend. Once again, it will be the SEO who takes the blame for bad algorithms that were designed divorced from human behaviors.

I am surprised Google hasn’t hired someone like a Greg Boser or David Naylor as staff to explain how people will react to the new algorithms. It would save them a lot of work in the long run.

Disclosure: I hold no position in AOL’s stock, but I am seriously considering buying some. When you see me personally writing articles on Huffington Post you will know it’s “game on” for GoogleBot & I indeed am a shareholder. And if I am writing 30 or 40 articles a day over there that means I bought some call options as well.

I am not sure how many people were holding off on updating to Firefox 5 because of our SEO extensions, however we made versions for Firefox 5 quite a while ago for Seo for Firefox, Rank Checker & the SEO Toolbar. When you first go to update it there might be a message that the extensions are not compliant. If that is the case, upgrade to Firefox 5 & then after you get Firefox 5 installed it has a check for updated versions of extensions.

Our newest extensions no longer support Firefox 3 (we get some complaints from people using 3.6) and some early versions of Firefox 4 (like 4.0.1) may not be supported either. If you have an older browser & try to install our extensions you will get an incompatibility message, likeso:

If you like the extensions as they are then there is no need to upgrade, however if you are having any issues with them (not being able to install them, not being able to pull Bing rankings, blank CSV export, etc.) then an upgrade should fix the problem.

Firefox stated that the version 5 update is a security one, so I did it right away. If your Firefox version is high enough you should see an “allow” message box, likeso:

Shout out to Brad McMillen, who had a support request & donated $20 to charity: water to receive a response. He was the first person to do so after months of us making the suggestion on the help desk area, even with 10 daily freetards (who are too lazy to read installation instructions) send us support tickets every day, flaming us because they “paid” for Firefox years ago & such.

I have been losing weight recently and working out a decent amount every single day & working a bit less. I even had time to go see my mom, see my sister, and visit my favorite childhood park.

As an added bonus we dusted off the Nintendo & found a store selling vintage games that had my favorite pinball machine ever – Medieval Madness. I felt like a genuine escentric when trying to explain to my wife how buying a pinball machine for the house was reasonable. Even more eccentric, she didn’t counter the idea. Who knows where that will lead…but it could add extra incentive to buy vs rent, if only California real estate didn’t start at 7 figures on up.

Extra time for reading, exercising & playing has led to a higher level of personal happiness, even as my fear of crushing state debts & banker fraud leading to a new wave of fascism the world over grow daily.

Probably the single best business move I made over the past couple years was deciding that freetards were worth less than nothing and just deleting them. Part of what helped me do that was I actually had an employee answer tickets & after less than a week of doing it he was miserable & had a health issue. Since discarding freetards entirely I have seen 0 business impact and a huge lift in quality of life. If you are trying to please too many people and are showing signs of an unbalanced life for it (things like lacking sleep, high stress level, gaining weight, etc.) then a change is in order. I am still pretty chubby, but have already lost about 30 pounds.

Sometimes I think it makes sense to lean into living a somewhat unbalanced lifestyle to build leverage, but after you are doing well for a while at some point it makes sense to live a bit more balanced life & enjoy it a bit more (or else the hidden health issues will become unhidden in short order).

I think sometimes if you just read the blog posts things can be perceived to be more cynical and negative than they actually are. One of the bigger things I struggle with is having inspiration to keep making new posts after having published thousands of them. As I read more about the history of communications & how monopolies come to control information it is easy for me to write about some of the parallels between that and the current market. It is much harder to have something new to write about marketing though, as so much of it is just a repeat of history.

Sure we can say everything is changing and hype everything new to try to pick up some links from people who want to site quasi-research, but beyond understanding broad stroke philosophical stuff, a lot of what is new is either just hyping what is new for the sake of it or a regurgitation of what was old.

The Google <3’s brands theme is something that has been playing out for about a half-decade now. And if you look at every other major established ad driven media model, brand is there as well. Other big components of the ad ecosystem?

• Classifieds = local/mobile/deals
• retail = ecommerce/deals/payment processing
• channel segmentation = ad personalization & social media platforms that you reveal your tastes & interests on

What areas are Google pushing into? Those exact same areas. Just look at this 2007 slide from Hal Varian…

…or see what Larry Page is pushing on Google+

I think about our products in three separate categories

First, there is search and our ads products, the core driver of revenue for the company. Nikesh and Susan are going to talk more about ads later in the call

Next, we have products that are enjoying high consumer success–YouTube, Android and Chrome. We are investing in these in order to optimize their long-term success

Then we have our new products–Google+ and Commerce and Local. We are are investing in them to drive innovation and adoption

The other hard bit with blogging is that of course sometimes there are some really delicious bits to SEO that most the market is unaware of. If you blog them there is a good chance the idea dies. Sometimes valuable tips are shared though, like in Rae’s latest link building group interview.