I figured over the last weeks, that some partners or clients are not aware of the great possbility of natural link building "the other way round" ... getting a presell page and then boosting that page with a few links to get the effect of those links indirectly to their own site… that’s why I call this concept indirect linking

The mindset "I need more PR" was born when every direct link to a site contributed to it’s direct pagerank and even better, it’s direct ranking – that was somewhere in 2001 or so. Well – those days are gone ... the search engine engineers know that buying links is mainstream, and have two strategies to fight that kind of link popularity manipulation – a) say that buying links is bad (you bad bad boy paying somebody money for linking to you… ) and b) and more effective – discount the value of direct links...

There is a concept that was documented as "truncated page rank" in the paper "Using Rank Propagation and Probabilistic Counting for Link-Based Spam Detection" which I also had on my TO-READ list of TOP SEO resarch papers since back in July (you should really bookmark that page and check back often :-)

What you read there is of course by no means a confirmation what Google or others implemented, but it gives you an idea of how they work – and I like their conclusions on how to filter "link spam" with the method of applying a heavy damping factor to the direct links.

It is based on the assumption that people that pay money for links, only direct it to their own sites… (that was a crazy though in 2002 – why pay that guy just to link to me … "oh my god, they pay me 5 bucks for a link on my blog – but today it’s common thinking)

[...]where is a damping factor between 0 and 1, typically 0.85.

A page participating in a link farm can gain a high Page-

Rank score because it has many in-links, this is, supporters

that are topologically "close" to the target node. Intuitively,

a way of demoting those pages could be to consider a damp-

ing function that ignores the direct contribution of the

first levels of links,

[...]

This function penalizes pages that obtain a large share

of their PageRank from the first few levels of links; we call

the corresponding functional ranking the Truncated Page-

Rank of a page. This is similar to PageRank, except that

the supporters that are too "close" to a target node, do not

contribute towards its ranking.

 

So while the first level links are discounted, the second and third level links are not, or at least not to that extend. And the reason is simpe as that

Why should I pay for a link to a site that is NOT mine?

Please note that I’m not saying that direct links (be they bought or leased) dont work… they work just over time, at a discounted strength – and IMHO we are already used to link damping over time for 2 years now… But still, getting strong links to (old) pages that link to you help both – the page you link to AND your own site!

So here’s my advice to get the most out of your presell page (AKA hosted marketign page):

1. once you get a pre sell page on an authority site, be it an old .edu site or another old and trusted domain, don’t let it there alone – include it in your link building plan
2. yes, that means linking to a site that might not be owned by you.. so what? you pay people to link to let those links help you!
3. chances are VERY GOOD that this presell page will RANK. and even OUTRANK your own site! good – you will get traffic AND link juice from that page
4. so you will increase your traffic from both – indirect traffic from human visitors from the presell page and your own rankings from the links of that high ranking page of course

Talking about the thing called "reputation management" – that’s a similar concept… buy pages on old sites that talk good about you or your company and let them rank ... voila’ that means your reputation on a typical Google search will increase :-) ...

oh – and did I mention your chance of getting traffic increases by 30-100% by having a second entry in the search results?

Now THAT is an incentive, eh?

Note: this post was also sent out end of August to my client-only newsletter … if you are interested in getting such stuff earlier, you might consider becoming a client, too.