Interview with Aaron Wall on Linkbuilding

It has been some time since I asked Aaron for a small interview but I never really found the time to come up with some questions Bad excuse I know but anyway, I hooked up with Aaron from SEO Book and asked him a few questions about links & linkbuilding.

1. What are the most important factors to give a textlink it’s value ? For example, would a contextual link on a page that has a PR0 but is (highly) relevant to your page would be ok for you to give it a go ?

I would say that the biggest thing that gives a link its longterm value is relevancy and traffic. If a link keeps sending me traffic or is an endorsement from a person in my marketplace I keep getting value from it every time someone comes across it…this is especially true if it is a link embedded in content.

Beyond that I think PageRank and anchor text are somewhat important, but you also want it to look natural, so a page with few or no bought
links on it is more ideal than a page full of bought links.

2. Are you ever looking to the toolbar PR at all during your linkbuilding process ?

Sometimes it does help to buy a bit of raw PageRank. And in markets you do not know well PageRank can be a quick guide / estimate to the value of certain sites, but I am typically more focused on perceived relevancy and anchor text than PageRank in most cases.

3. How can e-commerce sites that are selling physical products use the WEB2.0 stuff (dig, facebook,twitter,etc) to get good traffic ?

I think rather than targeting selling they have to target being remarkable or being useful. How to information and features of cool products can help get coverage. For instance, making a video and uploading it to YouTube can create a real traffic stream. Not only that, but video sells well because people hear the honesty in your voice as you teach them. It appeals to a whole different audience base than some text does. And many people have embedded some of my videos in their blogs. Essentially they are putting an ad for me in front of hundreds or thousands of readers on their site and saying that I am worth 5 minutes of their time. Huge win for me (and everyone else out there making how to videos)!

Getting a fan club on Facebook can help get a bit more exposure, but typically only if your brand is well known or you can come up with a cool software widget that people want to play with. One of the things I think I am going to do a lot more writing about in my SEO training program over the next year or two is the use of widgets…many of the best brands will have a home away from home by sponsoring and/or creating cool widgets.

Twitter I have not used much yet, but just based on my brand strength I think over 100 people are following me. From the bits of Twitter I have seen it is really about having a conversation with the marketplace. And if you read the Cluetrain Manifesto conversation is really what markets are about.

Whenever possible becoming the community marketplace is great for brand building, but all these other channels can add up to a substantial advantage. If one person makes an announcement via 1 channel and you make it on 5 or 10 different channels you are probably going to be able to spread ideas faster and further, especially if your main channels are of similar size.

4. Assume you have an e-commerce store and you want to start blogging, would you start the blog at your e-commerce site or on a separated domain and what are the advantages & disadvantages of that ?

Typically I would keep it combined. The authority tends to flow around the site, but not flow as well cross site. So if all my authority is on a blog over here, and all my income comes from a site over there…that set up is not as good as if I keep them together.

The one exception to this rule is if you plan on becoming a leading blogger…then you can start with it separate, and then bolt services onto the blog after you start to get well known. This is sorta how SEO book changed from a blog to a site with SEO tools, SEO videos, an SEO glossary, a SEO training program, and a private SEO community.

Many of the other top leading SEO brands have done similarly, bolting on consulting and other goodies. I don’t know if I would know of Andy Beal, Michael Gray, Peter Da Vanzo, Rand Fishkin, or John Andrews without blogging. And likely they probably would have never heard of
my name without blogging.

5. How do you see the links , the value of the links and the linkbuilding process to involve in the next few years (in Google) ?

I see links becoming an even greater indication of social acceptance, and links doing an even better job of indicating relevancy. But I also imagine gaming (in the opinion of Google) is going to spread faster and faster. So I see them eventually looking into subscriber stats, analytics data, AdSense data, and more data they are hoarding.

I see search becoming more subjective and human driven. Lots more of half baked idealistic and unfair stuff from engineers and trying to control the market through the use of fear.

6. If 2 links on a same page are pointing to another (same) page within your site but has a different anchortekst , will both of these links pass some value or is it only the first one that Google is seeing that gets the ‘love’ ?

I think a couple people tested this recently, starting with MichaelVandemar last October
http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/2007/10/09/you-may-be-screwing-yourself-with-hyperlinked-headers/

His test showed the first link counted. But in a Sphinn article about the topic Dan Thies said they once saw different results in the past.
So this may change over time.

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