GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 41 - July 2018

ume of traffic multiplied by proportion of traffic from organic search. Aside: Why don’t I use SEM Rush? If SEM Rush allowed me to do bulk analysis of lists of domains — i.e., if it behaved a bit like Majestic, Ahrefs and Moz, but gave me SEM Rush search metrics — then I would use SEM Rush. In theory, I could use SEM Rush, but I would have to spend $399 a month for API access. Then I would have to build a tool to query the data or use URLprofiler at around $200 a year to get ranking data, whereas Digimetr costs me roughly $2 USD per 1,000 queried domains. Getting back to my main thread: I have a list of domains that I believe Google trusts, and the next job is to make sure they go on pages that have decent “internal page rank.” For these internal link metrics, I use Majestic, but any of the main link analysis tools will do. I’ll use “citation flow,” since it’s a close assimilation of the original Google page rank algorithm. Observations on link sources: I’m constantly impressed with SAPE. (If you don’t know what that is, do some research.) “Spam” link sellers have a surprisingly large number of ranking domains on their books, but agreeing on placements is chal- lenging when there are so many cultural and language barriers. You’re probably asking: If you’re buying links fromsuch bad sources, aren’t you worried about a penalty? And what about link toxicity? This leads to the question: Is there such a thing as a bad link? I don’t believe there is. Why? If Google attributed a negative value to a link and if the SEO community worked out which were the truly toxic links, all you would need to do is point a large number of toxic links and you could kill the rankings for a website. If this kind of negative SEO became widespread, there would be unbelievable damage to the quality of Google’s search results. Links Are Dead - Long Live Links Illustration by Sammby/Shutterstock 35 W W W . G P W A T I M E S . O R G