| Hyperlinks in the Old LED Archives |
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Written by Steve Pronger
February 23, 2006
Re hyperlinks in the LED Archives at http://list.audettemedia.com/archives/led.html
"Your post to LED got you a link from the last issue, now posted in the archive and re-crawled often due to frequent updates and high popularity... Expect the search engines to revisit your site this week because you posted to LED." - Mike Banks Valentine, Directory Information Pages for High Rankings
Usually correct, and good advice. Unfortunately with our beloved LED, it does not appear to be the case. Adam might like to confirm or deny this, but those back issues don't appear to be spidered at all. The listing page yes, PR5 and all. But the archived issues are not your regular URL and appear to be unspiderable (bet that's not in the dictionary). The URLs on all the signatures are not hyperlinked either. If only it wasn't the case. Think of all those high PR backlinks we'd have :-) Ah well, gues we must post to LED only because we've got something to say.
P.S. The signature URLs are hyperlinked, but they still sit on page which isn't indexed with the engines. At least that appears to be the case. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Steve Pronger
stevepronger.com
<Moderator Comment>
You're right in the P.S., Steve -- the URLs are all hyperlinked. Trouble is these archives (which are "automagically" produced by the LED's mailing software) are cumbersome, outdated, un-search engine-friendly and sorta ugly. But there's good news here, because (eventually) I'll be incorporating all these archives (which date back to the late '90s -- not all are currently up) into the new site where they WILL be search engine friendly. Just when that happens is anyone's guess... (just kidding... sort of). Actually I'm trying to find the time and always have it in mind; it's a really fun project that I hope will benefit everyone.
-adam
Written by Michael Martinez February 24, 2006
"The signature URLs are hyperlinked, but they still sit on a page which isn't indexed with the engines. At least that appears to be the case. Correct me if I'm wrong." - Steve Pronger
And they are being indexed by the search engines.
Whether they bring any value to anyone is another issue, but they are indexed, the signature URLs are converted to hypertext links, and the engines are aware of them.
Michael Martinez
michael-martinez.com
Written by Steve Pronger February 27, 2006
Ah, interesting. I was searching for actual URLs, rather than keywords, which produces a "did not match any documents" result. I couldn't find any of the archived issues in Yahoo or MSN though. Can anyone identify these archived pages as a backlink to their site? I'm still drawing a blank, so I still believe that generally they are not SE friendly. Maybe you should bundle them all up, Adam, and sell them as an e-book ;-)
I don't have any doubt as to their potential value as backlinks. Hey, I'd take the link. If only I'd put some keywords in my domain name....
Steve Pronger
Written by Cheryl Berry February 28, 2006
Steve -
I couldn't find any of the archives on Yahoo! or MSN either but regularly come across LEDs while researching our site placement on Google. Based on your post, I specifically Googled audettemedia.com bookkeepinghelp.com and then reviewed the "more" results. Of the 30-40 results, none appear to be backlinked to our site but I see why.
Yours is backlinked due to the http://. Browsers typically read http://anything as a
hyperlink. Want to test it? Visit a site that allows a free post - say craigslist.org - enter a URL with and without the http://. One will
link, one won't.
How silly was I not to have done this before? :)
Cheryl Berry
bookkeepinghelp.com
Written by Steve Pronger March 1, 2006
You're right Cheryl, I always include my full URL in posts for that very reason i.e. it will get hyperlinked in archived issues. But when I say "backlinks" I'm not actually referring to whether the URLs are hyperlinked in the posts, but whether the search engines actually report that particular page as a link to your site. You can check this yourself by doing a search for link: followed by your domain.
In my case Google report 92 links, Yahoo 1,520 and MSN 3,455. It's a well known fact that Google doesn't give you full picture on these searches, only a "sampling". Why, I'm not really sure. Theories abound. But I couldn't find audettemedia.com in any of my reported backlinks and I was curious as to whether anyone with a hyperlinked URL on one of those pages could identify it as a backlink. I suspect that even though Google (alone) had managed to index these not-normal URLs it can't spider the outbound links on the pages.
As a comparison, this is a page from a discussion list I used to participate in a few years ago:
Note it's a regular URL, with a Google Pagerank of 2. The engines have no trouble identifying this page (and dozens of others from that list) as a backlink to my site. This is why Mike Banks Valentine advised in LED 2102:
"Your post to LED got you a link from the last issue, now posted in the archive and re-crawled often due to frequent updates and high popularity."
Mike's post was a good one. Posting to discussion lists like LED (with your full URL of course) is a great way to acquire backlinks and spider visits. It's just that the LED archives, because of the way they are archived, did not appear to be providing those
benefits.
In case you were wondering, I didn't search through 3,455 links. I use a program called SEO Elite to analyze the links to my site. It not only reports on who is linking to you, but how i.e. anchor text, and what percentage of keywords make up that anchor text.
Steve Pronger
Written by Mike Banks Valentine March 2, 2006 The LED archives are indexed and the links to your site from your posts in the archives do *contribute* to both link popularity and PageRank for the linked site - and will lead to your site being crawled by search engine spiders due to those LED archive links.
Links from the archives show up in Google queries differently, it just depends on how you search for them. I did a little test to check those links. Forgive me, as this may get a bit arcane, but I think a few like-minded LED-ophiles may find it interesting just the same.
Using Google query: "site:audettemedia.com Mike Banks Valentine", I got 98 results, but in reviewing that list, saw that my posts to other Audettemedia.com lists, I-Helpdesk and I-Winsoft discussion lists from 2002 contributed to that total, so I searched "site:audettemedia.com LED archives Mike Banks Valentine", and narrowed it down to 73 results from 2003 forward.
(The archive must not include posts I made to LED in 1998-2002 - For grins visit: http://snipurl.com/n1zn [web.archive.org] (LED Home
in 1998 as shown in the web archive WayBack Machine)
When I search for each of 5 domain names I routinely use (depending on topic of posts), I found from 0 to 22 results for each of 5 domain names. Interestingly, when I visit most archived pages from that first result list of 73, I still found the domains linked from those posts.
One thing that apparently keeps them from showing up in Google searches is that many were linked to specific pages and filenames. In some cases the search returns different results if you include the http:// in the Google
search!
I thought that Google parsed out text within longer words or in this case within URL's. But apparently this introduces some odd variables within the LED archives, even though in most cases, the entire string exists in each instance.
A search for "site:audettemedia.com WebSite101" returns 17 results in a Google search
A search for "site:audettemedia.com WebSite101.com" returns 14 results
A search for "site:audettemedia.com http://WebSite101.com" returns 8 results
Try your searches with these or other variables, like your name, or the topic of your posts. I believe you'll find them indexed and linked to your site in most cases. (I believe Adam does hyperlinks properly if you neglect to include http://)
All of that to say, that one way or another, the links are there and they will very likely lead to search engine spiders visiting the archives (because they are often updated and re-crawled regularly). Spiders will then end up following links from your posts in the LED archives to your site, thus negating the need to submit your site to the search engines - which was the point I was originally attempting to make from my first post in this thread. ;-)
Mike Banks Valentine
realityseo.com
Written by Michael Martinez March 2, 2006
"... I suspect that even though Google (alone) had managed to index these not-normal URLs it can't spider the outbound links on the pages." - Steve Pronger
Google can parse URLs out of just about anything you can imagine. Whether they spider non-hypertext URLs is anyone's guess. But you can easily find pages where Google has identified non-linking
URLs.
The real question with Google, but probably also with Yahoo! and MSN, is how to determine if a link counts. Google has openly acknowledged that they devalue outbound links for a variety of reasons. I would be inclined to guess that the LED-archive links are more valuable than many other highly sought after links if only because the LED-archive pages are so under the SEO radar no one has given any thought to them.
That is, people generally assume that all high PR pages give good linkage. That is wrong. Many high PR pages no longer confer reputation or PageRank for Google. It's a total roll of the dice. Google has done this to combat link manipulation at all levels. And I mean ALL LEVELS.
I will be offline for a few days and cannot continue this discussion until next week.
Michael Martinez
Written by Steve Pronger March 3, 2006 "The LED archives are indexed and the links to your site from your posts in the archives do *contribute* to both link popularity and PageRank for the linked site..." - Mike Banks Valentine
Yes, I would normally agree. It's just that I can't identify a single bona fide Google backlink from the 113 archived pages which link to my site. I'm not talking about the fact that Google has indexed those pages or that the signature URLs are hyperlinked. Doing a "site:audettemedia.com keyword" search just confirms what we already know - the pages are indexed.
What I'm curious to know is if anyone can identify one of those pages as a backlink using the link: command. They can't contribute to your link pop or PageRank if they're not recognized as a backlink, no? It's interesting that of the pages I checked (I didn't check them all of course) none appeared to have any PageRank. And, if you have a download manager installed like me and click on one of the listings in the search results, it tries to download it. Download manager thinks "this is an .exe file, not a web page".
My only point here guys is that these archive pages do not appear to be SE friendly. I'm quite happy to change that view - I WANT them to be SE friendly - if just one person can identify any LED archive issue as a backlink using link:yoursite.com. Yahoo and MSN are another matter. They're not nearly as clever as Google in indexing files.
"Many high PR pages no longer confer reputation or PageRank for Google. It's a total roll of the dice. Google has done this to combat link manipulation at all levels." - Michael Martinez
Randomly devaluing links? I don't think so. Evidence please.
Steve Pronger
Written by Michael Martinez March 6, 2006
I thought I had seen where you yourself acknowledged that Google's "link:" command only produces a random sampling of their backlinks. It's widely documented that you cannot check Google's backlink data with any degree of accuracy with that command.
But the archive pages are indeed "search engine friendly" to the extent that they are crawlable and that many URLs are converted to hypertext links. The original discussions are not optimized for search indexing and, frankly, I don't want them to be.
"Randomly devaluing links? I don't think so. Evidence please."
Google is NOT randomly devaluing links. When I said, "It's a total roll of the dice", I was referring to the unknowable quality of links based on PR with respect to SEO. That is, anyone who goes out and solicits links on the basis of PR values has no way of knowing if they'll get good links. PR is not an indicator of value or quality. At least not for anyone who is serious about SEO.
Michael Martinez
michael-martinez.com
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