Everything you ever wanted to know about Link Juice but were afraid to ask

[Steven at Cross-Pollinate]

Hi everyone.  Hope you're all well and ready for the upcoming holidays and don't mind me reaching out to the group with a mutually beneficial proposal:

I wanted to suggest that those of us not doing so already participate in a link exchange.  For those who want to read the SEO guru Rand Fishkin's insights into Link Juice, what it is and why you want it, check this out:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links

For those who want the cliff notes version - basically, more links increase your page rank, which means that when you, as well as everyone else and their grandmother, has content that is relevant to a search query, the one who gets seen first is the one who wins Google's popularity contest.  Google basically assumes that what others say about you is more important than what you say about yourself.  More links pointing to you, the more popular you and the higher you result.  That's the simple version - the complex version details how this Link Juice varies in so many ways.

Why is this important?  Well, I suppose it depends on what you're trying to achieve with your blog, but data shows that most travel related discovery of content is done through search (rather than social, for example) and therefore our blogs rely on search engines to be seen.  The more they are discoverable, and the more visits we receive, the more valuable they become - either because there's a service for sale somewhere, or for advertising purposes, or simply to have more readers/followers that you can contact at a future date.  I'm pretty convinced that the future of media and PR will be bloggers, so those who have a "name" for themselves will be the next rockstars.

There are many factors that make this practice better/worse, but it's a bit labor intensive to get into it too deep and I don't suggest any of us invest all the time necessary to do it the "right" way, which would mean having the links high up on the page, not in a nav. bar, etc. etc - all a bunch of techie stuff that most of us who just want to write don't want to deal with.  What is important though is that whatever we think our sites are about need to be put in as anchor text.  In sites like wordpress there is a field that isn't seen on the site where you can add a description.  On other sites where this doesn't exist, the description you see ought to contain some useful text.  An aside, if you're blogging and want your pages to be well indexed in search engines, you really ought to be using Wordpress with the Yoast SEO plugin.  There is no comparison to how SEO friendly the wordpress platform is.  If you're not using it, you might want to switch.  Posterous also seems pretty good and IS SO EASY - you can send an email to 1 address and it'll do the rest (pics, videos, everything).  You can also just tell it where your current blog is and it'll import it into posterous for you (I assume wordpress has a similar feature).

For us, for example, listing a link to http://www.cross-pollinate.com/blog or cross-pollinate.com doesn't tell the big G very much.  But the text, "apartments and B&Bs in Rome, Florence, Venice, Paris, Barcelona and London" does.  

So, I suggest that whoever wants to participate, email around your link AND the text you think describes your site in the most useful, relevant way to you.

We have two blogs, one for our hotel, The Beehive, that Linda should hopefully be maintaining more, once a new version of our site is finished (probably in the next week or two) which will be at http://www.the-beehive.com/blog (I think) - my suggestion for anchor text would be - The Beehive Hotel's Rome Blog - or if you felt inclined to link to the site itself (all the cool kids are doing it these days!) it's http://www.the-beehive.com and anything text based that says hotel in Rome would fit.

Our other business, that is kind of my baby, is cross-pollinate.com which does apartment and B&B rentals in Rome, Florence, Venice, Paris, Barcelona and London (and soon coming to Istanbul, Berlin, Madrid and Lisbon).  Think Airbnb, but doing it since before those clowns ever took a trip as far as the 7-11.  Linking to our site is much appreciated but if you want to link just to the blog it's at http://www.cross-pollinate.com/blog - I take the blog pretty seriously so I'm happy to ignore the 'business' side of things if people feel like business is just kind of icky, and prefer to stick to the blog.

I'm happy to add a section to both our blogs that has our recommending blogs for reading and recommended services for travelers, so by all means, send yours my way, along with that important anchor text.  When things are good, we often get over 22k unique visitors a month to each of our sites, so there is some exposure there.  If you have a logo too, I could even try and work that in there somewhere (as pictures are prettier).  We have some banners that are more for owners we work with but if someone wants to use one, more power to you.  Examples and the code to use them is here: https://www.cross-pollinate.com/join/blogger-badge.html

Also, if anyone, especially those just starting out, want to send us a guest blog post, I'd be more than happy to publish it, and the links that point to you from a proper page (rather than a blogroll) have more of that Link Juice.  Plus, we promote our blog through twitter and FB so we try to get everything there read (although we don't have a large following as we came pretty late to the table).  Or if you like the stuff I write and want me to guest blog so you can sit on your laurels and drink eggnog, I'd be willing to do that too, but you have to give me a topic and some parameters to follow or I'll just ramble on (proof of that is now clear).

Hope to hear back from anyone interested.  Take care,

St...@cross-pollinate.com

[Erica]

Thanks- very insightful. 

I am not up to speed with all of this, good to see a breakdown. 

Happy Hanukkah!

Xox e

Sent by iMoi

[in...@antiquatours.com]

Hi Steve,
thank you for your email. I would like to participate and I would be
happy to link the Beehive and your blog to both my blog and out
wesbite at www.antiquatours.com blog at www.tastingrome.blogspot.com
the blog is linked to the website.

I will think of something to write up regarding my website. Even
though I offer tours in Rome I want to really push the wine side of
it, because wine and teaching people about wine is my true passion
even if the Vatican pays the bills.

Sarah

[Steven Brenner]

Hi Sarah,

It should only be a few words - just the keywords that apply the most that others might use in a search to reach you.  Those words "stick" along with your link.  Then what happens is the "bounce rate" is recorded.  This is how often someone lands on your site and leaves immediately without doing anything.  If you have a high bounce rate Google sees this as a sign that those keywords must not really apply if people aren't staying.  Instead, if your bounce rate is low, then you are deemed relevant to that search.

Steve

[Vinoroma]

Ciao everyone,

I would like to know if there is a way people can write emails to just each other or for uninterested people (like me) to opt out of getting follow-up emails to certain topics. Getting a notification to the original post is ok, but i guess there should be a way to stay out of this if one is not interested or the notes are just between two people (as is the case here till now). If anyone knows how i can achieve this thru settings, please let me know!

Have a nice day everyone!

Hande

[Jessica Stewart]

Hi Hande,

Usually with Google Groups you can opt to only view things online or receive only a digest of emails or receive an email every time a message is sent.  I also know the administrator can make the settings so that reply goes back to the individual sender instead of the entire group. Tricks of the trade learned with Context google groups, as we had those problems as well.

Sincerely,

Jessica

[Steven]

Hi everyone. I've set up an area on our blog at Cross-Pollinate of
'blogger friends' and 'friend's services'. I've put some of you
(whose addresses I could remember) on there already. Anyone else
who'd like to be on there, please send me your link.

Steve