April Fools!

However, we have also learned what happens when an overzealous reporter happens upon a piece of “news” that just happens to be published on the first of April and spins it as fact in this day and age of the Internet.

Now, Google is assembling a Google SEO team of approximately 100 employees. The company professes that their intentions are noble. Google wants to set the standard for an industry that outsiders so often criticize. Google SEO promises to use only the most ethical practices to increase a client’s PageRank™, and they promise to do it without adding to the spam glut that currently exists on the Internet. However, the fact remains that Google SEO will be the only SEO agency in the world that can guarantee first page rankings because they are the only company that will have access to the algorithm that dictates it.

Google is putting together an SEO team of approximately 100 employees because it feels like it needs to set the standard in an industry that often gets criticized from the outside. Google SEO will strive to only use the most ethical best practices to increase rankings without adding to the spam glut on the Internet. This implies that Google SEO will become the only search agency in the world that can guarantee first-page rankings because they have total access to the infamous algorithm.

Since I do possess a journalism degree, I’m qualified to say the No. 1 thing I learned in J School is this: “If your mother says she loves you check it out.” Basically, don’t believe anything that a source says – and don’t believe any old story on the Internet that just happens to be published on April 1 with a link to AprilFools.com at the bottom – without first verifying it yourself.

Michael Schwartz

Michael Schwartz is an Internet marketing strategist at Vertical Measures as well as an accomplished reporter, blogger and editor. He covers the link building beat.

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Everyone seems to want a one-way link from an .edu domain.  And why not?  We’ve been told repeatedly about the value of an edu link in helping boost the reputation of a website.  There seems to be a few reasons for this.

First and foremost, .edu sites are perceived as reliable, reputable sites and excellent at providing accurate, current information. These sites also tend to be quite large, with larger schools and universities often having thousands of pages of information available.  Search engines reward size, and that positive influence tends to trickle down to the sites that are linked to them. Finally, a great number of .edu sites are time-honored presences on the web; they’ve been around since the early days of the Internet and have aggressively used their Internet presence.

With so many positives to have an incoming link to your site from an edu site, keep in mind that even these have varying degrees of worth. An incoming link from a professor’s personal page, for instance, would be more valuable than a link coming from a student’s page. You can always buy links, but there are more creative ways to get links that are also more effective – purchased links don’t usually provide as much weight as you’d like them to, and if you can get top quality links at no cost, you’re ahead of the game.

A few good ideas for getting inbound links to your site from edu sites might include:

• A “top 100” list that relates in some way to both your product (say, text books or calculators) and edu sites. A “Top 100 Best Engineering Schools” would be a good example – no school can resist letting people know they’re the best at something.
• Post college sports scores and information on upcoming collegiate events.
• Do a write-up on a particular college or university that touts the advantages of the school or something unique it offers – again, schools like good press, just like everyone else.
• Interview professors for content articles on your site. Most professors will be glad to link from their own site to yours, particularly if they have recently been published and are seeking good “word of mouth.”
• Review books or research done by professors at a college or university. If you sell vitamins and the bio-sciences department of a university is studying the positive effects of vitamins on certain diseases, it’s a great match.
• Populate your site with content that is valuable to students that edu sites might not provide. Calculators are always nice – for instance, a student loan calculator that helps students estimate how long it will take to repay loans. Information on everything from how to do laundry properly to learning to live on a budget can be valuable and may get you links from student resource pages.

Have you created some fascinating link bait that attracts edu linking to your site? Or do you provide content that colleges and universities seem to jump all over? We’d love to hear about it! Just post your success stories hear so that the rest of the link building community can benefit from your experience!

[tags] one way edu links, link bait, edu links, buy links [/tags]

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