Slightly Shady SEO | Blackhat is Back, Baby.

Those of you who have been reading for awhile know my favorite site architecture is the traditional tiered structure (pictured a few lines down).
I’m aware that some of this will be review(the architecture part), but I’m going to put add a level to it later. So don’t sweat it.
The Blackhat Guide version of this is at the bottom.

Introduction
Link Juice flows both internally and externally through a site. Pick any site, and search it’s domain name. what comes up first? Most likely the home page. Why? It has the most internal/external link juice pointed to it. Now, by controlling where our links are dropped, and by controlling how the donated link juice flows internally, we can efficiently get each page devoted to a specific key term ranking, even if they are of varying difficulty.
How do we control this you ask? Well, Google gave us this lovely tool in manipulation. It’s called the no-follow, and it tells Google to not spill your link juice all over the place, allowing us to hone where it gets sent. As much as it might damage your site when used externally, it can benefit us GREATLY when used internally.

The New Perspective
I’ve covered this before in context of speeding indexing. That entry was based around the increasingly expansive scraper sites. Today though, I’m going to concentrate more on the ranking aspect of this technique. How to make certain pages rank highest, how each link type can spread it’s juice, etc. Although it’s similar, I decided today I could write it better. So I am.

The Site Architecture

I’m well aware it’s nothing special. However, it does have some special properties. It allows us to control a significant amount of flow of our linking juice back and forth from the different pages. No-Following pages like contact us, privacy policies, and other such things are important to horde our link juice for the pages that matter. However, that’s not the limit of what we can do with it.

Deciding What Your Most Important Page Type Is
Each site has different requirements for deciding what page you want to rank is. For a lot of commercial products, you may want your homepage to rank highest of all. But let’s say you have a review site. You want your individual pages that HAVE the reviews on them to be the ones ranking. And each probably needs a different amount of link juice to rank where it’s needed. So let’s take a look at how to handle this.

• Making The Homepage Rank
  This is probably the easier of the two strategies. Depending on how much traffic you’re expecting your article/supplement pages to bring in direct from the SERPs. After you’ve exhausted your linking resources for the homepage, start plugging out your articles. Syndicators, comments, pulling a favor or two to get cited in a blog post, you get the idea. BUILD these articles around the idea that they need to gain links, but don’t need to rank worth a shit. Then no-follow the link to everything except your homepage. Your homepage meanwhile, links to NOWHERE else on the site without a no-follow.
  Note: Categories in this case are a one way link to the homepage. All others to and from are no-followed. This is not included in the image.
  Note that in the map on the left, that the red lines are all inbound links from external siets. The blue lines are all the internal links, heading FROM the articles, and TOWARDS the homepage. EVERY single link aside from the ones in blue are no-followed.

• Making The Articles Rank
  Ok, so making the articles rank is initially quite simple. However, the reality of the internet is that not all keywords are equally competitive, and it’s counterproductive to treat them as such. The easiest way to handle this is to have each article link to the others that need more of a boost. This can be done in text, or via a sidebar. Also, for you sketchballs(like myself), this can be automated…let’s take a look. In the next image example, the articles that need to rank for the most competitive terms are going to be red, and the easiest will be green. Like a traffic light. The blue lines in this are ALWAYS one way links from least competitive to most competitive.
  Remember to horde as much as possible into the yellow links, only passing link juice to red ones, and only after they get a split of one in the green.
  Note: It’s not included in the image, but all categories are one way links to the articles. Any link back to the category is nofollowed.

Picking Your Inbound Link Locations
Whew. Finally. We covered the site architecture, and how to handle it’s linking on an internal level. Time to get down to business.

• The Advantages of Each Kind of Link
  • Article Links
    • Links to articles are easiest to get. You can comment, trackback, use social news, or another few tricks I’m sure the backlinks here can think of, without causing suspicion. No matter what, these will probably grow to outnumber the rest of your links.
    • On the downside of article links, there’s no way they can pass as much power back to the homepage as a direct link. If you’re trying to promote your homepage, these can push it up a lot, but are no replacement for direct links.
  • Category Links
    • Unless you’re game for link spamming, these are hard to get. You can probably help it out by dropping an rss feed for each individual category, or OF the categories, and pumping it out to the various RSS syndicators and publishers, letting them do the linking work.
    • The upside of this, is that it can give every single article link a decent bump whenever it gets link juice. Also, it doesn’t appear awkward if you link to dozens of articles.
    • There is much more versatility in deciding what to no-follow or not.
  • Homepage Links
    • The homepage is where any directory/blog comments/citations can gather, and amass the linkjuice to spread to everything else. That makes it a terribly useful place to distribute the link love.

The Blackhat Guide For This Technique
Alright darkies. It’s your turn. So what do blackhats have that make this technique especially valid? We have complete control. We can point as many category links as we need, as many article links, as many whatever links. For the sake of pretending to be organic, no matter what you’re going for, do not link spam out ONLY the homepage, or NEVER the homepage. Both are needed. But concentrate your efforts on certain pages that are struggling a certain amount, then let it rest for a few days while the links take effect. Not only does with this keep you from getting boned by link velocity(links should be dropped at a relatively constant rate, with no sudden dropoffs), but it also means you don’t risk damaging your pages that are already linking well. ESPECIALLY since there should be no live links going from your page NOT ranking well, to your page that IS ranking well.
If it’s within your skill level, try and automate the no-follow switching based on a CURL script that checks how each page is ranking for the desired key term every so often. Too often blackhats forget the value of internal SEO.

No-Following His Way through the Rankings,
-XMCP

P.S: This article was written awhile ago. I have become aware than Andy Beard wrote one that is an excellent supplement to this. Find it right hizzle. He’s quite good at showing different linking algorithms. It’s a bit wordpress centric, but whatever. I am officially in favor of Andy being allowed to trade in his .eu for a .edu

Posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 11:29 am in the category:seo. Comment RSS 2.0 feed. Comment it , or trackback this post.