The Missing Link That Will Help Your Website Generate More Revenue – Episode 96

Do we think, broadly speaking, that Google are way cleverer than we give them credit for in terms of being able to figure good content and bad content?

I think the opposite actually. For example, the sort of common tactics that gets used at the moment for link building is that whole idea of tiered link building. You know that you don't want Google to see that you're doing naughty link building behind the scenes. So instead you build lots of naughty links to a domain that you don't really care about very much, and then link that domain to your domain and it passes all the link juice along and you get the authority. And that's got to be so easy to spot. But people are doing that and it's working.

When we've looked at trying to rank a page about some subject or other, and we've looked at the pages currently ranking and we've seen the link profile for those pages and it is absolute garbage.

Yeah. Clearly garbage. Um, but and yet they still rank well and haven't been penalised.

Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. It's a beautiful day. I've suggested to most of the guys that they take the rest of the day off because it's so nice.

Except for me, I got held back in class for some reason.

Because you're naughty.

Ah, damn.

Um, yeah. And, uh, if you do a good job of this, you can go home early as well. If you don't, you're staying.

Thanks, guv'nor.

Back in nineteen ninety eight. Bloody hell. I know I presented a paper at World Wide Web seven in Brisbane. Thanks to the work I was doing at the University of Aberdeen. Um, they paid for me to go all the way to Australia to.

Do all.

That.

Yeah. They have planes in those days.

No, no, we took a ship. It took eight weeks to get there. Anyway, uh, at the conference, uh, above and beyond, uh, the paper I delivered, which was cutely named. Let me just see if I can find it. It was called, oh, delivering computer assisted learning across the World Wide Web, because then that was actually quite.

Quite cutting edge. Yeah. It was.

Yeah, absolutely. It was um computer assisted learning was on CDs and all sorts of stuff like that. It was never delivered anywhere. The work we were doing was cutting edge. Um.

Oh that's nuts isn't it, to think that what. So you had to post somebody a CD with some training on it?

Pretty much. Yeah. That's right, that's right. Anyway, at the same conference, there was a couple of guys, um Sergei somebody and and and Lawrence somebody.

Who are they.

There? No idea. And Brin and Page, I think they were their surnames. Anyway, the Google boys were at the same conference. I didn't get to meet them. I think they were already in nineteen ninety eight. Things were definitely happening for those guys. Um, but they were delivering their paper, which was the anatomy of a large scale hypertextual Web search engine. Title. Anyway, I'll just read a little bit from the introduction because I've got the book with the with. It's got my paper in there and this same book.

I was nearly famous.

I was.

Good, I.

Was nearly famous. Um, the web creates a new challenges for information retrieval. Remember, this is nineteen ninety eight when, when this was presented. So it was maybe written in ninety seven, I don't know because it was from memory April ninety eight. So yeah, this, this would have been written in ninety seven. The web creates new challenges for information retrieval. The amount of information on the web is growing rapidly.

Well, that was an understatement.

No shit.

Sherlock. Yeah.

Um, as well as the number of new users and new users inexperienced in the art of web research, people are likely to surf the web using its link graph, often starting with high quality human maintained indices such as yahoo!

Remember them?

There was AltaVista, yahoo loads anyway, uh. Or with search engines. Now, human maintained lists cover popular topics effectively but are subjective, expensive to build and maintain, slow to improve, and cannot cover all esoteric topics. Talking about porn, aren't they?

Maybe.

Yeah. Automated search engines that rely on keyword matching usually return to many low quality matches. So basically search engines that just rely on the content themselves can be rubbish. That's right. So basically what the um, what the bright lads from Google did is they came up with an automated search engine and they say we've built a large scale search engine which addresses many of the problems of existing systems. It makes especially heavy use of the additional structure present in hypertext to provide much higher quality search results. What are they talking about there, Alex?

Uh, links.

Yes. And they talk about they go into a lot of detail. It's quite a long, quite a long read. If you want.

To get sciency, you.

Can you can still get this somewhere online if you just Google. What did I say it was called? Just Google the anatomy of a large scale hypertextual web search engine. You'll find it. They also talk about the citation brackets. Link graph of the web is an important resource that has largely gone unused in existing web search engines. We have created maps containing as many as five hundred and eighteen million of these hyperlinks. This was in nineteen ninety seven, um and a significant sample of the total, which it wouldn't be. Now, obviously, uh, these maps allow rapid calculation of a web web pages, PageRank. Remember that an objective measure of its citation importance that corresponds well with people's subjective idea of importance. I'm going to close the book now and stop reading from it. But what are we talking about? What were they talking about there?

Well, I guess in simple terms, what we're talking about is.

Have to be in simple terms so that you can understand it enough to tell me about.

It. Uh, just, uh, do link on internet. Um, so basically the idea is when you obviously when people link to your web page or resource, the more often that happens, the more popular and useful your page is. Therefore, you can just look at the number of links pointing at somebody's site and work out whether or not it's important or not. That's basically what they're discussing here. And obviously things get way more nuanced than that when I guess Google start iterating on that idea and they start looking at things like how well linked to is the referring domain. So for example, if somebody links to your website, that's great. But if that's.

I don't know about anybody listening to this, but I'm, I'm pretty bored already. So just kind of dial it back a bit and keep it in plain English.

I, I mean, I inherently, the more often people link to your website, the more important it is, right?

So if I write a web page, right, and I link to you, that's going to help me.

Know.

Why not.

Why would it. Citing somebody else's.

The reason I said that is every time we discuss link building with clients, potential clients, they always say, oh, so if I link out to really important places, that's going to help me to rank better.

As if by proxy, by being associated with those people would help you. I mean, if, if important places link to you. I mean, the whole idea is founded in the way that like scientific research works, right? So if you write a paper and other scientists cite your paper, people say, oh, well, that paper that forty two other scientists have cited must be really important and influential.

And if you read that article in the seventh International World Wide Web Conference proceedings. Mhm. Um, what that what I was quoting from, um, that's what it goes on to say. It basically says that, you know, it comes from the idea. And I think we said this in a previous podcast when we talked about links and things. Um, I think we've got, we've got too complicated too quickly with this, so we'll just wind it back. It's not good enough.

Um, I guess I'll be staying even later then.

So let's let's say let's just try and explain this idea of the missing link because link, you know, we'll talk about the whole kind of link building industry, what's right with it, what's wrong with it and everything else. But let's just try and explain to people, um, what link is why it's important and um, how it helps to build authority. Because when, when we have conversations with people, we often, you know, look at their website, maybe we're doing a review of the website and we say, you know, your website has got low authority. We always explain what that means. So go on, explain what authority means. And I will stop you if you waffle on and it gets complicated.

Well, in simple terms, your authority is a measure of how often other people link to your website, right? Yeah.

Only that. No, no.

It's way more complicated than that. Um, I feel like I'm being deliberately led into a trap here? No. So, yeah, the idea is that when. The authority of your website is determined by the authority of all the websites cumulatively that link to yours. Right. So the important thing to remember is what you are trying to do is to get people to link to your website or cite your paper or, you know, talk about you. But it only really matters if the websites that are linking to you or citing your paper are also useful and have high authority.

I think you've I think I still think that anyone listening to this is going to go like, nah, I still don't get it.

How do we explain it in simpler terms?

Well, if you put. If you build a website. So you've. So you. Um, let's what should we build a website? Let's, let's build a website that talks about, um, everything you need to know about. Um, give me a subject, something.

Uh.

Brewing beer.

Yeah. Right.

So you're setting out to build a definitive resource for people who are interested in brewing beer. Mhm. It's full of fantastic content. And that content was written by experts. And it's a website with one hundred pages covering everything from the different types of hops, different temperatures to get kickstart the process equipment, how you know, when to test it, you know, what, what to test and you know how to get the different tones. Is that what is the wine tones in beer as well? No, it's just a that's a right good point. That or like that's horrible.

Tastes like.

Piss. Tastes like piss. You cleaned your pipes.

Now it comes out of our systems. Yes. So you've created this fantastic resource.

It's right. And it's on a web server. And anyone who knows about it can access it. Right. And You submit it to Google?

Mhm.

I know you don't really need to, but anyway, Google will find it somehow. Um, so you tell Google about it. So Google comes along and it goes, right. Okay. The domain name is brand new.

Mhm.

Okay. Nothing to go on there. Uh, it's got one hundred pages. Okay. There's quite a lot of content. There's, there's like a couple of thousand page words on each of those pages. So there's a lot of words here. There's a lot of content here. I wonder if it's any good.

Mhm.

And previously what was said in that book, you know, was like previously a search engine would find the relevant words and then go, well, the words exist that that person typed into the search engine, they exist on this page. So we'll just.

Serve them that.

Just serve them up. We'll just give them that, you know, here's, here's the information you were looking for. And that was done like in, in sort of blind, uh, blind obedience or. unfounded confidence. You know, it's just like this. There appeared to be a match. Yeah. Um, you know, a bit like the way AI splats a load of words onto a page and it's like, you know, it's like all the right words.

That seems to be.

Correct in the right order. It must be right sort of thing. Um, it's a similar thing, I suppose. So right now, um, you know, with, with an unsophisticated search engine, that would be fine. But like there are, you know, I hate to mention this, but there are another sixty eight thousand websites dedicated to everything you need to know about beer. Right.

So awkward.

So Google's now got a problem. It's like, well, I found this page or you've told me about this new website and all these great pages, but it had absolutely no way of knowing whether that was trustworthy.

So, well, not only did it have.

At that point, just to mention the word before you rudely interrupt, um.

Doing podcasts with you, it's quite hard sometimes only.

I'm allowed to rudely interrupt, uh, at that point, uh, that brand new website, brand new domain. Did I say one hundred pages?

You did?

Yeah, with maybe a couple of thousand words on each page. So loads of words, loads of stuff. Content. It has no authority. There is absolutely no way for an automated piece of software, Google to look at that website and decide whether it's any good. Is that be fair?

Yeah, absolutely.

Now interrupt.

Well, no, no, I was just going to say that like, don't interrupt. So far as the search engine is concerned, it's, it's, it's not only that there's no way for it to tell what authority it has had. It's there's no real way to determine that it's actually any better than a website that has just typed the word like beer brewing advice ten thousand times into an article like it's you have to remember about these systems like Google is that they are just automated intelligence. It's not actually very smart. It's not capable of making a distinction. So, you know, if you're not going to look at things like authority, which I assume is what we're going to get onto next, it is literally impossible for the search. Were you not.

Listening? I already said, what authority is Between.

Between that and something that is just spammy content. It can't tell the difference.

So right now, just going back, you know, you've got this website and Google knows it exists. It's got loads of words on it. And, and like, I'm the proud owner of this website and hey, you digital marketing bloke. Um, he's got a man bun today. Hey, you digital marketing bloke. It's not really a man bun, is it? It's because it has to be on top to be a man bun, doesn't it?

I put my hair up because it's hot outside.

It's quite fetching, I like it. I like.

I'm.

I used to have long hair. Yeah. Before I realised the error of my ways. Um, yeah. If it had been on top, I'd have sent you home. There we go.

Next time.

Right. So this website exists, and, um, I'm the owner of this website and I've come along to you, Mister digital marketing blog and said, look, I spent six months doing nothing but writing this content. It's. I consulted all the world's experts. Um, and it, the information in it is fantastic. But when I type in um advice on, uh, make a brewing beer, I'm not even, I'm not even on like page one hundred. I'm just absolutely nowhere like, what the hell is going on?

I would say to you exactly what you said earlier, which is your domain has no authority. Nobody is listening.

You just wander off into that geek speak. Just it just comes so naturally to you, doesn't it?

Nobody is talking about your website or nobody is linking to it online.

How about there is no way of Google for Google to know whether your website is any good or not. It's like it can't actually, unless a human looks at it and goes like, wow, this looks really good. Cross references looks at other websites. Yeah. What they're saying is right. And look at the beautiful way it's written. It's great to read and lovely illustrations, fantastic photography. There's some really useful videos.

Which no one is going to do.

Can't figure. No. And yeah, you cannot scale. I mean, I think the title of that paper was about scale, wasn't it? How do you actually sort of index the world, you know, the world of web web pages? How do you do that at scale in a way that's going to produce accurate results? So that's what they were driving at. That's what they were trying to do. So. Right. Okay. So, um, you tell me all that and I go, oh, it's not not much good, is it? So I think I'm pretty disappointed about that. But, um, I go out, uh, to a networking event and I meet somebody from the Guardian and I get chatting to them and teaching them how to spell things like that, and they take some notes and decide to write a review of my website. And they say this fantastic new resource. Anyone interested in brewing beer and da da da da da, and they put it on the Guardian's website and they link from their article on their website to my brand new website. So now my website has got one link from the Guardian. Yep. Things going to improve.

Probably not straight away for sure. But yeah, probably why Guardian is. Well, I mean, think about it this way. If if your mate said to you, oh, there's this really great website, that's fine. If a journalist from the Guardian said, this is a really great website, you may be more inclined to trust them, right? They probably know a bit more about it. Um, so Google works in very much the same way. If the Guardian has a lot of authority, the Guardian is a well-regarded website. Um, as far as they're concerned, most of the people writing for the Guardian are experts in their field. So a link from the Guardian carries a lot more weight than a link from your mate's website.

Okay, you nearly went wandering off into geekdom there, but in essence, in essence, a trusted resource. And let's not talk about how the Guardian became trusted. Let's just accept that the Guardian is a trusted resource.

Are you going to go on a right? A right wing rant. Is that a thing?

Right wing?

Right wing. Really hard to say. I started a f*cking terrible idea.

Right? So instead of going on a right wing rant, um, I'll talk about the Guardian has authority and the Guardian is now linking to my to a, let's say the homepage of my website. Ding. So there's a, there's an initial signal of trust. The Guardian trusts it. Now, the article was in the Guardian, so at least twenty five more other people read it. Probably a bit more than that. I'm being facetious.

Um, there's no agenda to this podcast.

No, I mean, I'm happy to read The Guardian. I'm not affiliated with any party right wing or left wing or any newspaper. You know, it's interesting, just as a sideline, I keep getting these adverts to subscribe to the times, you know, for like a quid for the first three months. Yeah. And I want to subscribe to the times, because I think it might be good to read a paper on a regular basis. I know you're.

Sharing your time.

Yeah. And and I just think to myself, yeah, but I just kind of want something that gives me information, not tells me what to think. And if you do that suddenly, well, you can't subscribe to any newspaper because they've all got an agenda, don't they?

Well, but it's funny you should say that, actually. And we are wandering way off topic here. But I was just the other night sat down and I was thinking to myself I should do the sort of, you know, middle aged intellectual thing and subscribe to a newspaper. I was like, I really want to subscribe to the Financial Times because that seems relatively unbiased.

It's left wing.

It seems relatively unbiased. Whatever. I went on their website, it's like thirty quid a month. I was like, it's no bloody wonder nobody subscribes to these things. Is it? Because that's how they get you a pound a month for the first three months, and they just do four hundred pounds every month.

Just just do the quid for three months. And then it's like, I'm not getting the chance to read it, so I'm not going to bother.

Inevitably. Yeah.

That's, that's my concern. You know, why, why would I read, you know, what a well-informed journalist written when I can just open up Twitter and see what some bloke from Accrington thinks. Right, okay, so back to our links. So we've got our website about beer brewing previously doesn't appear anywhere in search, but somebody, because I met this guy at a networking thing from the Guardian, a journalist thought it was interesting what I'd done, wrote about it linked to me. And when he linked to me, then I got this one single trust signal. But it came from a pretty good, trustworthy resource. And because it was in the Guardian, lots of people read it and they then went, oh, actually this is really interesting. And they also wrote something.

On their own.

On their own website and linked to my website. So fast forward a couple of months, my website now has two hundred links from, let's say one hundred and fifty different websites because some of the websites linked more than once. Um, and some of those websites were Forums. Some of those websites, excuse me, were pretty, you know, low brow, nothing special websites. And one or two of them were specialist. Right.

Like other brewing companies or brewing.

Companies or whatever, like that. So two months down the line, my website now has these trust signals coming in, all of which this is the key, all of which were earned because I created a fantastic website with great content and people read it and went, this is useful. I'm going to link my readers to this resource as well. What's happening now when somebody types related search terms into Google and other search engines?

Well, now when Google's looking through all the articles that could possibly rank for that for the search term that somebody typed in, they're seeing yours and they're seeing that you now have lots and lots of links pointing at your website. It's a trusted resource. And they're saying, oh, actually this one should be front of the queue. This one is the best.

Because.

It has lots of authority. It's linked to a lot.

Yeah. Okay. That should be pretty clear. I think the way we've laid that out. Should it?

Do we get there in the end? Not notwithstanding my attempts to overcomplicate things. Um, and it's worth pointing out, too, that in this fictitious scenario that growth is exponential. Because now your article on how to brew beer or whatever, or like which hops to pick is coming up first in search every time somebody searches it. And now every time somebody wants to write their own article about this, yours is probably the article that they're linking to or using as a reference or whatever. So once you sort of get enough authority to start ranking well for popular search terms, you will find or in theory you will find that you get more natural earned links as well. Yeah.

Okay. So everything we've spoken about so far is laid out in the way that Google laid out in the paper that they wrote at the seventh International World Wide Web Conference in Brisbane in nineteen ninety eight. What, where I was.

What, where I was.

And um, that's the ideal world, isn't it?

Right. Yeah.

And is that how is that the reality?

It's an entirely fictitious scenario. I don't think it holds up to real world examination at all, unfortunately.

Let's talk about why not.

Well, now, if I if you were this fictitious website owner and I explained all this to you and I said, you know, you came to me and said, why is my website not ranking for these search terms? And I said, well, it's because people aren't referencing your website and linking to it. You may go off to your networking event and talk to somebody from the Garden Guardian and be lucky enough to get a link. The reality of the situation is most people will think to themselves, well, how can I take a shortcut to get there? Right? How can I streamline this process? I don't know any people from the Guardian. I go to networking events and I sit there nervously in the corner instead of interacting with people. This is never going to work for me. So how can I sort of fake it? Um, and, and I think that's, that's the real reality of the situation, isn't it? Now that like people will spoof or find ways of gaming the system and gaining links as quickly as possible. Um, because doing things the way that you're talking about, they're like getting a mention in the Guardian and it's snowballing and loads of people linking to you out of nowhere is just, it's a vanishingly small chance of it happening.

Is it for the birds?

It. Yes. I don't know that phrase. I've never heard it before. Well, you learn something new.

Um, yeah. And I guess one of the challenges is that in, you know, if, you know, ten years ago that, um, fictitious journalist from the Guardian, the Grauniad didn't understand that that link had a commercial value because it helped you rank better in search.

And now they're gonna.

And now they do.

Yeah. And they're going to try and charge you for it or tell you you can't have it.

That's right, that's right. So one of the challenges is that people know the value of those links. And therefore. How about this? Um, my mate is a journalist at The Scotsman, and I know for a fact if I bung him fifty quid, um, that he'll slip a link into the article he's written about a particular subject that links to my website or maybe one of my client's websites. Is that, is that okay to do that?

Well, it's it's absolutely in contravention to Google's guidelines.

Why?

Well, I mean, think about the system you're talking about in, in this paper that they wrote where they're talking about basically looking at a natural trust signal. The whole thing falls apart once you, once you're gaming that system, like in this situation, you're talking about where you can just slip somebody fifty quid to link to your article. The whole idea that the most trusted and most useful websites rise to the top is completely obliterated, because now it's just who can pay the most or who knows the most journalists. So obviously Google really don't want you to go away and do that because doing so completely dilutes the idea that they can find the best resource.

Are they are they explicit?

They are explicit, yeah. They say you should not ever buy or sell links.

But Google is a multibillion dollar business that makes lots of money, has made lots of people very, very rich. Who the hell are they to tell us what we should and shouldn't do?

Well, exactly. All they can do is penalise you for doing it. If they catch you.

Penalise me? How will they do that?

Well, they will literally penalise you as in decrease the visibility of your website. So sometimes they'll slap a manual penalty on you.

Do they do that anymore?

Sometimes I think maybe not. I mean.

I.

Don't know, sometimes it's just an algorithmic penalty, right?

Explain what the manual penalty.

What a manual penalty means that like your website has been flagged for doing something that Google thinks is against its guidelines. And then somebody sat down, a human person, sat down, looked at the situation and said, yes, you are definitely breaking the rules. Here is a penalty, right?

And basically remove you from the index. And it's happened to some pretty high profile businesses.

It happens quite a lot. Yeah.

JC Penney in the States. BMW did something and got hammered by Google, apparently.

And then like obviously the process of unpicking that manual penalty is basically you have to appeal to Google and say, well, please, I've changed my behaviour. I'll be a good boy now. But more importantly, they can and do also impose algorithmic penalties, right. Which is just.

Well that's it. What they would prefer to do is figure out what you've done and then figure out how to change the algorithm so it can see when others are doing it as well and devalue. Yeah. So the argument generally these days is with link building is somewhat like do it. And if Google don't like it, they'll more than likely just ignore what you've done rather than penalise you. And that's it feels like the same because if they don't value the links effectively rank better, then. But you know, they let you do it anyway because like, yeah, let these idiots waste their time.

Yeah. If you do something to build a link that they know about and they recognise the behavior happening and they turn a blind eye to it, you've effectively just wasted your time. Right? That's the idea. And it doesn't contaminate their search results. They're completely ignoring the signal, so it's all fine and dandy. Mhm.

Okay. Okay, so let's just let's just recap. Um, we've got this idea of this link bill link based algorithm, which Google came up with in order to automate the process of deciding which web pages were more important than others. Mhm. Um, that's all well and good if everybody plays by the rules, um, people stopped playing by the rules when they realised what Google was doing and started doing all kinds of putting together all kinds of schemes to help their pages rank better. Yeah.

And some of those schemes were incredibly convoluted. I mean, it got to the extent of people setting up entire networks of sort of interconnected blogs and websites so that they.

Could private blog networks.

Yeah. So they could sort of like pass links around and increase the authority of everything in the network and then direct it all to a client site. And it just incredibly intricate and complicated ways of trying to game this natural system of like, you know, recognising links.

And that's why sometimes when you see a website that's ranking really well and then you read it and it reads like AI.

Gibberish.

Content and or an idiot. Um, it's not a good user experience, but somehow it's at the top of search. And that's one of the reasons I think that Google has the, um, what are they called? The Google people? Actual real people.

Yeah. They do review manually review sites all the time. Review site checks.

And they're basically trying to say like, if you put this search in, these are the results to these results. Look, right. If they don't look right, what's wrong? They don't have a manual penalty manual penalty to get rid of the sites that are ranking. They try and figure out what is the algorithm doing to make these websites rank well. What are these? What are these sites doing? Rather, that's managing to fool the algorithm into thinking that they're important when they're not that sort of thing. So yeah, let's just talk like loosely for a short bit a short while about the different schemes. You mentioned private blog networks. So these are effectively, you know, like ten thousand. I could personally own ten thousand websites. And so you could come to me and say, I'm trying to get this website to rank and can you put like a hundred links from different websites in your library of ten thousand websites back to my website so that Google thinks my website's important? Is that it in a nutshell?

That's it in a nutshell. Absolutely.

And in the early days, um, what just if you can remember, what were people actually doing with these private blog networks in terms of the content?

Oh, as in like automatically generating it? Yeah. So they were using something called what we used to call article spinning websites back in the day. So you would plug some words into them, and then it would just spin out a thousand variations of that content, which basically rearranging the words effectively.

That's right. And it did read like utter gibberish. But importantly, somewhere in amongst the gibberish, it would say, um, beer brewing advice. And that would be a link to their beer brewing website that we talked about earlier. And so search engines just went, oh, that's a look.

Somebody cited the beer brewing.

Website, the beer brewing website, and it's and it's just hold on a minute. Caron's having a conversation over on in the kitchen. You heading out, Caron. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Good stuff from the coalface.

From the coalface. Yeah. Digital marketing From The Coalface in a real office where we're doing actual digital marketing. But it's a beautiful day. So everyone's been, uh, requested to leave early, not not requested. Everyone's been told to leave early and go and enjoy the sunshine. Indeed. Um, right. So we can use these private blog networks. They do still exist. They've become, you know, Google got very good at, at finding them because there would be patterns, fingerprints, whatever. And so, you know, going back to when was it, when it all kind of blew up? Was it like twenty twelve, twenty thirteen? A lot of them got found, websites crashed and burned. So people started looking for other ways. And we don't know all of the ways. That's okay. Off you go. I'll hear the bell ring as you open the door as well. But that doesn't matter either. Yeah.

Why do we have a bell?

Why? What?

Why do we have a bell?

Well, because we're all working upstairs, and that tells us when somebody's coming in, I suppose. And that's why they put it there originally when it was an architect's office, I think. Anyway, we digress again. What about, uh, other ways for people to create links?

I guess the classic one was like buying and selling them, right? So when I, when I first got into SEO, I was writing content for an agency that had a team of link builders and their entire job was to find often like mommy bloggers, if you remember that whole trend of like people just blogging about the recipes they made with their kids and stuff, but they would track them down and they would pay them to insert links in their content. Um, sometimes with money, sometimes with bribes like shoes or tickets to Disneyland or whatever. But that was like a whole industry. There was a whole thing for a while. Um, link buying people also used to trade um, links. Um, guest posting was a massive thing. It still sort of is a massive thing, but certainly in explain.

That, explain the concept of guest posts.

So the guest posting is like, you would literally say like, here's my blog, I accept guest posts, please come and submit an article. And then agencies or businesses or whatever would sort of write an article, including links to the website they wanted to promote, and then they would give it to these webmasters and they would say, please publish this on your blog. And sometimes you'd have to pay for that. Sometimes it would be free if the content was good enough, whatever. But the point is, the blogs were sort of open to submissions from outside entities. Yeah. And it was widely understood that you were only doing that in order to put a link to your website on their blog.

And it's still pretty widespread now.

Yes it is. Yeah, absolutely.

And in fact, link building agencies, of which there are many and aboveboard, you know, they advertise online, they provide a service, um, which you pay them for to secure links in order to build your authority in order to improve your rankings, in order to get more traffic, in order to do more business and improve revenue.

You got that?

They exist.

They do exist. And to be honest, it's not a terrible tactic. I mean, again, going back to the whole twenty twelve thing, there was a time, a spate where Google's it was then it was Matt Cutts was the head of Google's sort of like Webspam team, whose job it was to set out all these rules. And he, you know, explicitly released a blog post saying, if you guest post, we will find you and we will delist your website. Guest posting is terrible idea. It's against Google's terms of service. Don't do it. Um, and of course, you know, at the time, I remember sort of rolling my eyes at it and thinking there's absolutely no way and, you know, true to form, it's still a tactic that can work. But it is, again, largely a sort of outdated, spammy thing to do.

But isn't it fair to say that it's kind of how most link building agencies are doing their link building these days? Yeah, I think they call it outreach. They give it a hipster name instead of link building. Well, I think it's spamming.

I think it's different because what what they're trying to emulate nowadays is much closer to sort of, I guess, Google's original intention. It's not the case now, for example, that the entire blogs exist that are just just accepting guest posts and not publishing any original content or like back in the days of like, you know, article submission sites and stuff like that where you could literally just kind of submit anything and you'd see these blogs where it was like, you know, they'd be talking about a, you know, dental treatments in one breath and then like architects offices in the next. And none of it really made any sense or was very coherent. Nowadays, I think guest posting is more about finding.

Blogs very coherent or incoherent.

Uh, I meant to say coherent. None of it was very coherent, but maybe, I don't know. I was talking quite fast.

Yeah.

Um, but nowadays, I think the tactics you're talking about, like you have to be a little bit cleverer about it. Sites are less likely to announce that they are sort of like publishing guest posts or accepting article submissions. And people will generally be a bit more careful about finding stuff. That is what we call niche relevant, which means that they actually talk about the topics that you want to include a guest post about. And again, to be clear, there's nothing actually wrong with guest posting. It's quite a natural behavior. I mean, if you think about it, if you are, I don't know, like, uh, a cyclist and you've developed a really cool new way of increasing your, uh, I don't know, metabolism or something. And you want to go away and write about it. For somebody who runs a diet and wellness blog, it makes perfect sense that you'd share resources with people also in your field and, and that sort of thing. Um, so I don't think it's a bad tactic at all per se. I just think it's one of those things that Google again, became very aware of the fact that people were gaming, um, and then tried to introduce penalties for doing that.

Well, I mean, don't you think it is absolute horseshit that Google, on the one hand, relies on links to figure out good from bad websites, whilst at the same time we live in an age where A securing earned links genuine produce some good. I mean they're effectively saying produce fantastic content. People will eventually find it. And some of those people might link to it. And if they do, you'll get rewarded with better search results. Is it any wonder that people try and manipulate the link based algorithm to fast track that?

Well, what I think is really interesting is going back to what you were saying in that book, where they make reference to the whole scientific community, right. And the idea that this behavior that they're looking for linking is supposed to emulate the way that scientists cite papers. What's really interesting is if there are any scientists listening to this, they'll already know is that that system's already broken. Everybody knows that if you publish your scientific paper, even if it's the best scientific paper in the world, if you publish it in the wrong journal and nobody reads it, no one's ever going to cite it. And they also know that really widely cited papers are often shit. They're just coasting on the fact that they were published once in nature six years ago. Loads of people saw it, and now it's the sort of go to article to cite if you're writing about that subject. So yeah, one hundred percent. I think the idea is really fundamentally flawed. And the dream that you would publish content about your, your beer producing, producing website and people would just happen to find it and then happen to link to it. And then that would sort of blossom and spread across the internet. It's just a silly fantasy, really. I don't think it could ever really work the way they intended it to.

So. So why does Google give a toss about these good, bad, indifferent links?

Well, the real answer is because what they are trying to avoid is a situation where people can just openly and obviously game the search results, right? So their search engine only survives if it serves useful content. And if it's so easy to game the system that you can just go out and hand somebody fifty quid and get one hundred links to your website, the search results are just going to be contaminated by the people with the biggest marketing budget effectively. And they know that in the long run, that kills their business, right? Because nobody's going to come to Google just to see who could pay most to rank for beer. You know, beer producing advice or whatever. They want the actual best content.

And do you think that's why in, in, in, in many niches or niches, if you're listening in America, if you know, in many of those niches, niches, then Google are strongly favoring in a search results page paid search because they've got absolute control over paid search. It's where they make all the money. And it's also a place where they have absolute control. They don't have to figure out anything other than, this is the word they're bidding on. This is the advert. This is where they're sending them. That's a good user experience. Give me a tenner and you've got me and that's a click.

And that's the key, isn't it? Because one of the things when you're setting up paid search that a lot of people don't realise is that Google do actually look at this whole experience, like is the keyword that you're advertising on relevant to your page and is your ad relevant and is it a good user experience? And then they award you a quality score. So they. Yeah, it's exactly like you say, they can completely control that ecosystem. And because less people are paying for their pages to be at the top of Google, they can also do a much better job of sort of, isn't it?

Fewer people.

Probably. Yeah. And I have an English degree. They can actually do a better job of sort of manually auditing those sites.

I just thought you got a degree that you did in England. I didn't realise it was in English.

It's a common mistake that. My English degree. Oh, yeah. I've got a French one. Um, no. Yeah. So so it's much easier for them to control that ecosystem and to say, you know, this is good, this is bad or whatever. It's much harder to do that at scale in organic search for sure. And I think that is definitely the reason why they've introduced more and more paid listings at the top of some search results page. It's also why.

And increasingly made them look less and less like paid listings.

And I think it's also where the whole kind of driver for the people also ask and the the featured snippet and the map pack and all of that additional sort of stuff comes from, because what they're trying to do is serve you the information that they think is relevant so that you don't go looking through the organic search results that they know are being aggressively gamed by other people.

Do we think, broadly speaking, that Google are we're cleverer than we give them credit for in terms of being able to figure good content from bad content?

No, I think the opposite actually, and I think quite a lot of stuff that I've been reading and listening to recently is sort of like solidified that like, for example, one thing we'll not talk about in any great detail, but one of the sort of common tactics that gets used at the moment for link building is that whole idea of tiered link building. So it's like, you know, that you don't want Google to see that you're doing naughty link building behind the scenes. So instead you build lots of naughty links to a domain that you don't really care about very much. And then link that domain to your domain and it passes all the link juice along and you get that authority.

And that's got to be so easy to spot.

But you'd think so. But this is the point I'm making. But people are doing that and it's working. So I think Google, they generate a lot of mystique around their processes, and they like to pretend that they're really good at ferreting these tactics out. But you and I both know, and many of the people listening to this will know, because if you go and Google something, probably in your own niche, you'll see that there are websites that are obviously gaming that system and succeeding there are because you can find there are plenty of free tools online to explain more clearly where you can plug a domain in, and it will tell you all the referring domains that are pointing at it, or all the referring domains that that tool can find. And we're talking about things like Moz, Open Site Explorer, and SEMrush and Ahrefs, and they'll tell you exactly who's linking to a domain. And you'll see very quickly that often the people who rank first are quite competitive. Search terms have a backlink profile that is full of websites that are very obviously the websites we were talking about before, like private blog networks or paid links or whatever.

Yeah, we've done that when we've looked at and trying to rank a page about some subject or other. And we've looked at the pages currently ranking, and we've seen the link profile for those pages, and it is absolute garbage.

Yeah. Clearly garbage. Um, but and yet they still rank well and haven't been penalised.

Maybe in amongst the garbage, there's one or two diamonds and maybe the website overall we got because remember the a website, a domain gains authority. And when it does it gets easier to rank more pages. It's like, it's like the gift that keeps on giving. If you do build a decent level of authority, it's, um, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, um, even linking internally within your own site can actually make quite a dramatic difference to how, uh, other web pages on your site are performing. That makes sense. What about, um, you know, one, one thing that people do as well, you know, we've, we've actually been, you know, one of the things we do is rescue websites, and when we rescue them, we audit them. We often find that they've been hacked. And what happens is with hackers is that they put small pieces of content in amongst the existing content with links. And that's, again, I think that's still quite common. I mean, it's it's precarious because if people realise the website's been hacked, they'll get it unhooked and all the links will disappear. But quite often at that end of the market, the really grubby illegal end basically. Um, and people don't care. They build a website, just do anything to get links to it. Use every scheme out there. It gets rankings, it makes some money, then it crashes and burns and they move on. It doesn't matter black hat. But as we've said, I think in previous podcasts, if if a reputable company that's trying to build a brand, start doing dodgy link building, it may work, they may get away with it forever, or they may find that they don't get away with it forever and they come unstuck. Although, again, I think increasingly, is it not the case that the search engines are more likely to ignore rather than penalise?

Yeah. And I think it's also worth pointing out that the goalposts often move as well. I mean, going back to that point, I do have a vast amount of sympathy for businesses that think they're doing okay things, and then it turns out to be in contravention of Google's practices or they change their best practices. I mean, the whole guest posting thing, right? One of the reasons it was so noteworthy and caused such a massive stink in the industry in general is because for a long time, it was sort of assumed that this was okay behavior or even sort of implicitly encouraged. And lots of websites were doing it at scale because it was a good tactic. And then Google turned around one day and said, you can't do this anymore. And I mean, I remember it certainly wasn't the case then in twenty twelve, twenty thirteen, that Google ignored the bad links. They actively penalised you. And penalty recovery was like a massive thing. So the agencies were set up to help people recover from these dubious penalties that had have been handed out for doing something that everybody else was doing at the time. So I do have a huge amount of sympathy, because sometimes it's actually really hard to tell whether what you're doing is explicitly bad or not, or just Google haven't got around to deciding that it's a bad idea yet. Yeah.

Do you think that this idea of ignoring bad links, um, that people have built to try and improve their authority and their rankings and their traffic and their revenue? Do you think that they're ignored rather than sites being penalised because of bad actors?

I suspect that there's probably a threshold thing. So like, one of the things that we often talk about when we're looking at people's backlink profiles is like the ratio of good and bad links and stuff like that. And I think you're right, I think because people could, you know, out of malice, go and build a load of bad links to your website, or they could go on a load of porn forums and build links to Reddit, for example. And that would look terrible to Google. So I think there's a certain degree of like Google understand that they appreciate that that's possible. So they will ignore a certain amount. But I think when it's really obvious that somebody is trying to manipulate the search results by building a load of spurious links. I think when the ratio of kind of crap links outweighs the ratio of good ones, you probably do end up suffering for it. Mhm. I think it's all just a question of whether or not Google realised their bad links, really, which I think is the crux of the issue, is that it's still actually quite hard to tell how good Google is at determining a good and a bad link. And loads of tools try like SEMrush, which we mentioned before, they'll do things like they'll have like a toxicity score and they'll say like, we're pretty sure a backlink from this domain is bad, but it's all just guesswork like you. You know, there are no sort of like, I mean, Google used to publish PageRank, right? They used to tell you how authoritative your website was and therefore how authoritative the websites linking to you were. And you could tell when a link was going to be worthwhile or not. You can't anymore because they don't publish any of that information. So everyone's just sort of guessing really.

How would a website owner make sure that they don't don't earn good links?

Um, publishing rubbish content. I don't know.

Well yeah, I mean I was thinking more like if you have a website that just says this is what we do and we're dead good at it.

Yeah.

Then why would anybody ever link to that? I mean, one of the reasons that people wax lyrical about blogging, um, is because it allows you to share your expertise, your thought leadership, etc. and if you do that, then the content might resonate with somebody else, they might then link to it. And, you know, and again, I agree, the look on your face says, oh, how often do people who run websites even know how to create a link to your website, let alone, you know, like they can be bothered doing it.

Like with the best will in the world as well. Like, so I've got a Moz article open in front of me and it is called Top Tips for non Spammy Link building. And it was published nineteenth of May twenty twenty three. So a few days ago. Wow. Um, and it is just about oh, build really cool resources that people want to link, to write really good blog posts. And it's like, yeah, that's fine. But like, how often honestly, hand on heart, how often have you ever linked to somebody's blog post? Because it was just so cool. It just never happens.

It's just nonsense. But the fact that they've written that shows how ridiculous things have got, doesn't it? The fact that a reputable organisation like them are saying absolute bullshit stuff like that. Yeah. Build great resources.

Well, because because again, because like the reason I feel so sorry for people that listen to that advice is because that's a real catch twenty two situation. Sometimes when I'm writing blog posts for our blog, I do go and cite the the resources that I've found that are useful. However, I've only found those resources because they're already being cited and ranking well. If a website has no authority, it can never be found. So this whole idea that you can build authority by writing great content is just like dead in the water, because you're never. How are you ever gonna start getting the links? You know, it's that's right.

Yeah. Well, I mean, what we've been doing is, uh, kind of, uh, exploring, Um. The missing link. Uh, the thing that's stopping you from, um, getting those fantastic rankings, etc..

I mean, do we have any advice? Do we give advice on how to sort of unpick this?

Uh, it's the sort of thing which is like very specific to the business. So the good news is in some areas of business to business, B2B, you know, you don't need squillions of links in order to build authority, or rather in order to build enough authority to shine and stand out in the search engine results pages.

Just have to have more authority than the other people. That's right.

Um, and that's good news if you're, if you're in a very competitive niche starting out, then yeah, that side of it is just going to drive you mad. You're just gonna, you're just not going to succeed unless you stumble across a scheme which may or may not help in the long term. You know, I'm not against schemes. Uh, no. As in, I understand the reason people do it. It's because it's you know, the bar has been set, um, impossibly high.

Yes. Yeah.

Because it's really, really hard to get really, really good links to build your authority. It just is. It doesn't matter who you are. It's very difficult. And that's why people resort to schemes. And we've experimented with some of those ourselves and we've seen mixed results from doing it.

Yeah.

Because because it's it's time consuming as well.

Yeah. I was gonna say, I mean, a lot of the tactics that do still work, like the guest posting where, you know, you can find sort of non-obvious places to guest posts and stuff like that, they're fine, but they do take a lot of time and effort that they have to. And the other thing that we do that is successful, but again, very time consuming is using like journalist enquiry searches, like Haro or, um, response source where, you know, when a journalist needs input for an article, they'll reach out via those services. You'll get an email, they'll say they're looking for comment from X, Y, and Z, and they will normally link to you in exchange for you giving the comment. And that's a great way to build natural links through your expertise that is completely compliant with everything that Google are advising, but it is incredibly time consuming. And again, you are just sort of waiting for an enquiry to pop up. You can't kind of proactively do it at all.

So and I think that's why, you know, link agencies are an option because what they've done and continue to do is build relationships. So if you go along, if you came to us saying like, and somebody did recently and said, oh, I'm just looking for link building, we went, nope, can't help you. That's not what we do.

But we did point them towards.

We did point them towards an agency who can do that for them. The thing is, if you know, say for example, you know, you are this fictitious brewing website, you could go along to a link building agency and say, I'd like to build the authority of my site, or I'd like to build the authority of a particular article on my site. And they say, what's it about and brewing? And they've got a catalog and they say, right, we've got a catalog of twenty, thirty, thousand websites. And in amongst that, there are one hundred and twenty websites which are relevant to you. Um, and therefore we have an existing relationship. We know for a fact that for X number of dollars, this person will put an article on their website with a link back to you. It's guest blogging, obviously, or guest content anyway, but.

It's not dissimilar to that. That's not dissimilar to the way that like traditional PR works, for example, where PR people have a catalogue of journals and newspapers and yeah, you pay them a bit of money and they get you featured because.

They know the journalists and they have relationships, etc. so it's kind of similar. And I think that, you know, the fact that they've got those existing relationships is makes them and makes them a good choice. Now, you know, one thing to bear in mind, um, if you want to buy, um, links and you're not too worried about the quality of them, you can probably buy links for twenty dollars, twenty five dollars, that sort of thing.

Yeah.

If you want to buy links from sites that themselves have got good authority, which in turn should help you build your authority. And, you know, you could be one hundred, two hundred, three hundred, a thousand dollars for one link. I mean, you know, it is an it is an industry. It is a currency online. And you need to bear that in mind. So if you're say, for example, you're working with an agency on your content and your branding and your messaging and all of that stuff, and you're paying them three grand a month if you want to do link building, like serious link building as.

Well, like find a couple of extra grand.

Find another two or three grand a month just for that. And by the way, you know, like you might even get one of these link building agencies to do the work for you. Um, and it could be five months. You could buy ten links off them and it could take them four or five months before they go. That's it. We've ticked off the last one. Here it is. You can see it's there and you know it's now been placed. It takes a long time.

Well that's one thing I would say. Just going back to the whole price and time thing that you need to be really cautious of if you're listening to this and thinking, oh, well, you know, f*ck it. I'll just buy some links. I think that was too many swears. Now we're gonna lose our clientele.

There's only.

two. Um. You may.

Well, you know what? Because I never swear.

Yeah, you may well think I'll just go off and buy some cheap links. And you will find people who will sell you cheap links. A hundred for a tenner. You know, it's not unusual in places like Fiverr and Upwork and stuff like that to see people offering packages of links for a very low, small amount of money. The problem is, with link building, you really do get what you pay for. And those links may well be ignored by Google, but they may well also harm your website, I think in the long run. Um, what you want and the only thing that will actually move the dial and make a real difference is websites, links from websites with decent pre-existing authority. So you are going to be paying for them. I don't think you can do it on the cheap really. And it does take a long time. I'm always really I was quite interested, um, to see how long it took some of the link building agencies to build decent links because the way that some of these services are advertised, you think it's sort of an overnight thing, but they were actually sort of negotiating with people to place these links and. Yeah.

That's right. Okay. If you've been interested in the conversation that we've just had, if you're in fact still listening, then well done. Uh, if you want to come on the show and discuss some aspect of digital marketing, web stuff, link building stuff, SEO stuff, anything really to do with business growth and revenue generation online. Give us a shout. You can get in touch at red evolution dot com. Um, other than that, we'll try and keep things moving. This is episode ninety six. We've, we've sort of just grinding it out to get to one hundred quite soon, I hope. And then, uh, whether we change the format or just keep onwards and upwards. I quite like the format. Yeah.

Shame about my co-host, but yeah, said.

The said the man with a manbun. Right. Thanks for listening.