Search Marketing Blog
Defend Your Web! (and hard-earned links)
Posted by Tyson Braun on 12.05.2008As we have conveyed in previous EngineWorks blog posts, effective SEO requires a three-pronged approach: Site-Wide SEO, On-Page SEO, and Off-Page SEO. I like to think of our SEO process as being similar to building a great spider web that’s designed to catch as many flies as possible.
To begin with, choose great keywords, implement proper Meta tags and URL canocalization, craft highly relevant content, and you have a solid foundation for a spider web. In addition, to attract flies, you must gain relevant external links to your site. There is, however, a fourth and often overlooked step: defending your web.
If some jerk human walks right through a spider web, the spider doesn’t just leave it alone. He must continually rebuild, or no flies will ever “convert” to a meal. A Web site owner needs to do the same by employing strategies such as 301 Redirects to defend his presence within the major search engines.
It’s important to realize that an external link to your site is a vote of authority. In the eyes of the search engines, your content is so impressive that the linking site is willing to send its visitors to your page. This recognized greatness, in turn, earns credibility for your site. Covet these votes, because they will be lost if you don’t take the time to maintain them.
Be aware, however, that there are countless links out there that do not lead the visitor to the intended site. Perhaps an entire page has moved to a new URL because someone decided that the content would be better suited on a different page. Or, maybe a forwarding domain has expired. When these events occur, your vote has essentially been retracted, and action needs to be taken to get it back. Once again, you must protect and defend your web.
EngineWorks currently has an SEO engagement in place with a renowned educational institution on the East Coast. A professor at this college chose to link to the school’s homepage from his personal Web site. He linked to a domain that is named after the school’s founder, which was then redirected to the university homepage. I discovered this link while exploring link-building opportunities for our client, and thought “great, we already have a relevant link from him.”
I decided to click on the link to see which part of the site I would be directed to, and much to my dismay, was forwarded to a parked domain. The domain had expired, and was registered by someone who created the parked domain. This meant that the new owner of the domain was benefiting from our external link vote! We immediately had our client contact the professor, and change the link to its intended destination on the university’s site. Since our client no longer owns this domain, the problem had to be fixed by the professor, and not by a 301. The re-established link now provides a benefit to our client’s site. A link saved is a link earned, and visitors to the site now have the experience that was intended by the university.
Another similar egregiously missed 301-opportunity currently haunts Baylor University. The university hosts a great piece of content titled “How to Say Nothing in 500 Words,” which is an article written by an English professor in the 1950’s. I attempted to access this article because several influential writing sites recommend it. Unfortunately, all of the links refer me to a dead page. Using Yahoo!’s Site Explorer, I was able to discover that this page has an incredible 628 external links! Among these non-performing “votes” are Squidoo founder Seth Godin, and popular sites such as ReadWriteWeb and DoshDosh.
What a missed opportunity! All Baylor University needs to do is implement a simple 301 Redirect to wherever they’ve moved the content, and they will be able retain the authority from these links. I did eventually find the article using archive.org, and it appears that the original content was moved late last year.
If Baylor becomes aware of this negative situation, and chooses to protect its valuable links, I hope this EngineWorks blog will be the 629th link to invite you to check-out this informative article! Remember, defending your web takes constant vigilance and effort. Especially, if you want to continue catching juicy flies!
Seth Godin 12.18.2008 at 2:47 pm
beautifully said
and a great catch.
Olivia Mitchell 12.18.2008 at 6:02 pm
Your link in the last paragraph also leads nowhere useful. Is that where you meant to point us to?
Olivia
Tyson Braun 12.30.2008 at 3:47 pm
Olivia,
Thank you for reading my post. And yes, like the hundreds of others, I have linked to this dead page, thus rewarding the site by virtue of my “vote,” and it leads nowhere useful.
But, unlike the others, I did it to illustrate how easily the authority of all of those “lost links” can be redeemed. The sites owner could implement a simple 301 Redirect of that URL forwarding visitors and “link juice” to wherever they moved the article.
After this is done, POOF! You, and everyone else would be delivered to a great piece of writing, like the link earlier in my story accomplishes.
The 404 Error Page: Don’t Offend the Search Robots! - EngineWorks 02.02.2009 at 12:15 pm
[...] a perfect world, dead-end 404 Errors should never happen. If content from a page is moved, a 301 Redirect to the new location should be a fundamental step. This way, the site retains the referred visitors [...]