Read more about our new screenshot investigations feature.

Upon learning of a possible infringement, AdGooroo Trademark Insight subscribers can now automatically collect up to 24 screenshots of the actual search results pages as seen within the targeted country (over 45 countries currently supported). The first screenshot is usually available within five minutes and the full set are sent via email after 24 hours.

How to start a trademark investigation

Begin by navigating to an AdGooroo Trademark Insight detail report. On the rows which contain keywords, you will see a small camera icon. Clicking this icon will open a popup balloon which will contain a second camera icon as well as links to any prior investigation results. Click the camera icon to initiate an investigation:

Wait a few minutes and refresh the page. You should now see an icon and link to view your investigation in process. Clicking the icon will open up a series of screenshots (click image below to enlarge):

Above the screenshot is the timestamp. At the upper right are "Save As" and "Close" icons. If you have multiple screenshots (one screenshot will be taken approximately every 30 minutes), you will also see "back" and "next" icons at the lower right of the screenshot.

A few other helpful tips about trademark investigations:

• You do not need to manually thumb through and save each screenshot. The full set will be emailed to you in a .zip file after 24 hours.
• Screenshots are available for up to 90 days. Be sure to save them locally as they are deleted and cannot be recovered after this time.
• The screenshots will be taken based on your currently selected search engine and region. Use the toolbar to select a different search engine or region prior to initiating an investigation if so desired.

What exactly does "well-linked" mean? You get different answers to this question. Marketers agree to "avoid artificial link schemes" or "don’t get too many links too fast," but there's far more disagreement than agreement as to what constitutes a truly legitimate inbound link profile (IBLP).

In a little known page in the Google Librarian Center, "How does Google collect and rank results?", Google engineer Matt Cutts states: 

"As a rule, Google tries to find pages that are both reputable and relevant. If two pages appear to have roughly the same amount of information matching a given query, we'll usually try to pick the page that more trusted websites have chosen to link to…"

Three words jump out at me: reputable, relevant, and trusted. 

From Theory to Practice

So what is an artificial link? For me, an artificial link is any link that you obtain or create with the goal of fooling a search engine's algorithm into thinking that link was freely earned. A link that is paid for, swapped, bartered, or otherwise engineered is -- at least from an algorithmic standpoint -- less trustworthy than a link that occurs with no strings attached. The link may be a great source of direct traffic, leads, etc., but for rankings, it's likely to have no value at all.

Three Recommendations

Let me offer three recommendations: For sites that are already engaged in artificial linking activities, either remove those links or accept that your site's ranking is on borrowed time. When seeking links, don't rely on reciprocal links as your only linking tactic. 100% link reciprocity looks mighty suspicious, that is, artificial. If you have link-worthy content, seek links for that content from known trusted sources. What's a trusted source? Put yourself in Google’s shoes. Trusted sources will vary depending on the subject matter. 

Do a Google query on: "best of the web" library site:.us After all, whose links are likely to be more trustworthy than a librarian's?

A Warning

Search engines do look for suspicious linking activity now. They'll only get more capable in the future. If Google or any other engine notices something about the links pointing to your site that it feels is artificial, your site's rank may drop as a consequence of the engine devaluing the links pointing to it. 

One last bit of advice. Have a look at Google search results for the phrase (with quotes around it) "artificial linking". The fact that there are so many people writing about the problem shows you how widespread the problem is. Read through a few of those results and you will see many artificial linking tactics and rules and warnings. Pay special attention to the warnings and -- unless you are willing to accept the consequences -- do not engage in linking schemes to fool the engines.

Link well my friend,
Eric

Eric Ward has been in the link building and content publicity game since 1994 and is the Chief Link Evangelist for AdGooroo.

In that column, I wrote “…spotting manipulated linking patterns isn’t as hard as some people think it is” In response, I was asked “What would you classify as ‘manipulated linking patterns”, and “…it would be great if you could give examples of easily identifiable patterns“.

First, note that I am not saying a manipulated linking pattern is automatically a bad thing. It could be, but not always. Buying links for the sake of advertising on a demographically relevant target site is smart business, and it is arguably manipulated, but it’s not spam and doesn’t deserve a penalty. Likewise, asking the person who runs this site to give a link to this site is also a form of manipulation, but again, not spam. That’s logical and on-topic link seeking at it’s best.

I define a manipulated linking pattern as links obtained purely in pursuit of search rank with no thought given to topical relevancy. I further define manipulated linking as any attempt to take advantage of or exploit a weakness in content/server design, like form injection or automated blog commenting, or the recent Google MapSpam incident. Last, and I’m sure I’ll hear it for this, I define manipulated linking as any links acquired as a result of sending automated or bulk email link requests to sites that you have never visited.

OK, so now on to an example of how I spot manipulated linking patterns.

For this example, I’m using five web sites all devoted to self-directed IRA investing. These sites all compete with each other in that they are after the same prospects. They all also appear in the top twenty Google results for key phrases that make sense for what they do. After running my competitive link analysis tools, I had a database of 26,500 cumulative inbound links across all five sites. I import this database into Excel. I sort the links for each of the five sites analyzed, and look to see if any one site has inbound links that none of the others have, and if so, I look at those links first. I then notice that one of the five has the following collection of inbound links, and none of the other sites do.

Have a look and tell me what you see.

Without having to visit any of the below sites, I’ll argue all day long that this is 100% manipulated, spam, junk, rank-chasing link building at its most pointless. Note that I am including only about 10% of the inbound links I found, and I *’d out some letters in the URLs so as not to embarrass the site owners.

http://www.****rawler.com/links.htm

http://www.****ht.org/web_links.htm

http://www.si****planning.net/links.html

http://www.as****sionplanners.com/links.html

http://www.cvna****.com/links.php

http://structured-s****ments.fine-information.com/links/

http://www.wiz****om/de/links/

http://www.st****-your-settlement.net/links/

http://read.in****s.com/structuredsettlements/links/

http://www.hotinf****com/structured-settlements/links/

http://www.revi****buyhub.com/structured-settlements/links/

http://www.fir****.co.uk/links/

http://www.so****ddrealestate.com/links

http://blog.all****ice.com/links/

http://thehomebuyi****ter.com/wordpress/category/links/

http://www.he****nder.com/links.htm

http://www.es****ate.co.uk/links_society.htm

http://www.sp****engl****nslations.com/links.htm

http://www.w****y.com/links.asp

http://www.cli****uirs.com/links/

http://www.ami****bles.com/links/

http://easts****business.com/links.htm

http://www.plat****kc.com/links.html

http://www.ro****.com/links.asp

http://www.key****bi.com/links/

http://www.i****entinrealty.com/links/

http://www.****i.com/links

http://www.ro****e.com/links

http://www.msre****.com/links.htm

http://www.jacks****mes.biz/links.htm

http://www.t****talk.com/links/

http://www.the****yteam.com/links.asp

http://www.ml****rities.com/links.php

http://www.****sta****utions.com/links.shtml

http://www.ro****e.com/links/

http://www.d****seed.com/links.htm

http://www.fo****ah.com/links.html

http://altam.****.com/investmentlinks.html

http://www.****results.com/links.html

http://www.bl****its.com/blinks/trust

http://membe****roperties.com/590/index.asp?page=links.html

http://www.hosteri****so.com/topsites200000/links

http://www.al****m.com/wp/2007/04/14/links

http://dot****s.net/headlines/tags/links/

http://www.m****.com/links.php

http://www.****operties.com/links.htm

http://www.r****state-tacoma.com/links/

http://www.r********sible.com/links/

http://www.re****ve****oguide.com/links/

http://www.al****m.com/wp/2007/04/14/links

http://www.bit****gets.com/helpful_links.htm

http://yo****net/Real-State/links/

http://www.hosiery-w*********.com/links2.html

Sure, a few of them might be on-topic and of some possible value to somebody somewhere. However, there’s a lot of fishy looking sites and URLs there, along with oddly similar file and sub-directory naming conventions. When I see one site with hundreds of similar inbound links originating from fairly indiscriminate links pages, and none of the other sites have anywhere close to that number, I know I’ve found the link manipulator who is seeking to improve rank without regard to quality or value. Did you notice the last one listed above is about hosiery? Anyone want to hazard a guess as to what hosiery and self directed IRA’s have to do with each other? Bueller..? Bueller…? Bueller?

Is this exercise right every time? Probably not. And I’ll be the first to admit that you should dig deeper. The point here is once you become comfortable interacting and scanning thousands and thousands of inbound links across hundreds of web sites, you start to notice things. And if I can see it using a rudimentary Excel spreadsheet, then the engines can see it any time they decide they want to see it.

Originating inbound URLs leave telltale signs, paint a picture, sing a song. So don’t do it unless you are prepared to face the music.

Eric Ward has been in the link building and content publicity game since 1994 and is the Chief Link Evangelist for AdGooroo.

In that column, I wrote “…spotting manipulated linking patterns isn’t as hard as some people think it is” In response, I was asked “What would you classify as ‘manipulated linking patterns”, and “…it would be great if you could give examples of easily identifiable patterns“.

First, note that I am not saying a manipulated linking pattern is automatically a bad thing. It could be, but not always. Buying links for the sake of advertising on a demographically relevant target site is smart business, and it is arguably manipulated, but it’s not spam and doesn’t deserve a penalty. Likewise, asking the person who runs this site to give a link to this site is also a form of manipulation, but again, not spam. That’s logical and on-topic link seeking at it’s best.

I define a manipulated linking pattern as links obtained purely in pursuit of search rank with no thought given to topical relevancy. I further define manipulated linking as any attempt to take advantage of or exploit a weakness in content/server design, like form injection or automated blog commenting, or the recent Google MapSpam incident. Last, and I’m sure I’ll hear it for this, I define manipulated linking as any links acquired as a result of sending automated or bulk email link requests to sites that you have never visited.

OK, so now on to an example of how I spot manipulated linking patterns.

For this example, I’m using five web sites all devoted to self-directed IRA investing. These sites all compete with each other in that they are after the same prospects. They all also appear in the top twenty Google results for key phrases that make sense for what they do. After running my competitive link analysis tools, I had a database of 26,500 cumulative inbound links across all five sites. I import this database into Excel. I sort the links for each of the five sites analyzed, and look to see if any one site has inbound links that none of the others have, and if so, I look at those links first. I then notice that one of the five has the following collection of inbound links, and none of the other sites do.

Have a look and tell me what you see.

Without having to visit any of the below sites, I’ll argue all day long that this is 100% manipulated, spam, junk, rank-chasing link building at its most pointless. Note that I am including only about 10% of the inbound links I found, and I *’d out some letters in the URLs so as not to embarrass the site owners.

http://www.****rawler.com/links.htm

http://www.****ht.org/web_links.htm

http://www.si****planning.net/links.html

http://www.as****sionplanners.com/links.html

http://www.cvna****.com/links.php

http://structured-s****ments.fine-information.com/links/

http://www.wiz****om/de/links/

http://www.st****-your-settlement.net/links/

http://read.in****s.com/structuredsettlements/links/

http://www.hotinf****com/structured-settlements/links/

http://www.revi****buyhub.com/structured-settlements/links/

http://www.fir****.co.uk/links/

http://www.so****ddrealestate.com/links

http://blog.all****ice.com/links/

http://thehomebuyi****ter.com/wordpress/category/links/

http://www.he****nder.com/links.htm

http://www.es****ate.co.uk/links_society.htm

http://www.sp****engl****nslations.com/links.htm

http://www.w****y.com/links.asp

http://www.cli****uirs.com/links/

http://www.ami****bles.com/links/

http://easts****business.com/links.htm

http://www.plat****kc.com/links.html

http://www.ro****.com/links.asp

http://www.key****bi.com/links/

http://www.i****entinrealty.com/links/

http://www.****i.com/links

http://www.ro****e.com/links

http://www.msre****.com/links.htm

http://www.jacks****mes.biz/links.htm

http://www.t****talk.com/links/

http://www.the****yteam.com/links.asp

http://www.ml****rities.com/links.php

http://www.****sta****utions.com/links.shtml

http://www.ro****e.com/links/

http://www.d****seed.com/links.htm

http://www.fo****ah.com/links.html

http://altam.****.com/investmentlinks.html

http://www.****results.com/links.html

http://www.bl****its.com/blinks/trust

http://membe****roperties.com/590/index.asp?page=links.html

http://www.hosteri****so.com/topsites200000/links

http://www.al****m.com/wp/2007/04/14/links

http://dot****s.net/headlines/tags/links/

http://www.m****.com/links.php

http://www.****operties.com/links.htm

http://www.r****state-tacoma.com/links/

http://www.r********sible.com/links/

http://www.re****ve****oguide.com/links/

http://www.al****m.com/wp/2007/04/14/links

http://www.bit****gets.com/helpful_links.htm

http://yo****net/Real-State/links/

http://www.hosiery-w*********.com/links2.html

Sure, a few of them might be on-topic and of some possible value to somebody somewhere. However, there’s a lot of fishy looking sites and URLs there, along with oddly similar file and sub-directory naming conventions. When I see one site with hundreds of similar inbound links originating from fairly indiscriminate links pages, and none of the other sites have anywhere close to that number, I know I’ve found the link manipulator who is seeking to improve rank without regard to quality or value. Did you notice the last one listed above is about hosiery? Anyone want to hazard a guess as to what hosiery and self directed IRA’s have to do with each other? Bueller..? Bueller…? Bueller?

Is this exercise right every time? Probably not. And I’ll be the first to admit that you should dig deeper. The point here is once you become comfortable interacting and scanning thousands and thousands of inbound links across hundreds of web sites, you start to notice things. And if I can see it using a rudimentary Excel spreadsheet, then the engines can see it any time they decide they want to see it.

Originating inbound URLs leave telltale signs, paint a picture, sing a song. So don’t do it unless you are prepared to face the music.

Eric Ward has been in the link building and content publicity game since 1994 and is the Chief Link Evangelist for AdGooroo.

The next logical questions would be how many is too many and how fast is too fast? Three years ago this month I wrote a column for SearchEngineLand titled Aggressively Seeking Links: How Much Is Too Much?

Here we are a thousand days later, and you still find confusion among the SEO/SEM community as to what constitutes too many or too fast.

Here's my reasoning as to why there cannot be a concrete answer to this link speed question, and an example.

First, there are plenty of perfectly legitimate reasons a web site could attract a surge of a few hundred or even a few thousand new links, literally overnight or within a few days (more on that in a moment). Second, Twitter and blogs make link propagation fast and easy, both real and spammy. Third, for both a brand new web site or an old, link spikes can be totally legitimate, or completely manipulated. (note: some link builders make a distinction between a brand new domain with zero inbound links, versus an old site with an existing historical "link growth profile" that if it suddenly spiked, would raise a flag). But this distinction isn't so cut and dried. Just because a site is old doesn't mean it can't have a natural link spike. If I'm right, the bots have to be able to draw a distinction between the speed at which links are being attracted and the quality and intent of the sites providing those links. All links given are not equal, especially those that come like a hailstorm.

Examples? Four months ago, you'd never heard of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, and why would you have? There are thousands of oil rigs around the world. They don't have web sites. But when the Deepwater Horizon rig blew up, you heard about it, and web sites were launched about it, both brand new like http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com, and also brand new sections at existing (and very old) sites, like http://www.bp.com/claims. In fact, the BP claims section has over 20,000 links, and that URL now forwards to another URL which is also attracting links.

Neither of these URLs existed three months ago, so nobody could link to them.

I wouldn't be surprised if BP's various "claims" URLs have more total inbound links than any other interior content URL on the BP.com site, all of which have come within the past few months. Unnatural? Nope, not at all. Very real, very sad, and very natural. And I'm sure as soon as BP can, it will kill off those pages, rendering those thousands of links dead. It's ironic that the kind of news that can cause a natural link spike engenders the kind of links you might wish you didn't have.

Back on point, a new site as well as an old site with new content can easily and suddenly generate mass links, perfectly naturally.

This doesn't mean you can go buy or build links with reckless abandon, though. The key is the word “naturally.” As I have written before, every web site has a certain linking potential, yet some linking related occurrences are out of our control, like a site devoted to an oil spill finding itself in the linking spotlight due to a horrible accident. Any engine looking to penalize a site just because it has a huge number of links, or a sudden surge in new links, would have to have the ability to algorithmically recognize when those surges were natural, or manipulated. My belief is that isn’t as hard as it sounds. It’s one thing to attract links from a few thousand news, oil industry and environmental sites. It’s quite another to have thousands of links from sites that have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

I can tell you that spotting manipulated linking patterns isn’t as hard as some people think it is. Link Insight helps me see them almost immediately, and can help you do the same. This also must mean if the engines want to look for a suspicious linking pattern, they can find it. Not every time, but you’d be amazed what you notice when you look across a list with 25,000 URLs/links in it. Without even having to look at the sites themselves, I can often spot manipulated links. From the URLs alone you can spot link spam.

So the real answer to the question is that it’s not about how many or how fast. It’s all about how natural.

If it can be algorithmically trusted as being natural, there is no such thing as too many or too fast.

Does it ever seem like Google is a Greek goddess who demands libations from her followers? Google is supposed to be just a huge network of computers, right? It’s supposed to be completely logical and systematic, right? Still, sometimes you feel as though you’re constantly appeasing the search engine gods.

I’d be hard pressed to name any topic with more urban legends, flim flam men and mystical freaking voodoo than Search Engine Optimization.

You get sucked into all kinds of time-wasting activities, hoping they’ll someday pay off. If you’ve ever wondered what it was like to toss a damsel in the volcano hoping rain would come…. well, maybe you do know :^)

Eric Ward did link building for Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com Books back in the mid nineties, and I’ve arranged for him to do a free webinar on link building strategies that produce fast results, improved SEO rankings and free traffic.

In this webinar, he explains some dire pitfalls that most SEO guys sell as "really cool hot strategies." Some of these strategies will get you banned and almost none of them produce lasting results.

The webinar is below (it's in Quicktime format so it will also play on your iPod or iPad). I've also included a link to a 36-page "how to" manual for link building. This guide will show you how to add to and diversify your site traffic with two new sources of free traffic: (1) traffic from Google, and (2) traffic from the sites who link to you.

Enjoy!

Perry Marshall
Author, The Definitive Guide to Google AdWords

Download my 36-page link building guide (PDF)

Download links: iPhone | Desktop

There have been countless studies and "expert interviews" where people assign a rating to certain signals. But among the top SEOs and link builders, there is plenty of disagreement. There are people I have utmost respect for as link builders who I disagree with on a signal by signal basis.

This post today will mark the beginning of a series of posts devoted to link signals. The term link signals is itself a bit confusing. When I refer to link signals, I am referring to both the pages (URLs) on which links exist, as well as the coding and attributes of individual links on those pages.

There are potentially hundreds of signals that are given off by pages and links. Some of them you are likely quite familiar with, like follow/no follow, anchor text, or link age. Others you might never have heard of, like reciprocity ratio or non-duplicated geographic inbound dispersion(yes I did make that up but it's also real). Even link color might play a role. I'm glad the search engines are sophisticated enough to better recognize when any given signal can be gamed. It's really not very hard to create a completely engineered anchor text inbound link profile that is heavily peppered with your keywords. And that engineered anchor text sends a signal to the engines that might even help improve your search rank.

For a while. Then? Boom. As the engines get smarter, your engineered signals will be discovered, and it's game over. It happened back in the day with on-page signals, and it has happened with off-page signals for years. Remember when directory signals were devalued? That was a painful moment for anyone who was foolish enough to base a linking strategy on something anyone could do.

Paid links are in the cross-hairs today. It can be very difficult for a bot to detect signals that indicate a link was paid for, and one of the bigger myths is that search engines have told marketers that buying links was was a violation of quality guidelines. A bought link may in fact have plenty of signals that indicate it can be trusted. No signal exists in a vacuum, either. You can't just look at a sites' anchor text without also looking at other signals to see if the site paying for that link can be trusted.

And this brings me to the great follow/nofollow debate. For those new to this, here's a backgrounder from Wikipedia. Put as simply as possible, if a link on a web page has the rel="nofollow" attribute, then search engines do not give that link credit that affects that page's organic search position. A real life explanation would be if I have a high ranking web page and I link to your site from it, this is supposed to cause your site to rank higher. But, if I insert rel="nofollow" into the html a href tag, this negates the potential of that link to help your site rank higher.

Here is where I think things can get confusing. If a link is nofollowed, then the engines do not give it credit and do not "hear" the signal the link sends. Nofollow is a muffler, right? Yes, but if I am running a search engine, and if my goal is to produce the best possible search results, do I really want to be at the mercy of millions of individual webmasters and page creators? Will they really all implement the nofollow attribute correctly on a link by link basis? What percentage of the billions of content creators around the world even know what nofollow means? What percentage of them are using a CMS that inserts (or doesn't) a nofollow tag automatically, and they don't even know it? And if we just look at the upper crust of web content, the absolute best of class content produced by the most brilliant minds, what is the likelihood those folks have ever heard of link attributes at all?

And this is where these truths lead me. A search engine can follow whatever the heck it wants to follow, if it feels the link will help it produce a more accurate and useful search result. No search engine dependent on an algorithm created by hundreds of genius PhD's can turn control of that algorithm over to the web masses via a hoped for perfect implementation of an arcane little known tag attribute. That's just plain silly.

Real world example. When I do a search for photosynthesis at Google, I get over 20 million results. Front and center is the Wikipedia entry. Out of 20 million possible pages, Google feels this is the best place to start, and I can't argue with them. Now, we know Wikipedia links are nofollowed (as they should be to hopefully keep that spam away). At the same time, let's think through this algorithmic logic.

- If Nofollow works perfectly and with 100% certainty, then...

- Google is displaying a page from Wikipedia as being the best page out of 20 million results, but...

- Any links on that page are of no algorithmic value to Google.

And that makes no sense whatsoever. It's like saying Albert Einstein was the smartest man in the world, inviting him to the head of the table, and then claiming every single thing he says can't be trusted.

A more likely scenario is what I believe to be the case. As I stated earlier, any search engine can choose whatever it wants to choose as the signals that produce the best result. Regardless of what we do or DON'T put in the source code, the bots have a job to do, and that job is often at odds with content publishers and web marketers.

As a link builder, I have never let the existence of any attribute impact my choice of link target. For me, it has and will ALWAYS be about relevancy and intent of the content where I am seeking the link. And scoff if you wish, but I have also seen rankings improvement even though some inbound links have been nofollowed. While I have absolutely no proof that any search engine does in fact ignore nofollow, it would seem to me that if other signals indicate they should, then they will. There job is to produce the best results, not police the links on the web. It just so happens they've ended up having to do one to accomplish the other.

In this presentation from our July 20, 2010 webinar, Eric Ward covers five key tactics to help increase your odds for success when seeking high trust links. Using case studies, Eric explains common and easy mistakes you can make that hurt your chances of getting links, as well as the tactics that give you the greatest chance for success.

Download this presentation (Subscriber content)

Read the full article here

To add monitoring capabilities to a new or an existing keyword group, navigate to the "Manage Accounts" page, select your group (or create a new one) and click on the "Search Engines and Regions" tab.

1. Streamlined setup wizard: we've combined the three separate search tabs (keyword, domain, and competitors) into a simpler, one page search form. This should be much more intuitive for new users.

2. Configurable spam sensitivity threshold: The first page of the setup wizard now allows you to adjust the sensitivity of the spam filtering more or less aggressive depending on your preferences. This will be particularly useful for those of you in spammy verticals, such as personal injury or auto insurance.

3. Cocitation 0 links will now be filtered to include only trust >= 1 links This was done to reduce the amount of off-target URLs displayed in the report.

4. Default sort order - all detail tabs will now have a default sort order of "cocitation descending". This brings up the most active URLs to the top of each report.

5. "To Contact" added to workflow states - You may now tag a URL as "to contact", which is intended to flag URLs which are candidates but have not been contacted yet.

6. Email Alerts - And finally, we have added two optional AdAlerts to let you know when you gain or lose a link. You can choose to receive these alerts either via email or RSS feed.

A special thanks goes out to our clients who provided the feedback which motivated these new updates!