“But I just have a regular shopping website” is probably one of the most common excuses from BtoC shopping websites I’ve heard for not having a lot of links. Obtaining links to a “regular shopping website” is probably one of the easiest things to do, though. If you manage to get your processes right, you don’t even have to build lots of links, you will be gathering them naturally. In this post, I will try to explain how you can get loads of natural links to a business to consumer shopping website in four easy steps.

1. Be linkable
This is not only necessary from a search engine point of view, but also if you want to attract more links. Session IDs, password protected pages and frames are potential killers of a great link profile. Be sure to be linkable. I’m not going into depth here, if you need more info about this subject check out this part of SEOmoz’ Beginners Guide.

2. Sell great products
Don’t settle with regular or good products, sell great products. You know, products that make you want to tell others “Hey, check out this product I just bought. It’s amazing”.
Selling really crappy products might get you a few links as well, but I don’t think these links are the ones you’re looking for…

3. Provide great service
Don’t settle with a regular or good service, but provide every customer with a great service. Small customers as well. You know, a service that makes you want to tell others “Hey, you know about the problem I had with that product I recently bought. You’ll never going to believe this”.

4. Encourage linking
It sounds pretty logical, but there still are loads of companies out there that don’t want you linking to them. Mentioning a positive linking policy on your copyright page can help, but encouraging linking goes much further.

• Include a link encouraging message in your confirmation email or in the follow up email. Something like “Did you like this product? Tell us and tell others! Found something wrong with this product? Tell us and others as well!”, together with the URL(s) of the product(s) your customer just bought might get you dozens of positive posts with natural links. It might also get you a few less positive posts, but this is a great way to let these customers get familiar with your excellent service.
• You might take this even a step further by offering discounts or coupons. I don’t know what Matt thinks of something like “Let others know what you think about this product and get a 15% discount on your next purchase!” in terms of paid links, but I think it’s a great way to encourage people to give you feedback about your products. Whether this is positive or negative feedback.
• If your products have a manual, use it. Let your customers know the URL of the product they’ve bought, so they can check out this page for more info, updates and more. This way, you might bond with a few customers and make them linktrigger-happy.
• Images. In stead of preventing people from hotlinking your images, encourage them! In return for a link to the source, of course. You could also use a script like this.
• Even a simple “bought this product?” button in stead of a “send to friend” button (with some explanation included) might encourage people to actually write about the product they’ve bought in the past.

While these steps look pretty easy to follow, I’ve only seen a few companies actually use this in their linking strategy. This is very remarkable, considering the fact that only a few changes might results in dozens or hundreds of free, natural deeplinks over time. And while I’ve mentioned only a few link encouraging tips, I’m sure you can come up with plenty more.

Loren Baker provided 10 great tips to build links without buying them, but there’s still plenty of room left for even more free link building tactics. Here’s a list of another 10 useful tactics that might work for you.

1. Interviews
Getting yourself interviewed by a local journalist, a specialist from your market or some other influential person gives you the possibility to mention your website as well. The interview is about you, right? To give you an example, Aaron Wall managed to get 5 links into this interview with Peter da Vanzo.

2. Guestposts
Guestposting (or better: create your own network) is a great way to not only spread your personal image, but to attract (or place) links as well. Since you’re the writer of the article, you decide where to link to. And what anchor text to use. Don’t overdo this, however. Linking to your own website(s) too often may result in a bad image or in never getting invited to write another post anymore.
This works the other way round as well; check out the amount of links pointing to SEOmoz’ UGC section (and that’s just the home page)…

3. Link out
A great way to get notified and to get links. And I’m not talking about trackbacks, but about real links without nofollow. It’s not only a way to show your readers what kind of stuff you’re reading, but the bloggers you’re linking to also watch their incoming links thanks to Technorati and to their WP Admin. By linking to them, they will notice you and might even link to you.

4. Link to your own pages
Bill Hartzer explained this one better than I ever could, so I’m not going to explain this link building technique. Go check out Bill’s article.

5. Discuss your favorite topics
Commenting your favorite blogs and forums regularly not only builds your personal brand, but can lead to visitors to your websites and links as well. Lots of forums and blogs don’t use nofollow (again: don’t overdo), so mentioning your websites every now and then will improve your link popularity. Thinking about a commenting strategy might pay off in the end.

6. Teach
This is one that I already mentioned earlier, but this technique can work like a charm. Teaching your favorite subject in a school in your area not only gives you the possibility to network with potential future employees, but also is a way to build your brand and even to get links. The school where you’re teaching probably has a website where you can add your own bio and publish your teaching material. Both .edu pages, of course, include a link to your website.

7. Do some research
Publishing the results of something you researched in your field of interest can lead to dozens of relevant, high quality links. Especially if the outcomes are funny, shocking or quite interesting. If the outcome is exceptionally valuable, you might even attract links from reputable news sources, .edus or other great sources.

8. Create a contest (or an award)
Contests, quizzes or awards not only can have a great viral effect, but can attract the attention of community members as well. Creating a yearly award is almost a guarantee for lots of attention, recognition and (quite important) relevant links and rankings.

9. Make pictures
Not only is Flickr a great way to get links (without nofollow), but some influential bloggers also give credits to the photographer of the pictures they use. And don’t forget that images are quite important in linkbait articles, so try to get your share out of it.
Especially when you manage to make some out of the box photos of common subjects, terms or goods (office, targeting, discuss, etc), you might be able to attract some great links. And get some great exposure on other blogs.

10. Donations
Ok, so technically, links you receive after donating something aren’t exactly free, but in this case I guess it’s ok. The money (or products) you used for getting links was for a good cause. You should at least donate something to charity once in your life, but if you’re only willing to do this if you get a link in return, so be it.

Aaron Wall wrote up a great post about Google and shopping comparison websites. In his post, he also mentions the current drop in traffic/ rankings of BizRate.com.

“I am uncertain if the drop in Google was algorithmic or editorial, but BizRate’s Alexa ranking is off sharply over the past couple weeks, and if you look at top keywords they ranked for on Google (via Compete.com, SEO Digger, or SpyFu), their site is no longer ranking for many of them.”

While I believe that this drop was caused by a mix of both algorithmic and editorial influence, most of BizRate’s top rankings seem to be coming back already. At least, the stuff that I have been tracking and from where I can see it…

BizRate, BizRate…
BizRate happens to be one of those sites that I have been tracking for a while now, mainly because of their aggressive link buying tactics. They used to have tens of thousands of anchor text optimized links pointing to almost every page on their website. The majority of these links was paid for; footer links, sidebar links and numerous ad box links. You name it, they had it. As you can see, BizRate was (and still is) a great example to keep an eye on.
Aaron’s post inspired me to dive into BizRate’s backlinks once again. I have been doing this in more than one occasion, but this time it was different than before. Lots of the news websites, that were selling direct links to make up for the ongoing drop in news paper subscriptions, have been removing, altering or nofollowing their sponsored links. What used to be a block with irrelevant text links, turned into a Google AdSense Ad. Complete footers went pink because of all the nofollows and direct links suddenly turned into redirects. Even several of the famous BizRate link blocks got slapped with rel=”nofollow”.

Mission accomplished
Google’s October FUD Campaign seems to be working out exactly as planned. More and more ad publishers are complying with Google’s rules and advertisers are backing out of renting links because of their fear for a penalty. Only a few will go underground and some will remain to use the same strategy. However, this will be resulting in fewer direct, paid, anchor text rich links, what will lead to multiple shifts in highly competitive SERPs.

And this is, in my opinion, one of the things that happened with BizRate. Publishers got scared and nofollowed or removed the sponsored links, what resulted in a huge drop in anchor text rich links. This, combined with a little touch of human influence, lead to these changes and a near zero visibility in Google for at least a few days.
BizRate will probably alter their link tactics and choose for something safer, which means that Google got what it wanted.

Building links can be a quite intensive and time consuming process. Because emailing with webmasters, negotiating terms of link placements and monitoring the progress of your campaign takes such an amount of time, you barely have time to build content. In stead of creating some excellent, in depth articles, you’ll settle with writing multiple articles of reasonably good quality.

Below is what the process of an average link negotiation looks like. When you send out a link request email, the recipient of this email will usually evaluate this request based on both the quality of your email and the quality of your website or web page.

So what’s up with the big ass flow chart? Build excellent content in stead of settling with ok or just good content. This not only increases the speed of your link process, but it also saves you from the hassle of lots of negotiating correspondence and will result in more and better links. It also saves you time to write or design even more excellent stuff. Optimizing your link building process starts with improving the quality of your website.

A Google PageRank update (a bigger one than earlier this month) has punished large scale blog networks and similar heavy cross linking sites by cutting their PageRank scores. The update also hit several sites that sell (or sold) direct links.

Some of the large sites that got hit:
Engadget.com (both network and selling links)
Joystiq.com (same network)
Space.com (network)
Problogger (network)
SearchEngineGuide.com (selling links?)
SearchEngineJournal.com (selling links?)
NewScientist.com (selling links)
WashingtonPost.com (selling links)
Forbes.com (selling links)

Not only big websites have been hit, I’ve seen multiple examples of small websites that got hit. Some for using TLA, but not every website selling TLA links got hit. Some for selling regular links, but not every website that sells links got hit. Some for being in a network, but, well, you get the point. It’s too much penalties for a hand job, but too little for an algorithmic change. Patrick Altoft has an interesting view on this, I think it’s a mix of all these things.

Andy Beard has listed several other websites that got hit, more coverage about this subject can be found at SearchEngineLand.

But what about the rankings?
Two comments in the enormous amount of discussions caught my attention, Jill Whalen’s comment at Sphinn and g1smd’s comment at SEO Scoop. They immediately focused their attention on where everything is happening: the SERPs.

Most of the websites that got hit didn’t see major changes in Google referers or in rankings in general. But rankings go further than that, especially when you investigate the link selling websites. Let’s take a look at how the advertisers rank.

If you take a closer look at the NewScientist, WashingtonPost.com and Forbes.com, you’ll notice that these websites obviously got hit for selling links. Direct text links in “sponsored links” blocks aren’t that hard to spot.

Forbes.com
Advertiser 1 (virus related keyword) ranks #4 in Google, competition 12,000,000
Advertiser 2 (printing related keyword) ranks #23 in Google, competition 88,000,000
Advertiser 3 (credit card related keyword) ranks #10 in Google, competition 2,000,000
Advertiser 4 (printing related keyword) ranks #4 in Google, competition 2,900,000

WashingtonPost.com
Advertiser 1 (attorney related keyword) ranks #1 in Google, competition 2,000,000
Advertiser 2 (retail related keyword) ranks #8 in Google, competition 3,900,000
Advertiser 3 (drug related keyword) ranks #9 in Google, competition 2,300,000
Advertiser 4 (debt related keyword) ranks #1 in Google, competition 125,000,000

NewScientist.com
Advertiser 1 (camera related keyword) ranks #1 in Google (UK), competition 102,000,000
Advertiser 2 (moving related keyword) ranks #1 in Google, competition 2,000,000
Advertiser 3 (moving related keyword) ranks #25 in Google, competition 58,000,000
Advertiser 4 (tv related keyword) ranks #6 in Google, competition 404,000,000

While these results aren’t stunningly high, some of the rankings of the advertisers on the anchor texts used are quite impressive. On the other hand, not every advertiser ranks for the anchor text they used.

So who got hit then?
This PageRank update seems like yet another example of FUD. The only thing that has changed, is the TBPR. The PR-punished websites don’t see changes in rankings and the text link buyers also rank pretty high in most cases. So, what kind of penalty is this?

The only ones that got hit are PageRank sellers. Their only selling point is PageRank, because they most often have a poor website with crappy backlinks. And with that PageRank sliced from 6 to 3, they have even less to offer to possible advertisers.

And let’s be honest, is that really a bad thing?

Today, I realized, that in stead of writing about When to Stop Your Link Building Activities, I should have been discussing where to start your link building activities first. So let’s discuss an example of really easy-to-access data you can use while starting up your link building campaign.

The starting point of your link building campaign depends on the phase of your website. There are two possible phases where your website can be at; phase 1 and phase 2.

Phase 1: Your website is less than one year old.
Phase 2: Your website is older than one year.

If your website is still in phase one; build content first (and try to create some buzz while you’re at it). While Jim Boykin puts the bar at two years, I tend to believe that it should be possible to target those mid- to high competition keywords when your website is around a year to a year and a half old.

Hopefully, you’re already in phase two. In that case, valuable info that you can use for your link building campaign is closer than you think; it’s in the 404 error page statistics of the Google Webmaster Tools console.

Especially larger websites, or websites that have already gathered a substantial amount of (natural) links, tend to have at least a few URLs that couldn’t be found by Google.

If you let Yahoo’s SiteExplorer check which pages link to these Not Found URLs (thank you Google for not updating your backlink data), you’re not only able to fix a few broken internal links, but it also might show you several websites that link to obsolete or non existing URLs.

Contacting these webmasters and asking them to change the link is like stealing candy from a baby. They have already linked to you and will appreciate it even more if you let them know that you visit their website and show your dedication.

And while your at it, you can also ask them to change the link text slightly by adding a keyword relevant to your web page ;)