A Look Back On One Crazy Year Of Link Building

If 2012 was the year of Google Algorithm updates — Moz counted 37 big ones compared to the 15 in 2013 and 21 in 2011 — 2013 was the year that link building suffered from a serious identity crisis.
It was sidelined, stretched, swindled and spit back out again more times than your average SEO pitches a guest blog post; but somehow it survived, and it will slide into 2014 broken, beaten and a little bloody. Let’s look back on everything that went down in link building in 2013.

Link Building Died

Some say it died; some cry blasphemy at that statement — but whatever side of the fence you’re standing on, you can’t argue that the link building of 2013 was anything like the link building of 2011 and even 2012. Google got smarter, users savvier and the algorithm harder to game.

The traditional “10 blue links” SERP is rarely spotted anymore; instead, it is cluttered with Google Shopping, image results, map listings or news results… or sometimes a mix of all of them. That invariably made link building harder because you didn’t know what you were building for.

It Was Resurrected By “Content Marketing”

2013 was the year that people started replacing “link building” with “content marketing.” For a little bit there, it seemed to be working; and, from looking at Google Trends, that could still keep happening in 2014.

I love content marketing. I love link building. I love it even more when they work together, but that doesn’t mean I can use the terms interchangeably.

Content marketing is creating content that’s specific to each subset of your users and giving it to them at the time they’re ready to absorb it. Link building is doing something to get more links to a page. You can do that with content, but you can do it with a dozen other tactics, too.

It Was Briefly Renamed Link Earning

Where link building implies taking an aggressive, active action in order to get one link, link earning is purely organic. You create something that deserves to be linked to, not something you have to convince someone to link to.

“You want my link? You better damn well work for it,” bloggers started to say.

To me, changing link building to link earning makes a lot of sense because it’s a better description of what we do. We’re not “building” anything, as that implies there will be something at the end of it to show for our work (when we all know that’s not always the case). Even one-to-one actions like resource listings or broken link building still require you to have something worthy of being linked to.

Public Relations & Media Outreach Were Weaved In

Every aspect of link building requires some sort of outreach, regardless if it’s to bloggers, journalists, webmasters or experts. The best link builders are the ones who know how to create an instant connection with someone in just a four-sentence email.

When bloggers stopped putting up with the guest blogging onslaughter, link building moved to attracting traditional news outlets for mentions (and links). That required you to get savvier in how you pitch them. Yes, journalists crave content, but they’re also sticklers for it being news-worthy and attention grabbing.

And It Claimed More Tactics As Link Schemes

I think we all breathed a little sigh of “well duh” when Google finally added guest posting, press releases and advertorials with over-optimized anchor text to their link schemes. Still, it shook a lot people simply because of the vagueness of Google’s language. Even if you were doing the right thing, Google could just decide that you “intended to manipulate PageRank.”

Guest blogging will continue to exist in 2014, but it won’t be a viable, scalable or efficient tactic. Spending two hours writing and five hours sourcing with the hope that someone, anyone will post your article is time wasted that your competitors are taking advantage of.

In spite of all these changes, link building isn’t going anywhere. It can’t — Google relies on links for rankings. They’re the word-of-mouth endorsement for search engines. It’s not like they can take verbal endorsements and just know what to rank. Sorry, Google. You’re good, but you’re not that good.

What do you think was the biggest change link building faced in 2013? Where will it take is in 2014? Tell me in the comments below.

Redefining "Advertising": How 2013 Transformed Digital Marketing

It was a great year for digital advertising. New technologies took off, helping brands, agencies and publishers reach today’s constantly connected consumers more easily and effectively than ever before. With budgets no longer being siloed, 20% of organizations incorporated digital into each marketing function, per a study by Adobe.

We compiled a few of the bigger changes in marketing and digital advertising in 2013, to see how far the industry has come along.

Redefining “creative”
New creative formats took center stage in 2013. Marketers invested more in social media and TrueView skippable video ad formats continued to grow on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

Redefining “integrated”
The new 360 media plan cannot overlook digital and the sheer number of screens people interact with. In 2012, Google released some research indicating that people use 3 screen combinations a day. In 2013, this manifested itself in the form of increased investments in multi-screen campaigns.

Redefining “buying”
New(Up)fronts. Programmatic. 2013 changed the way digital media spend is committed.18 digital media companies presented at the Digital Content NewFronts. And programmatic buying gained significant traction with an expected ~74% growth, according to eMarketer. As brands took to programmatic and with the growth of programmatic video, CPMs on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange increased, and Preferred Deal impressions grew 250%. DoubleClick Bid Manager powered social media ads, joined FBX.

Redefining “success”
Earlier this year, AdAge released some research indicating that 50% of display ads are not viewed, making advertising viewability a hot industry topic. Google’s viewability measurement solution, ActiveView, got MRC-accredited. Last week, Google announced that it would enable viewability-based buys on the Google Display Network. Engagement Rate was another hot metric in 2013, with Cost per Engagement pay models enabled for ad formats like Engagement Ads on the Google Display Network.

Default Campaign Settings In AdWords — The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

Fellow SEM experts, how many times has this happened to you? A newbie joins your company (or a company with which your SEM agency is working) and is convinced that he is an SEM master. He’s read a few SEM books, attended a conference or two, and gone through the AdWords tutorials, after all. It’s just keywords and text ads!

In a worst-case scenario, this genius has enough confidence to convince folks higher up in the organization that he can truly make positive improvements to the path of the company’s SEM fortunes and suddenly has some control over the campaigns. My favorite example of this scenario happened last year when a self-proclaimed “searchologist” did a re-org of a B2B AdWords campaign that resulted in an 85% conversion rate — a nice increase over the 3% conversion rate the campaigns had seen for the prior three years.

When I pointed out that this was likely due to a misplaced conversion pixel on the landing page and that this 85% “conversion rate” was more likely indicative of a 15% bounce rate, the searchologist shot back saying that it was the new account structure that was driving these incredible results. As with many things in life, SEM is easy to do, but hard to do well. This axiom is proven to me every day by neophytes who have anointed themselves searchologists, as in the case above.

To demonstrate how dangerous it is to start an AdWords campaign without a lot of deep knowledge, I recently set up a new AdWords campaign and looked at the default settings that AdWords recommends. As you’ll see in the following deep-dive, starting a campaign on AdWords recommended settings can easily lead you to a world of hurt.

Search & Display Or Search & Destroy?

The default campaign type when starting a new AdWords campaign is “Search Network with Display Select,” and the default setting is “standard” versus “all features.” Sticking with the default setting of “standard” here can cause advertisers to miss out on all sorts of opportunities to fine-tune their PPC campaigns, as you’ll see throughout this column.

Display Select is a recent addition to the AdWords world; it pushes your text ads onto parts of the Google Display Network (GDN). GDN can be a very powerful network if managed properly — we have many clients that see 30-40% of their acquisitions coming from GDN — but it can also be a cesspool of irrelevant and occasionally fraudulent sites. (Example: I recently evaluated a B2B telephony site that was spending thousands of dollars a month on a website that had articles about getting cat urine out of carpets!)
Moreover, we’ve found that the conversion rate on banner ads on GDN is astronomically higher than the conversion rate of text ads, so this “display select” offering (which involves text ads only) is a double-whammy for newbie AdWords users.

Devices: All For One, One For All

Regardless of whether you choose “standard” or “all features,” you are defaulted into all devices when you set up your campaign:

Of course, since the advent of Enhanced Campaigns, we are all defaulted into all devices. What’s missing here is the ability to exclude mobile devices by bidding at -100%. Assuming that new AdWords advertisers are the least likely to have mobile-optimized sites, running full-throttle on mobile is likely going to be pretty painful.

Location: Pakistanis Searching For “Los Angeles Burger King”

The next option is location targeting. The default setting (for US customers) goes to US and Canada, which makes sense to me. The advanced options (which I have highlighted in yellow in the screenshot) are missing for “standard” users:

I’ve found a surprisingly large variance in performance between “people in my targeted location” and “people searching for or viewing pages about my targeted location.” In general, folks outside the US perform much more poorly than people in the US (due to shipping costs or the local nature of a product or service). I generally recommend that you exclude these “geo intent” keywords unless you have data that suggest otherwise.

Extensions: PLAs MIA

Ad extension options are unchecked by default in the “standard” edition; they also exclude several more advanced options (yellow represents the excluded options):

Again, in the spirit of simplicity, I totally understand why Google has unchecked these and excluded some choices. That said, an advertiser that at a minimum doesn’t have sitelinks is going to be at a huge disadvantage for competitive terms, especially now that Google has tweaked its algorithm to factor ad extensions into ranking.
Additionally, for e-commerce businesses, not even showing product listing ads (PLAs) as an option is a pretty big deal. For many merchants, PLAs perform better than text ads, and Google appears to be giving PLAs more and more prominence.

Day Parting: All AdWords, All The Time

“Standard” setting users are not shown day-parting options, whereas the “all features” users at least get the ability to click and open a section on day-parting:

Depending on the business, day-parting can be very important. For example, brick-and-mortar businesses that do not have online storefronts are usually better off shutting off ads when their store is closed. B2B companies see conversion rates drop over the weekends.
Moreover, the options shown above aren’t even the most advanced choices — power users can also make bid adjustments by time of day, as opposed to just on/off functionality.

Ad Rotation: CTR FTW!

“Standard” users don’t get to choose ad rotation preferences. “All features” users can open up a hidden field to make their choice, although the “recommended” and default choice is to optimize for CTR:

My preference is to optimize for a combination of CTR and conversion rate, but given that this isn’t a choice, I’d rather chose to optimization for conversion rate.

Keyword Matching: Close Only Counts In Horseshoes & Hand Grenades

The last “all features”-only option allows advertisers to opt-out of exact and phrase near-match:

I haven’t seen a huge impact one way or the other from this feature, but when in doubt, I prefer to have more control over my keywords, so I opt out.

The Average Man Thinks He Isn’t

As I’ve said numerous times in this article, I don’t fault Google for making choices in the name of simplicity. Amongst self-serve online advertising platforms, Google has the best training and FAQs and the easiest-to-use interface. All that being said, the things that are missing from the default campaign settings in AdWords are the nuances that often make or break an account.
And, this ultimately goes back to my original point: people who think they know AdWords but actually don’t will get burned badly by simply following AdWords’ recommended settings. If you think an expert is expensive, wait until you see what a novice will cost you!