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Advanced Link Building Strategies for Affiliate Sites Presentation

I wasn’t intending to publish this presentation online because some of the content is the sort of thing best kept private. However it seems that the slides are already live on slideshare and various other places so I guess the secret stuff won’t be secret for much longer. :)

The presentation is below. Any questions please ask in the comments.

tl;dr – brand links are big.

This was the basic version. I will be doing a more advanced version for the SEOmoz Pro Seminar in a couple of weeks time.

BY Patrick Altoft AT 12:12pm ON Friday, 15 October 2010

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3 and has worked in the SEO industry for over 10 years. With experience across some of the worlds largest brands as well as startup businesses Patrick is well known in the industry and speaks regularly at the major SEO conferences and events. Follow Patrick on Twitter or Google+

Comments

  • http://www.alexdumitru.com Alex Dumitru

    This is the best presentation I’ve ever seen. I wish I was there.

  • Daniel

    I’m confused on Brand Authority and Domain Authority. I wish I could go to the conference to listen to you explain all the slides.
    If I need to work on my Brand Authority what does that mean?

  • http://www.andthenhesaid.com Andy

    Many thanks for releasing this… I didn’t have the budget for the expo and was cursing not being able to go to this.

    May well send you an email, as invited.

  • http://www.gadgetheaven.co.uk gadget

    I thoroughly enjoyed your presentation, took loads of notes but probably missed some stuff so I am very grateful you’ve put this online.

  • http://www.blogstorm.co.uk Patrick Altoft

    Brand authority is the number you get when you add up the Page or Domain Authority (via SEOmoz data) of all the links with your brand name as the anchor text.

  • Daniel

    Thanks Patrick
    Let me see if I have this right.

    Take the top 20 results for a keyword.
    Put the url into OSE.com with the filters you showed.
    Export CSV
    (repeat for all 20 results)
    Combine CSV’s into one “Master List”
    Sort by Page Authority
    Research how the competition got a link and try to duplicate for my own site.

    Is that correct?

  • http://www.theinternetbusinesscoach.co.uk dee oneal

    This is one of the best presentation, however I still have questions in mind about it. Well, maybe if we attend the conference we can understand more about it but overall you presented it well and I thank you for that.

  • Janusz

    There are some fresh and interesting observations on linking that I haven’t seen before. Thanks a lot Patrick! I wish I were on the A4U it seems it was as good as the previous years – but it probably cannot beat affiliate beach life in Ecuador ;)

  • Jeremy Kaiser

    Patrick,

    Your presentation answers perfectly some ongoing debates about link building such as quantity vs quality, how some websites are still not penalized ?, ranking are only about links… I have now few SEO years of experience in the gambling industry (one of the most competitive) and I have the evidences that you right (especially slide 36).

    Thanks a lot for this presentation!
    J

  • http://www.blogstorm.co.uk Patrick Altoft

    Daniel – Yes that’s pretty much it.

  • http://seoptimizacija.com/ SEoptimizacija

    Great presentation. I’m shore there will be lots of different tips to gain more brend authority in future, since this seams like a big change this year.

  • Simon

    Great presentation Patrick.

    I’m particularly interested by this part ‘Non brands are using branded anchor text links to make Google believe they are brands’.

    Could you clarify this for me, or perhaps dumb it down a bit might be more apt.

    Say I’m promoting luggage, for example. Targeting the medium to long tail, this is my keyword: ‘Samsonite Bright Lites 20″ Spinner’. This is the exact keyword, and say I get that exact phrase as my anchor. I’m not sure if that would work too well? I’m using affiliate sites that simply can’t better the likes of Amazon and the advertisers site in terms of brand recognition so I’m not sure what I can do with my anchor text here.

    I’d appreciate you pointing it out to me if possible. I’ll go sit in the corner with my dunce hat!

  • Daniel

    @Simon: I believe “brand” links are just links with your domain name/url as anchor from authority sites in your neighborhood (or within walking distance). You need to get a lot of those to build your site’s authority, when you have a good amount of authority (SeoMoz DA of around 70), you should only need a few ‘Samsonite Bright Lites 20″ Spinner’ links to rank.

  • N3O

    I find the part about brand authority interesting, I have never heard of it before. But I have a couple of questions:

    -How does Google differentiate what is a brand and what is a keyword? What if the brand is also a keyword, for example- cheaptickets.com, their brand name is Cheap Tickets which is also a keyword.

    -Taking Simon’s Samsonite affiliate website for example, suppose he named his website Luggage4less and got tons of backlinks with the anchor text “Luggage4less” would that constitute as brand links? And is that what you mean by ‘Non brands are using branded anchor text links to make Google believe they are brands’?

  • http://www.gadgetheaven.co.uk gadget

    @Patrick

    Given the fact that Carphone Warehouse appears #1 for the term ‘mobile phones’, which does not appear in their domain, and hardly appears in their anchor text, what drives them to #1?

    Is it the tag, the meta description (picking up Dave Naylor’s reference in another session), on-page text on the home page or the overall use of that phrase throughout the site?

    Thus, given that keyword anchor is dead, what should we be focusing on instead?

    Thanks

  • http://jorge-delgado.com/blog Jorge Delgado

    awesome thanks for sharing the presentation!
    Jorge

  • N3O

    That’s what this presentation talks about, that you need to build brand authority by building links with anchor text as your brand name, once you have enough authority just few backlinks with the anchor text as the keyword you want to rank for is good enough to get you to rank higher.

    In your example, more than 60% of the links have the anchor text “Carphone Warehouse” or a similar variant which is the brand and less than 5% have the keyword “mobile phones”.

  • http://www.gadget-blog.co.uk gadget

    It would be worthwhile looking at the search results for mobile phones today as an extension of this study. It may be because I am in the London area but the results show extracts from Google Places, including star reviews, and also other review site snippets like qype etc.

  • http://www.eliveinfo.com Elive

    Thanks for sharing this secret this was really useful post, But one thing I don’t understand is that how to rank only with on page factors.

  • http://www.jacvapour.com Jim

    The brand authority theory is really interesting, Patrick. I’ve a few questions for you. 1. Do you include internal links for the purpose of counting anchor text? 2. Do you count URL links as brand links? And most importantly, 3. how are you counting the total Page Authority or Domain Authority? I’m assuming its an average figure since the total could be well into the thousands, and your example shows a percentage (0-100). Is that right? Feedback appreciated.

  • http://www.blogstorm.co.uk Patrick Altoft

    Hi Jim, we don’t include interna links in our analysis and yes we do count URL links as brand links. Yes we take the average PA & DA

  • http://www.workingvagabond.com Rodders

    Really informative presentation, thanks for that. I was also a bit confused about what you meant by brand authority. Perhaps you can elaborate a little for some of us who are a bit slow on the uptake.

  • http://www.blogstorm.co.uk Patrick Altoft

    Hi Rodders, brand authority is the sum of the Domain Authority (SEOMoz) across all links that have brand anchor text.

  • http://veba-software.com/blog/ Justin

    Hello,

    I’m glad to find an article on link building strategies in your website.

    I share your view on this and I’d like to share a proven strategy that could further enhance your marketing campaign using followups. I wrote something about it in my blog and if you are interested, you can visit it.

    I wish you can drop by and see for yourself.

    Have a good day.

    Justin

  • http://www.pariuri24.com Pariuri24

    A very interesting presentation and that information about having a brand authority first is very new to me, to obtain brand links it is much easier than links with keywords.

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