This URL has 1000+ links from 6 domains.

• angelfire.com 1
• annbrundigestudio.com 20
• digg.com 1
• mythphile.com 25
• squidu.com 952
• squidutils.com 1

(Once again demonstrating the  limitations of social media for SEO, since the links from StumbleUpon, Del.ici.ous. Tagfoot and others don’t show up.)

1000+ backlinks is pretty good, right? Well, yeah, assuming (a) all search engines see the same backlinks as Yahoo Site Explorer (the database SquidUtils uses), and (b) all search engines count those links as relevant. But of course, they don’t.

Checking my Swoosty SEO Tools Firefox Add-on…

(Pagerank 4, not bad, could be better…)

Links according to Google:

• 40, of which 36 are other Squidoo lenses, 4 on my Mom’s blog.

Digg doesn’t show up. That ancient Angelfire site I’ve had since the dawn of the web isn’t listed. More troublingly, my blogs started 8 months (this blog) and 2 months ago don’t count, even though Google indexes their new posts within an hour.

Note that Googling for link:http://www.squidoo.com/lensname may not does not give all the backlinks that Google considers relevant for ranking in search results. I know Google search results occasionally turn up SquidU posts, so it’s seeing those signature links. [EDIT: Fluff explains why Google's link: search doesn't show all the links Google knows about.]

But this test is a sobering wake-up call that using Yahoo tools to count backlinks for Google optimization purposes is like using a German dictionary to translate a French menu.

Okay, it’s no secret that I am better at on-page SEO than backlink-building. But my “Free Web Graphics” lens (and the blogs mentioning it) are less than a year old. How about…

Test #2: A More Established Lens

Ancient Greece Odyssey is a less-searched topic, but it’s been around since May 2007. It’s got pagerank 5 instead of 4, for what little that is worth.

SquidUtils backlink checker:

• This URL has 595 links from 64 domains.

That’s half the number of links, but 10 times the number of different domains.

Google link checker:

• 28 links, of which only TWO are from non-Squidoo pages, but they’re my older blogs which are relevant to the lens topic. Surprisingly, one of those links was from Livejournal, which I don’t often hear of as a good blogging platform for SEO purposes, whereas only my older WordPress blogs showed up (the ones 2 and 8 months old didn’t, though Google indexes new posts on them promptly).

Among the Squidoo pages that Google’s link: search turned up as links pointing to my lens, I notice a few things:

• Some but not all of my lenses turn up. I am stymied as to which lenses get chosen — they’re not all highly-ranked, they don’t all many backlinks, and at least one of them is old, stale, un-trafficked, and hasn’t changed much since 2007. Hm.
• Lenses with links to my lenses in Plexos did not turn up. I wonder whether Google demotes big lists o’ links.
• Lenses with regular updates tend to get listed. If you haven’t built a “Latest Ten Lenses” lens, do it now.
• The Squidoo tag page for the PRIMARY TAG was listed.
• Other Lensmaster profiles with Ancient Greece Odyssey listed FIRST under Favorites turn up.  Checking Webconf’s Spider Simulator,  it looks like Google may be giving extra love to the first link on a webpage after the header links.

Edited due to comments: As Fluff points out, just two examples isn’t a big enough sample size to let us draw any sweeping conclusions. And the link: search delimiter doesn’t tell us which links Google recognizes as backlinks for SEO; it just shows us “here are some pages that link to yours”.

But it does at least suggest that a good primary tag and links from other Squidoo lenses may help get your lens seen by Google. When you’re looking for places to build links to your lenses, I would start with lensrolling, featured lens modules, careful choice of the primary tag, and embedding links to your new lens  in the body text of your other lenses.

There is a powerful backlink source hidden right in plain sight: your Squidoo lensmaster bio.

Your “About Me” bio includes links to your top ten lenses in terms of lensrank, plus any links you may have hand-typed within your Bio. For instance, if you click the “More” link in my Default Lensmaster Bio  that shows up in the upper righthand of EVERY ONE of my Squidoo lenses, you get a popup that says:

Part-time Latin tutor, art history instructor, artist and writer puttering away at a PhD in mythology and depth psychology.

My lenses currently include art, gifts and musings related to ancient Greece – Ancient Greece Odyssey and my Toyota Prius, just because I keep having to answer the question –  “Yes, I Love My Hybrid Car!”

Greekgeek’s Pages

• Ancient Greece Odyssey: A Traveler’s Journal
• Free Web Graphics: Where to Get Them (Legally!)
• SquidU’s Lensmaster Lounge: Help for New Squids
• Squidoo SEO: Help Search Engines Send Traffic to You
• Squidoo Tips: Building Web Traffic
• Convert Your Prius to a Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV)
• Make a Fancy Table of Contents
• Basic Kite Making: How to Build a Pyramid Kite
• The Care and Feeding of Apostrophes
• Sparta, The Mean Kitty of YouTube

See all of Greekgeek’s pages

ALL of those links are embedded in EVERY single one of my lenses. So those count as backlinks. LOTS of backlinks. With 110 lenses, that means that those lenses all get 110 backlinks!  So be sure to include links to some lenses you want to promote in your default bio. Then rejoice that all your lenses are giving a small SEO boost to your ten highest-ranked lenses…automatically!

But WAIT! Back up. See what I said back there? Add a Featured Lenses module to your other quizzes. Or any sort of links to your lenses on related topics!

I think this could be very powerful for SEO. I didn’t figure out the system until lens #3, but I soon realized there’s an SEO trick staring us in the face.

1. Identify a keyword on one of your popular lenses
2. Make a Squidoo Quiz TARGETING that keyword, with the keyword in the lens title, lens image filename, and module titles
3. LINK back to your popular lens with the keyword in the anchor text
4. Rinse, repeat!

This is something like the blog effect. Google tends to like backlinks from fresh content, so links from blog posts are great for SEO. SquidQuizzes are so quick and easy to build you can do one or two an hour. No, it’s not as fast as submitting to random directories, but how much weight does Google really place on StumbleUpon entries (which are nofollow) or Digg entries (which are cloaked behind a Diggbar)? The keywords on the SquidQuiz lens demonstrate that it’s relevant to your keywords, and the link then passes that keyword-SEO juice back to the mother lens.

So what do you think? I’m going to give it a try.

Tonight I have made:

• Greek Mythology Trivia Quiz
• Greek Mythology Quiz: Athena
• Greek Mythology Quiz: Apollo

I’m going to make a few more, then create a navigator bar in the introduction of each module linking them all together. I’ll add a Featured Lenses module at the bottom of each lens reminding visitors of the other lenses.

Linkbuilding is a necessary part of SEO, but people waste so much time building links on sites that are nofollow or not particularly relevant to their content, thus passing little or no backlink value. How about linkbuilding by building Squidoo lenses, each of which promotes all the other lenses it links to AND earns you a royalty? Lazy Lensmaster SEO says: YES!

I got the same advice. I bought into it. But does social media/social networking really benefit SEO (search engine optimization)?

Hey, let me be social and ask you, the readers!

Now, let me give you my answer…

Answer: Tagfoot, as far as I can tell, is one of the few social media sites that benefits SEO.

It’s time for me to remind you of that social media links and SEO rant by Michael Martinez of SEO-Theory (you should really read the whole post to understand the context):

“Social media link building is a complete waste of time from a search engine optimization point of view. Even if you know of social media sites that haven’t yet implemented nofollow you don’t know how long that gravy will continue to taste good. Google is chasing your sorry social media linking profile and you need a better plan than that.”  —“Real Advice from Bad SEOs”

How do we know he’s right? How do we know which social networking links still pass the “backlink gravy”?

We need more than just a NoDoFollow Firefox plugin, although that’s a start.

That tells us that links on StumbleUpon, Del.ici.ous, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook are set NoFollow.

NoFollow means that search engines won’t follow or index those links. So for SEO purposes, those links are invisible! Links on those sites won’t boost your webpage’s position in search engine results one jot.

LinkedIn? It depends. The “Website” listed in your profile is Follow, the “Additional Information” section, including “My Websites”, is NoFollow. So, one link from a not-particularly-relevant website with no pagerank. Whoopie.

Reddit? Another “It depends.” Submitted URLs start out Nofollow and may be promoted to Follow if enough people up-vote them. But Reddit members react like antibodies when they sense self-promotion– they will BURY you.

Digg? Ah yes, the holy grail of linkspam. Nevermind that you can get your account suspended for self-promotion on Digg. Links on Digg are Follow, right? Linkbuild me, baby! I can always open a new account!

Except now Digg has implemented an ingenious way of redirecting all the SEO benefit to itself for links submitted to Digg. See The Truth about Digg’s Diggbar, The Digg Toolbar Exposed or 5 Reasons Diggbar Sucks for more information. (In light of their findings, I’ve added a Frame Free WordPress plug-in to block Diggbar from this blog. Nice PR disaster, Digg.)

Tagfoot is the only social networking I’ve found whose bookmarks are set Follow, whose robots.txt file doesn’t block spiders, and which doesn’t ban users for self-promotion. But before you all run out to spam Tagfoot, remember that Tagfoot members will block you or flag you as a spammer if you abuse the system. [[UPDATE June 9, 2009: Tagfoot has set its links to NoFollow for ordinary users, DoFollow for special members. See this post for more info.]]

So, am I saying you should give up on using social networking to promote your (quality!) webpages?

No. My point is that social media sites are lousy for search engine optimization– getting search engines to send you traffic. So don’t bother with SEO tactics on social media sites. When participating in social networking, optimize for humans!

Post a viral video on YouTube or a good photograph on Flickr with a link back to your website, and members of those sites may click on the link, even if search engine spiders ignore it.

Likewise, if you participate in a social media community, recommend good websites, and earn a following, your followers will follow your links even if search engines don’t.

That means investing time in meaningful participation on social networking sites. Interact with people. React to people. Carry on conversations. Read and rate what others are linking to. Retweet. Etc. You can’t cheat with social networking — you have to be social.

You may find that you’d prefer to sink more effort into passive forms of traffic generation — e.g. keyword optimization — which continue to work when you’re busy doing other stuff. With blogs, forums, and social networking, as soon as you stop participating, most of the traffic dies away.

Which brings me back to the point I keep making about building web traffic with social media: join social networking communities if you enjoy being active in online communities! Getting visitor traffic from followers is a secondary return on your (time) investment. Your primary ROI for social networking sites is the enjoyment and satisfaction of social networking.

These are the kind of visitors you want most: a targeted audience who will be more likely to click your links, or even your sales modules, because they’re interested in what your lens is about.

Note that it’s against Flickr’s terms of service to use their site to store photos that are simply graphical elements of webpages (titles, banners, buttons), or items you’re trying to sell. But this is an indirect way of drawing in a target audience who may click on your links or products.

Linkbait — making something so compelling, outrageous, attractive or argument-inducing that people are liable to click on the link — is harder. You can’t count on any picture or image going viral, and most don’t. However, if one ever does, it could bring in traffic by the thousands.

Here’s a linkbait I’d been planning to make for a while.

The key is that I didn’t make it just for linkbait. I’ve been wanting to show off my cat’s silly dance for 12 years, ever since she first started amusing me and visitors! But “funny cat videos” — the best ones — tend to enjoy widespread circulation. I included the link in the video itself, just in case people start replicating and distributing it (they shouldn’t, but that’s often what happens with viral videos).

I’ve also posted the raw URL near the top of the video description, where it shows up on YouTube in the video’s sidebar above the “More…” link. I’m already getting some traffic from there. Cool slideshows and fun videos can thus be embedded on your lens, and drive traffic to your lens.

Links are the currency of the World Wide Web.

Obviously, links are no substitute for money. Yet links perform several vital functions, and are in effect a virtual commodity. They promote, recommend, and connect all parts of the World Wide Web. While most people think of links as a way to navigate the web or as a tool for promoting their websites, links can be used as a simple form of payment or exchange for services.

Links: The Threads of the World Wide Web

The idea of links existed before the web. In the eighties, the concept of “hyperlinks,” textual links between files and documents, was revolutionizing computing. In 1989, Dr Tim Berners-Lee of CERN came up with a system for connecting documents uploaded to the internet, and the World Wide Web was born.

Links are the threads of the World Wide Web. They continue to serve as the fundamental means of all web navigation. Like a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it, a webpage with no links to it exists in limbo. No one can find it unless they already know its exact web address. (That’s what the internet was like before the web.)

Links not only help people find webpages. They help search engines find webpages, by sending out “bots,” “spiders,” or mini-programs, to follow the web of links and make road maps of the web. Millions of these searchbots are crawling the network of links all the time, since new links between webpages are constantly being forged.

Links As a Form of Recommendation

At the dawn of the web, users began building index pages of their bookmarks, keeping track of websites they liked to visit. For example, here’s an index of Egypt-related websites I maintained from 1994-1998. Yahoo began this way; I actually remember when it was a page of links. These index pages were the forerunners of modern social bookmarking sites.

At first, these links were personal recommendations. They could not be bought — for one thing, profit-making and commercial enterprise were originally barred from the internet!

A few years into the web, early search engines began counting the number of links to a website as a sign of its authority and worth. They used that to decide which webpages to list first in searches.

Once this was known, people began exploiting the promotional power of links. Link exchanges and webrings blossomed. Once the internet was opened to commercial development, paid link directories became big business.

The Death and Rebirth of Links As Recommendation

Linkbuilding caused a problem which continues to plague the web this day: how to distinguish between “natural” links (links to connect to relevant information, links which are purely personal recommendations) and “artificial” links (links to promote one’s own websites or that of a paying customer).

The idea of a link as a vote, a form of recommendation, belongs to the web of the 1990s. Yet the versatility of Web 2.0, dynamic pages allowing visitors to submit content and interact with other web users, makes new forms of link-building and recommendation (rating, voting, social bookmarking, sharing) possible.

How do search engines tell “natural” from “artificial” links? How do social networking sites distinguish personal recommendation from self-promotion? How do web users sift through all the “click here!” links to find what they really want to find? In short, how can links still serve their original function as pathways for navigating the web?

Judging and Using Links

Search engines now measure many other factors, including the vocabulary of webpages in key areas like titles and image names, to decide a website’s relevance and value. Search engines keep their algorithms private to discourage gaming the system, and penalize websites that use “black hat” methods. Even a big corporation like BMW gets blacklisted and dropped from search results if it engages in these activities.

There’s some controversy about the control Google has over the web, since its dominance of the search market largely determines website usage, and since its Adsense program is a form of paid links. But that’s a topic for another article.

Social media sites use several strategies to handle the artificial versus natural links problem. Some have a paid advertising program, and block members found to be self-promoting. Some allow linkbuilding for self-promotion but make it transparent, leaving it to users to judge which linkbuilders are promoting pages with genuine content. Most social media sites invite users to vote on submitted links, allowing members to penalize or reward sites depending on their quality.

Black hat practices have sprung up to buy votes, but the size of large social media sites tends to minimize the impact of virtual ballot stuffing.Individual users are also more aware of the promotional use of links. Aggressive linking practices are rejected with the same vehemence and disgust as telemarketing (though some gullible victims fall prey to both).

Therefore, savvy linkbuilders provide content, resources and quality in order to “earn” clicks, search engine placement, and social recommendations. They employ techniques like keyword optimization, slick web design and graphics, just as book publishers pay attention to cover art, but content is still king. Wise linkbuilders also realize that link placement matters: a genuine recommendation or review helps, whereas spamming link directories, guestbooks, forums and social sites often results in search engine penalties and user rejection.

Copyright and the Web

When the printing press made mass distribution of writing and images feasible, copyright was invented to give authors and artists’ control over the use of their work, credit for their work, and a way to earn money for their work.

The web’s enormous potential stems from how it fosters instant worldwide communication and distribution of content. This has quickly led to new forms of collaboration, creativity, research, learning, news reporting, commentary, understanding and discovery that were simply impossible before. Many of these activities are limited by traditional copyright laws, which dictate where and how a picture or piece of writing may be published. Unless we expand the copyright laws governing satire and fair use, the incredible renaissance we’re seeing will leave copyright law behind.

There are many examples of how these copyright violations actually benefit the copyright holders.

For example, a common practice on YouTube is to upload “fan videos” or “remixes,” music videos splicing favorite scenes from TV shows, movies or video games synchronized to a popular song or soundtrack. On the one hand, this activity clearly violates copyright. On the other hand, it’s free advertising of the most effective kind: an unsolicited endorsement. I can vouch for its effectiveness: most of the music I’ve bought in the last few years comes from hearing a piece of music on a YouTube video and immediately going to iTunes to purchase the song, or sometimes an entire album.

YouTube has discovered how remixes can be turned from piracy to profit for license holders. They now have a library of music which may be added to videos, and any video using one features a link to purchase the song from a legal music downloading site. That doesn’t help the copyright holders of the video track, but similar arrangements should be possible.

Another example is the onset of fan-produced original works in partial collaboration with authors, artists, or members of an original production team. The New York Times reported last year on several fan-made Star Trek movies being released online, some of them in collaboration with series actors or team members. Fansites like these promote a franchise and often have a shop or Amazon links selling items for the original publisher or franchise, for which they earn a small commission.

Copyright 2.0: Links As Copyright For the 21st Century

These examples suggest a model for solving copyright problems on the web: through links. If we cede one of the three rights that copyright was designed to protect — control over usage — we can use links to gain through the other two rights — credit for our work, and profit from our work.

Links give credit the author or source. This solves the issue of plagiarism (unattributed use of work) but not profit for the copyright holder.

Links can provide profit in three ways: by promoting/marketing a work, by direct sales of that work (assuming the online shop passes part of the profits back to the copyright holder), and by sending traffic to a copyright holder’s website, which can either sell work or earn money through paid ads, the webpage equivalent advertisements in newspapers and magazines.

It’s important to make sure the copyright holder retains the benefits of “direct sales”. The web like the printing press steals from authors and copyright holders when it’s used to sell copies of the original product without giving money to the original maker or copyright holder. I think this can be solved as follows. Derivative works (remixes, mashups) should require credit and a link back to the original product and (if possible) links to the website where the original may be purchased. Ditto for webpages that reuse graphics or other embedded content as a portion of an original article or mashup. But it should remain illegal to produce and sell the original product without permission; the publisher, producer, or license holder is the only one who may do that.

The one thing that linking does not solve is usage rights. You don’t want people using your material to promote things you hate. This could be solved by making illegal to reuse material for pornographic purposes, to promote hate speech, or to make it appear that the original copyright holder is actively endorsing a product or political view, unless one has written permission.

These ideas are the half-assed opinions of someone who’s been watching the internet and web grow and evolve for twenty years. This proposal would need refinement by legal experts before it is workable. But I think it might actually work. Whereas if copyright laws are not redefined in the next ten years, I think the web may leave them behind as obsolete and unworkable, like Prohibition (the Constitutional Amendment banning sale of liquor) in 1920s America.

— E. Brundige