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DISCLAIMER: This article refers to the original use of “the SEO method” as established in 2006 and 2007 on the SEO Theory blog, not a marketing program that has been sold on the Internet by that name since 2008. Neither Visible Technologies nor I endorse the marketing program, as we have no connection to it.

The SEO method is pretty simple: You experiment. You evaluate. You adjust.

I’ll admit that I am disappointed in how poorly so many people seem to understand the experiment part. Despite recent brouhahas over experimental methodologies and reporting flaws, most people in the SEO community (I am tempted to say “all”) experiment with search results quite often. Every time you publish new content, every time you place a new link, you are being experimental.

The SEO method does not require that you compile normalized statistical measurements and examine derivative scores on a Six Sigma ruler. The SEO method is nothing more than an extension of the scientific method, which calls for an organized approach to studying phenomena.

The SEO method calls for experimentation first — which can be either informal (as most of us do it) or formal, as only some of us do it (and then probably only occasionally). The formal experimentation must conform to the scientific method if it is to be credibly proposed. The scientific method begins with a question such as “does X produce Y?” or “what if X does Y?” These questions must lead to research, study, observation and analysis.

Only after you have observed and analyzed can you really postulate a good hypothesis. People in the SEO industry just seem to leap over the first three steps very quickly. They ask questions but they ask those questions poorly. The scientific method tolerates simple questions (why do apples fall to the ground?) but when you prequalify the question with unattested assertions, you’re trying to ask a question with an obvious answer (if links help improve search results, is search engine optimization all about links?).

Your hypothesis must be simple enough (or its complexity supported by established scientific knowledge) that it can be tested independently of anything you say or do. Let’s take PageRank Sculpting, for example. We can begin with the question, “Is it possible to manage the flow of PageRank about a site with precision, such that the site obtains some benefit not evident in unmanaged PageRank flow?”

That question simply asks if sculpting PageRank is even possible. If there is no observable benefit, then it’s not possible. That is, if you achieve nothing with the sculpting, then you’re just spinning your wheels — you’re not accomplishing anything.

We can do the observation and analysis pretty easily in several ways. For example, Matt Cutts said that Google sculpted PageRank on YouTube by managing how content was linked to (they even used “rel=’nofollow’”). Observe, however, that it was Google who managed the flow of PageRank around its own site — Google, which alone of all among us has the ability to track and measure PageRank.

Based on that observation, one must reasonably conclude that it is not possible for anyone outside of Google to manage the flow of PageRank through a Website with any precision.

Of course, as has been noted by many, we have (for years) had to observe the predicted effects of black holes in order to see that they are there — as the theory of black holes says we would be unable to see them. Ironically, we can now see black holes so that’s no longer a good metaphor for how to detect the flow of PageRank around a Website.

Science has learned to detect and observe black holes by studying spectra of energy that we mere humans cannot perceive. PageRank flow, however, is more complex than a black hole. Here is why: Google updates its internal PageRank assignments more frequently than the few times a year that it publishes its Toolbar derivative PR date.

And that is all anyone outside of Google can say with any reasonable credibility (except for ex-Googlers who have steadfastly remained silent on the details of Google’s PageRank machinations).

In other words, we don’t know how Google updates the internal PageRank data for individual pages, Websites, sub-domains, domains, communities, vectors, victors, and other essential parts of the Web which Google has indexed. Does a page in the Supplemental Index accrue PageRank? Does PageRank for one page on a site flow to its siblings immediately or are the links queued for processing further on down the road?

Have you ever considered the possibility that Google might not evaluate the PageRank for every page on a site at the same time?

Given so little knowledge and so many unanswered questions, we cannot claim to have observed much and our analysis leaves us wanting more. Hence, we’re unable to create any testable hypotheses regarding the management of PageRank flow around Websites. That is, until you can predict when a page’s PageRank is modified by Google you cannot devise a scheme for effectively managing the flow of PageRank.

Let me demonstrate quickly: Let’s say you have a 10-page Website. You use your root page to link to the other 9 pages, and they all link to each other in groups of 3. If you cannot track and measure PageRank you can at least track and measure the internal anchor text. So let each of the 9 pages use unique anchor text to link to its siblings. They should all also use unique anchor text to link to the root document. And the root document should link to each of its 9 children with unique anchor text.

In all, you’ll have 36 links with unique anchor text.

You cannot begin your PageRank sculpting test until you confirm that all 10 pages appear for all 36 unique expressions in Google’s index. These expressions, being unique, can only appear once — in link anchor text — and nowhere else.

Now, there is no guarantee that Google will pass PageRank if it passes anchor text (and vice versa). It’s a leap of faith we have to make — an assumption that must be noted in the conditions of the test — that we’re treating passed anchor text as an indication that PageRank is being passed from document to document.

What does it take to get a 10-page Website to appear in Google’s index under these conditions? If you only link to the root URL once from some established site, will that be enough? Let’s assume for the sake of discussion (not as a condition of the experiment) that we decide we need 5 links from trusted, aged sites to get all 10 pages indexed for 36 anchor expressions. Now we can start fiddling with our PageRank.

For example, what happens if you take one group of 3 pages and add an extra link on each page to another group? So group (A..B..C) links to group (D..E..F) such that A links to D, B links to E, and C links to F. Now D,E,F all have 1 additional link and anchor text passing to them. What happens in Google’s index to the original 36 listings?

But here’s a complication that the setup for the test did not take into consideration: what if Google devalues or deindexes one or more of those links pointing to the root URL of the domain? You can’t know when that happens for sure, although you can set up some controls to help you see when links may lose value (have those pages point to other sites with unique anchor text).

Here’s another complication: what if Google decides to recrawl only part of your test Website? What happens to the other pages’ standing within the search index?

It is impossible to stabilize the backlink profile for a Website. You can keep building links but if you don’t know how much PageRank is being passed to a Website you have no way of controlling where the peanut butter is being spread.

It is equally impossible to determine from an outside perspective how frequently Google will recrawl each page on a Website. Yes, you can watch your server logs for fetches from Googlebot — but what timeframe do you use? 1 day? 1 week? 1 month? 1 year? If you don’t know how much time to allot for a complete cycle of recrawling, you have no way to establish a window for estimating the flow of PageRank.

You can arbitrarily choose a multi-month period — many people do just that — but that multi-month period may encompass several recalculations of PageRank for only parts of your site. Remember: you have no way of knowing what the PageRank is or how often it is recomputed.

You can, of course, try to observe when your pages stop appearing for unique anchor text during your multi-month period. Knowing this, you could attempt to correlate such losses of anchor text with drops from the index, changes in cache value, and other factors that may indicate that Google has changed how it looks at your pages.

But here’s the problem with that: in the midst of testing your hypothesis that you can sculpt PageRank, you’ve now found yourself needing to form (and test) a hypothesis about when PageRank changes. And that shows that the experiment as proposed is flawed because you cannot isolate the one factor you’re trying to test.

So what you really need to do, before you embrace the ambitious goal of proving that PageRank can be sculpted, is to craft a solid method for tracking and measuring PageRank.

And that is not a Catch-22. You can set up a measurement that tells you something about how a search engine evaluates a Webpage. All you have to do is document the changes that the search engine reports to you for each Web document, and note the events that precede and follow the changes.

The key principle is to establish that change in how the search engine treats Web documents is uniform and predictable. Once you achieve predictability you can look for correlations with the passing of anchor text. When you can isolate a mode of change that correlates with the passing of anchor text you have a reasonable mechanism for tracking and measuring a pseudo-PageRank.

As long as it’s consistent, your pseudo-PageRank will be good enough for your further testing of PageRank-centric hypotheses. After all, if you ever get the ability to track and measure real PageRank you can just plug that into your tests. Your previous work will help you predict what should happen on the basis of the changes in PageRank flow.

So let us now take our pseudo-PageRank and pass it around our Website. We add links, we subtract links. On the basis of our previous work we can now predict with precision what should happen. If our predictions turn out to be wrong there are two possible explanations: either our pseudo-PageRank is not as predictable as we had hoped OR we are not sculpting PageRank.

Random stuff happens all the time, so you need to test this experiment in as many different ways as possible. Let’s say you set up 100 Websites to test this model. And let’s boldly assume that you observe the same results across all 100 sites.

You still haven’t shown that you can sculpt PageRank. Why? Because your link profiles are not stable. In fact, your search engine is not stable. Google claims to make about 10 algorithmic changes per week. We cannot assume that all those changes have anything to do with PageRank, link anchor text, or how documents are indexed. But we do know that these changes may affect what we see in the search results.

In other words, our observations cannot be trusted. And if our observations cannot be trusted our predictions are not going to be reliable. If our predictions are not reliable, then what does it mean if we predicted changes in anchor text-based rankings 100 times and the predictions were all accurate? It means that we overlooked something.

Too much consistency burns the experiment. Consistent systemic behavior cannot occur within any dynamic structure. If during all these months of changing Web sites and not changing Web sites you don’t get some erratic results, either Google has stopped changing stuff or your experiment is flawed.

So we cannot assume for the sake of discussion that all 100 Websites perform as predicted — not every time. There have to be some instances where the predictions come true. Otherwise we’re allowing something we haven’t identified to influence the search results we’re trying to influence.

Albert Einstein is credited with having said the equivalent of “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.”

Scientists understand that you cannot prove that Sculpting PageRank works. Google can prove it because Google owns the search index and controls PageRank. Google can arbitrarily set PageRank any way it wants. On the basis of Google’s authority we can reasonably say that PageRank Sculpting works — but that is all we can say.

No one outside of Google can credibly show that they are sculpting PageRank. You don’t have enough information to manage the flow of PageRank with precision. But maybe you don’t need to go that far. After all, given a large enough Website you should be able to invoke the economies of scale.

That is, if you do things often enough and efficiently enough, you should be able to channel your PageRank through the sheer weight of volumes of links. Now, the intuitive argument against PageRank sculpting is that, if you want to channel more PageRank to any particular page you should just link to it from more pages. The intuitive argument for PageRank sculpting is that if you want to make a page seem less important then you should remove links pointing to it — that is, remove PageRank-passing links. Of course, you want visitors to still be able to find the document.

That is the fundamental flaw in PageRank sculpting. It hypocritically argues that certain pages are not important and yet insists that they be linked to for the user’s benefit. The search engines are trying to use PageRank-like values to figure out what is most important to people, not to rankings.

Let’s go back to our original Website. Instead of using only 10 pages we’ll use 10 million pages. Now let’s say we want page 900,000 — a deep leaf-node page — to become as important as the root URL. How do we do that? First, we have all 999,999 other pages on the site link to page 900,000. Second, we obtain as many inbound links for page 900,000 as for the root URL (page 1).

Are we channeling PageRank to a specific page? Yes.

Are we doing this with precision? No.

Can we refine the link placements so that the channeling becomes more efficient? Yes. We can arbitrarily remove groups of links from page 900,000’s backlink profile. But here’s the rub: What do we mean by “as important as the root URL”?

People in the SEO industry talk about PageRank as if it actually means something but they have never figured out what, exactly, it means. Ask most SEOs today what PageRank represents to them and they’ll likely say something about trust and authority. But what are trust and authority?

Some people also talk about managing crawl but crawl, though influenced by PageRank, is affected by other factors (under the Webmaster’s control). So crawl is not a good indicator of PageRank-based value.

In short, we have no real way of knowing what PageRank does for us. We know it seems to determine which pages are placed in the Main Web Index. We also know that it (originally was used to) weight(s) the Information Retrieval score that Google computes for documents in resolving queries. That is, PageRank is (assumed to be) added to the IR score, such that two very similar IR scores might be adjusted to reverse the ordering of the listings on the basis of PageRank. We don’t know which factor is more significant, PageRank or IR score, except that many low-PR documents do outrank many high-PR documents — which implies that IR score plays the larger role in determining Google’s search results.

And that would be an interesting test in itself — which implies that we have not yet gone deep enough into the algorithm to devise an atomic test that tells us something we can incorporate into another test.

In other words, scientific experimentation is not as easy as the SEO pundits would have us believe. Before we can test something as complex and mysterious as PageRank Sculpting we have to establish axioms and systemic processes that are as ironclad as the failure to disprove them makes them — that is, they have to be good enough for science, real science. Science does change its axioms on occasion, but it’s a real struggle to institutionalize any assumption or finding as an axiom.

People question scientific studies all the time. They go back and forth over the tiniest minutiae. It took 300 years to solve one of the simplest and intuitively most easily understood riddles of mathematics, but in order to do that mathematicians had to invent several new branches of math. I’m talking about Fermat’s Last Theorem, the proof of which is so esoteric I could not even begin to explain it to you. Like most other people, I just have to take it on faith that the math is correct, the science is real.

But Andrew Wiles’ proof of FLT is much more trustworthy than the claims people make about PageRank Sculpting. They lack the millennia-long scientific history that modern mathematics arises from.

If we lack the tools to properly conduct PageRank sculpting experiments, is there anything we can do to study how links affect Websites? Sure. We can conduct lots of little experiments. But until you learn to isolate factors in your observations any claims you make based on your research will be suspect. Your findings are only as good as your observations, and you’re not ready to observe PageRank in motion.

None of us can do that. Probably, none of us ever will be able to observe PageRank in motion — not as long as search engines care about using PageRank-like data to influence how they rank Websites.

At best all you can do is say, “I did this and observed that”. If enough people corroborate your observations, we might reach a consensus about something. But I’ve looked at enough screwed up sites that were attempting to sculpt PageRank to understand that what people think they are seeing is not real.

That is why, Google tells us, they changed how they handle nofollowed links a long time ago — a change that all the SEO tests failed to detect. You’re in no position claim that PageRank sculpting still works since you were never in a position to claim it did in the first place.

Only Google can sculpt PageRank. Only Google can make it work.

But we can all use the SEO method to learn a little bit more each day about what seems to work. I advise you not to waste any more time spinning your wheels on PageRank Sculpting, but hundreds of thousands of people devoted a lot of time and effort to failing to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem. You’ll have plenty of company if you want to pursue a dream for which you are not equipped.

I think one of the largest unsettled questions in the SEO industry is concerned with how to measure link building. It’s not an easy question to answer because, frankly, there is no one right answer. Everyone has their own idea of what is important in the SEO process. Link building is usually deemed to be one of the most important parts of the process but reporting is not always part of the plan.

First of all, there is more than one kind of link building. Some people build links only to get new sites crawled and indexed, allowing nature to take its course. If you consistently publish good content that’s really about all the link building you need to do.

Some people build links to improve search results rankings. This is, of course, one of the least efficient ways to build SEO success but it’s the simplest concept in the business and a lot of people look no further than that (although, to be fair to the industry, most SEOs probably devote far more time and effort to other SEO processes than they realize — thus subconsciously weighting link building more than they should).

Some people build links because they are under pressure to do so. You know the link building is not necessary but someone wants to see some movement (people scurrying about the decks, so to speak). A great deal of the SEO process involves waiting. Clients and executives don’t like to wait. They think you can force the process if you take immediate action now, which is of course absolutely ridiculous in most SEO situations.

The Searchable Web Ecosystem just doesn’t work that way — not even in the era of Real Time Search.

So, still, people want to know more about how to report on link building. It’s an important question because we have to be accountable for the work we do. I’ve had to report on link building in many different ways.

Some clients just don’t care because all they look at are the search results and (hopefully) their conversions. These are easy clients to build links for but they are probably putting themselves at greater risk of being abused by unscrupulous link building practices.

Some clients just want the numbers, with the understanding that if they feel something is amiss they expect immediate disclosure of the details behind the numbers. I like these clients best because they are making me responsible for my work but trusting me to just give them the core information without getting bogged down in the details.

And some clients want to know everything. These are not bad clients, they are simply detail-oriented clients. I was recently asked on the HighRankings Forums how I report links to clients (and that sort of inspired this article). I mentioned that for these types of clients we’ve provided spreadsheets showing link locations.

You know, I’ve often advised people in the industry to NOT share their resources — but there is a difference between wasting your hard-found linking resources on a blog post and building a stronger relationship with a client. Clients can be very touchy if you try to be coy about your links.

Some clients just don’t understand search engine optimization. They can be a challenge to work with if they feel like they need to be asking questions but as long as you build patience into your client relationship you should be able to reach a mutual understanding with them. I’ve never denied being responsible for a link I had placed for a client.

Some clients know enough about search engine optimization that they want to make sure you don’t do anything sneaky or unethical. They don’t necessarily HAVE to know where all the links are, but they want to know they can audit your work for their own accountability.

So I think you have to be consistent in how your manage your link data. Don’t do it just on a client-by-client basis. Do it for all clients, do it consistently as much as possible. Using the same data tracking and reporting methodology for everyone makes it easier to handle sudden changes in client demands for accountability.

Our working philosophy has been that a client might at some point demand a full audit. In fact, this happened (under welcome circumstances, so please don’t read anything into my admission). We were able to collect and report on a lot of link data pretty quickly.

I like to provide detail-oriented clients with spreadsheets — and probably most everyone wants that. Spreadsheets allow for easy annotation and sorting. There was a time when I provided link detail reports in word processing documents and I don’t ever want to go back to that. Spreadsheets or comma/tab-separated files offer the best reporting formats.

Clients do sometimes object to specific links. You as an SEO might feel like they are perfectly good links but for whatever reason the client doesn’t want the links. We remove such links immediately without argument or attempt at justification. Links are much, much easier to replace than client trust. In a very few rare situations I’ve found myself with links that were not so easy to remove. I don’t like dealing with those kinds of linking resources if only because I want to keep the clients happy.

Of course, there are other aspects to measuring link building. After all raw link counts don’t really tell you anything except that someone placed X number of links (maybe with Y anchor texts) on such-and-such sites.

The difference between effective link building and busy work is a significant change in the search environment. But what do you do about highly competitive queries where, say, 1 month’s worth of link building doesn’t necessarily accomplish much?

I had a client call me up once and ask if I was responsible for the sudden surge in links he saw for his corporate site. “How many links?” I asked, thinking he might have seen our full quota for the week by some miraculous coincidence of software.

“About 1 million,” he replied coolly.

One…million…links. Yeah. Right. I can take those down overnight.

Seriously, I would never place 1 million links in a week or a month. That is just insane. I know some people do it but not me. I’m not interested in that kind of SEO.

I know people who have built millions of links, millions of content pages at a time. I respect their skills. I just don’t use those tactics. And I seriously doubt such people really report those links in detail. What Fortune 1000 company would want that kind of information in its email system? Maybe there are some big public companies that don’t care about stuff like that — but I don’t know any of them.

Link value is really not easy to measure, especially when you don’t have the luxury of using unique anchor text to track which links add value to a destination in the search results.

But if you have access to referrer data you can show links that send traffic to specific destinations.

If you have any ability, even though it might only be to subscribe to search engine alerts, to track Website mentions in the blogosphere, that can help you show how effective your blog link placements may be. “I saw this link on such-and-such” happens.

If your client values Toolbar PageRank and you’ve allowed them to box you into the corner of tracking Toolbar PR you’ll be sitting jittery every 3 months or so when Google updates its TBPR data. I don’t tie my reporting to Toolbar PR data, however. It’s not a reliable indicator of value.

Another good measure of link building would be search visibility — how many new pages are being indexed since the link building began, as opposed to how many new pages were being indexed before the link building began. You have to compare trends to trends, not numbers to numbers. Think of a trend as a vector (a series of numbers).

All of these things contribute to showing clients (or management) they are getting value for their investment. The more information you provide the better. Often enough people have too narrow a picture (at first) and they ask for too little or unhelpful reporting. If you can tie the link building to other metrics you’ll provide better value.

Your ultimate goal is twofold: first, to use the link building measurements to improve your own link building; you want to be the first person to know that what you’re doing doesn’t work, not the last. Second, you want to be able to show the return on the investment. That return can change over time. A link placed today may be worth more to you in a year than in a month, and not simply because it’s a year older.

Measuring your link building adds work to your burden as an SEO but in my opinion an ethical SEO technician cannot hide anything from the client. You have to be accountable for the work you do and what you bill for. If you’re ashamed or afraid to disclose your links to your client (or management), you’re probably doing it wrong.

Link building doesn’t have to be completely transparent — in fact, the more transparent you make the process the more you risk being micromanaged by someone who knows less about link building than you do. Reporting and measuring are really two different functions. You SHOULD be measuring your link building regardless of how much you report. And you SHOULD be ready to report everything if you find yourself with the need to do so.

There is intrinsic, tangible value in the measurement itself.

What makes a good SEO report? Have you ever thought about that? Most people rely on automated rank checking reports, which I feel provide some value (if you track the rankings as trend lines on a graph) but they don’t really get into the meat of what I would want reported to me, were I to farm out my SEO reporting to someone else.

There are a number of things that I look at when doing traditional SEO, particularly for my own sites where I am developing content and seeking new traffic that appeals to me. The SEO community is beginning to focus more on conversions than on rankings and referrals but informational conversions (what I usually seek for myself) are not always appealing.

For that matter, transactional conversions (sales) may not always be appealing, either. You may get a lot of customers who abuse your return policy, for example. Some companies have actually been targeted for what I would deem return policy abuse by a few blogs and Web sites.

Transformational conversions (signups or registrations) may also be unappealing if they are made for bogus reasons. In my science fiction and fantasy forums, for example, we constantly have to delete accounts that were created by spambots and low-life “link building” SEOs who create forum profiles in volume. I would prefer not to have to deal with those kinds of people.

So here are a few items I would want included on a good SEO report. Your mileage may vary.

Search Results Rankings – I do monitor some keywords, but what I would really like is a report that monitors query spaces. A query space consists of all the keywords and relevant content that would be served for those keywords that pertain to a particular topic. So I don’t just want to rank well for “itemized blue widget topicality”, I also want to rank well for “topicality relating to itemized blue widgets”, “blue widget topical itemization”, and “topic-specific itemized blue widgets”.

Furthermore, as I noted above I would want to see these rankings graphed into trend lines. Ideally I would want to see a 2-year rolling window. Since a query space could theoretically entail thousands of keywords and since many of those variations would produce virtually identical results, I would want to arbitrarily limit my query space analysis to about 5 keywords per query space.

So show me a graph by limited query space that includes up to 5 keywords with rankings for the past 2 years — by search engine (Ask, Bing, Google, and Yahoo! would be sufficient). I would also want to track a few meta search engines (including Ixquick, Dogpile, and 1 or 2 others). And then I would want to include a 3-month or 6-month window for new or smaller search engines.

A typical site with 100 pages of content should be tracking about 500 query spaces (approximately 2500 keywords across 10-15 search engines and meta search engines).

Furthermore, I would want to see aggregate rankings broken out by category: major search engines, meta search engines, and new search engines. Even though the query spaces are unrelated to each other, such aggregate rankings reports would give you a snapshot or birds’ eye view of your ranking depth.

Referral String Data – I would want to see which queries people are using to find my content. I would want to know month-by-month for about 2 years which strings are the most popular (the top 100 would be okay). However, I would want to see this data broken out by referer — don’t bother figuring out which one is a search engine, just tell me who the referers are that include a query string.

I would want to see queries flagged as seasonal if they occur in a cyclic pattern. I would want to see queries flagged as “never seen before”. I would want to see queries flagged as “stable”. And I would want to see queries flagged as “declining”.

You need trend graphs to do this kind of analysis and it can all be automated but no one does it to this level of detail.

Search Referral Demographics – So take that referral data report you just put together and find out what you can about who the referrers are — are they indeed search engines, or are they just sites with search boxes powered by search engines, or are they search engine partners? Are there any new names in the mix?

The sooner I identify new resources, the sooner I can get another advantage over my competitors. The same is true for query string analysis. If you’re suddenly getting traffic for a query you haven’t targeted, maybe you should optimize for that query space and see where that strategy takes you.

Competitors’ Analysis Report – Who my competitors are is not determined so much by who ranks for what keyword as how many query spaces the same sites appear in. You can divide competitors into “sites like mine that pursue all these query spaces” and “sites unlike mine that appear in these few query spaces”.

Some of your Class A competitors will be larger than you. Some will be newer than you.

Some of your Class B competitors will be so huge you are not even a blip on their radars. They don’t care about your query spaces — they just happen to show up here and there.

If your site sells shoes to American customers, your competitors will be other sites that sell shoes to American customers. The occasional CNN article about shoes will appear in your query spaces but CNN is not your competitor even if it outranks you.

Most competitive analysis reports lack sense and coherence. They look at nonsense like backlink profiles, comparative rankings, and on-page keywords. You’ll learn more about a competitor by comparing how many query spaces you both appear in without really looking at comparative rankings.

What makes a site a Class A competitor? You’ll know it when you see it. It’s the site that, if you were running it, you would try to push into all the query spaces you care about. Size and age really have nothing to do with it.

Backlink Profile Stability – I should think that if someone were doing SEO for me then they should know enough about link theory to be able to report to me which linking resources are performing well for my needs.

No, I’m not going to provide you with any criteria, but rest assured there are no link analysis tools out there that tell you want I would want to see in a report.

Every month I receive numerous offers from “SEO firms” wanting to help me with my rankings and link building. Friends, before I would give my money to you, I would want to know you could deliver the reporting by which I would hold you accountable. This ain’t your daddy’s ranking report — not by a mile.

If I have timed this right, and if you subscribe to SEO Theory, then by now you may have read Managing Link Investment Risk. If not, go read that blog now and then come back here.

So, for those of you who understand what I’m talking about when I mention “Link Investment Risk”, here are three tips you can use to manage your risks. I briefly described one in the SEO Theory article.

• Use a spreadsheet to catalog your linking resources and strategies
• Assess your competitors’ linking investments (and link investment risks)
• Calculate risk-to-cost ratios

Before you do this, you have to make certain assumptions. You can adjust your assumptions over time as you improve your ability to assess costs. You need to assign a dollar value to every cost. For some costs the value may change over time. I recommend using average values rather than updating your assigned values frequently.

You want to assign value to the tasks involved in your link acquisition: analyzing sites, filling out forms, writing emails, whatever. If you were doing this for someone else, what would you charge them? That’s the cost you have to charge yourself. There is no profit margin to be concerned about.

Since you don’t know what your competitors earn or charge for these activities (unless they spell out the costs on their Web sites), just use your own personal cost factors for them.

Use a spreadsheet to catalog your linking resources and strategies
By “resources” I mean classes or types of resources, not individual Web sites. You decide how to group them.

You want to use a separate table for resources and strategies. You want to assign reasonable risks and costs. You can be creative in assigning a cost to a strategy. Think about how much time you would devote to a particular strategy for a campaign. Don’t think in terms of, “Well, I’ve been doing this for five years….” Most campaigns are executed in 3-6 months or less.

Be consistent with how you assign risks. If you use my proposed “foolish risk”, “prudent risk”, “unexpected risk” scheme you may find some risks are not easily categorized. It’s okay to expand beyond those three levels. I would not, however, equate “foolish risk” with “high risk” and if you don’t use “foolish risk” then you should use something else in addition to “high risk” to distinguish between risks that potentially offer a lot of return and risks that really just squander resources.

Costs should be based on time and materials, fees, etc. Use estimates where you must.

Finally, count up how many links you obtain from each resource class and strategy. If you want to really drill down, count how many of the links are indexed by major search engines.

Assess your competitors’ linking investments (and link investment risks)
Using the method described above, pick your 2 or 3 best performing competitors and do the same thing for them as much as you can. Don’t worry about how accurate your profile of each competitor is. You’re just creating benchmarks to compare your own investment costs/risks to.

Calculate risk-to-cost ratios
This should be self-evident. Let’s say you developed a 5 point risk scale, with the higher number representing safer risks. Let’s say you have identified 5 resources classes and 3 linking strategies. A risk-to-cost ratio would be the assigned risk divided by the cost of class or strategy.

If you have an average risk of 3 and an average cost of $3000 then your average ratio would be 3/3000 (or 1:1000). How many links does each resource class provide you? How many links does each strategy provide you? The lower your ratio, the better. For example, a high risk/high cost ratio might look like 1/10000 (1:10,000). A low risk/low cost ratio might look like 5/500 (1:100).

You can convert the ratios to percentages, if you like. 1:10,000 would be equivalent to .0001 and 1:100 would be equivalent to .01. You’ll never get to a value of 1 but the closer to 1 your percentage/ratio gets the better (in this model — there are other ways to measure link investment and risk).

If you obtain 100 links at a ratio of 1:10,000 and 200 links at a ratio of 1:100, which resource class or strategy do you feel offers the better return on investment? Actually, you can’t know for sure, but if you’re tracking indexed links and how fast each resource and strategy produces them — well, you can develop some pretty interesting statistics.

The bottom line here is to determine how effective, risky, and efficient your link building is (and maybe to compare it to your competitors’ performances).

Of all the things that people say about you on the Web, what is acceptable to you? What is not acceptable? You cannot control what other people say about you but you may want to know what impact their comments are having on your reputation.

When Visible Technologies launched TruReputation last week we also launched TruReputation Score — a free tool for scoring sentiment.

At least one person questioned the value of self-grading. To me the value is self-evident but I’ve been involved in online reputation management for many years. The concept is still new to many people.

The point of the self-grading your online reputation is that only you know where your comfort level lies. Only you know what you like to see other people say about yourself. Only you know what you don’t like having said about you. We do have sophisticated sentiment grading analysis tools that learn how to analyze stuff — that’s expensive technology that won’t be offered for free this year.

You can subscribe to search engine alerts and see random new content that appears in your name space but the alert tools don’t tell you whether the content is favorable, unfavorable, or unrelated to your reputation. Nor do they tell you how visible that content is.

The whole point of TruReputation Score is to give you a snapshot analysis of what people will find in the top search results for your name or brand and to let you see at a glance (after you have scored it) how favorable or unfavorable that content is. The higher your score is, the more favorable your reputation results are.

Some people flood the search results with social media profiles, micro sites, and other content they have created for themselves. That’s not building a reputation. That’s creating a reputation shield (or a marketing message, which is acceptable in itself). Your reputation is measured by what other people say about you. If you want to get an accurate TruReputation Score, you should grade your own content neutral unless you allow other people to comment on those pages.

We released the TruReputation Score tool to help educate people about sentiment because it’s important to know that when it comes to understanding your online reputation, sentiment is more valuable than the mere existence of content. A hostile Web page that ranks 50th for your name is nowhere near as likely to influence what people think about you as a glowing testimonial that ranks 5th.

TruReputation Score is the mirror you use to see how others see you. You have to be careful in how you use it, though. You can deceive yourself into thinking you have a great reputation. But the tool is also flexible enough that you can use it to see how far your marketing message reaches into the search results. There is plenty more to say on that score, but I’ll leave that for another day.