Chapter 9: Scaling White Hat Link Building—Scaling Content

By Will Critchlow

Editor's Note: This post, which focuses on scaling high-quality content as part of a successful link building strategy, is even more relevant than when it was originally published on The Moz Blog more than two years ago (March 13, 2011). Since then, Google has rolled out more than a dozen updates to its Panda algorithm, which rewards websites that have informative, unique content. Google has also introduced Penguin, an algorithm that favors quality over quantity when it comes to backlinks, and penalizes overoptimized sites that employ spammy link building techniques.
The introduction of the rel=“author” attribute added yet another incentive for publishers to step up their game. Verifying Google Authorship adds an important level of trust to search results, and increases click-through rates for publishers who implement it in conjunction with a quality content creation strategy—not to mention that it humanizes authors and thought leaders, and rewards them individually with more exposure in the SERPs.

Although SEO is one of the “free” organic marketing channels, there is no doubt that competing with the biggest brands and most aggressive web marketers is not going to be free. In fact, it could be very expensive. I won't be sharing ways to compete with the link buyers for free with no effort, but I will be sharing real strategies that brands can use when they need to step it up a notch. In this chapter, I focus on one particular type of strategy—namely, creating scalable content.

Scalable Content

If you haven't already read the article in Wired Magazine about how Demand Media operates (www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_demandmedia), I can't recommend it highly enough. Even (or perhaps especially) in light of the Panda/Farmer update, I think it is important to think about how you would operate if you had to do what Demand Media does at this scale. Even more importantly, we should all look for the lessons we can learn that will make us better at what we do.

Editor's Note: Demand Media is a content and social media solutions company that commissions freelancers to produce content on subjects that it has identified as having a high ROI using its proprietary algorithm. Content usually provides advice of a “how-to” nature, and is posted on a number of highly visible sites, including eHow (www.ehow.com), YouTube (www.youtube.com), Trails.com, and Cracked.com. For information about Demand Media's other products and services visit their website at http://demandmedia.com.

© 2012 Condé Nast

It strikes me that there are three particularly notable aspects to the Demand process: cost, scale, and quality.

Cost

“(I)t's fast, cheap, and good enough.”

The Wired piece was written before the recent Google update, and this sentiment is, in any case, debatable. Nonetheless, it's clear that there are major cost-saving efficiencies to be gained versus the process many of us use to create content.

Scale

“Demand will be publishing 1 million items a month, the equivalent of four English-language Wikipedias a year.”

This fact is interesting regardless of what you think of the quality of Demand's content—it's an amazing feat and there has to be something we can learn from it.

Quality

“… every algorithm-generated piece of content produced 4.9 times the revenue of the human-created ideas.”

There are clearly things computers are better at than humans. One of these is mining data for patterns to see what is successful.

One of my long-running wish list ideas is a database of great headlines—based largely on offline media—that is categorized by predicted effectiveness. Have you ever stopped to look at the headlines on consumer magazines and compared them month over month? I feel like I should give credit for that tip—but I can't remember where it came from—perhaps Todd Malicoat's suggestion of a headline “swipe file” (www.stuntdubl.com/2007/01/12/linkbaiting-hooks)? Anyway, in a similar fashion, to I'd love to be able to run something like the following code to generate a list of keyword-rich headlines on a particular topic.

References

“Google's Farmer/Panda Update: Analysis of Winners vs. Losers,” The Moz Blog, March 3, 2011 (www.moz.com/blog/googles-farmer-update-analysis-of-winners-vs-losers)

What's This All Have to Do with Link Building?

While “links” are pretty easy to understand, “link building” is a phrase that actually covers dozens of potential approaches and tactics. The consistent themes are:

• [WHAT]—a piece of content receives the link

• [WHO]—someone places the link

• [WHERE]—a piece of content contains the link

I would argue that there is not a single white hat link-building technique that would not benefit from better content either in the what or the where. And for every link that is not the result of a very close relationship or exceptional piece of evergreen content/functionality, scaling will come from either creating a greater volume of content for your own site, or creating greater volumes of content to appear elsewhere.

I will leave it as an exercise for the interested reader to think about the various forms of “good” links that you could get more of if only you had a stream of great content.

Great Content?

Well, while we are trying to learn from Demand Media, I'm not necessarily talking about emulating them. Especially if we are creating content for link building, the bar we're reaching for needs to be a little higher.

My research shows that on average, across my sample, a piece of Demand Media content gathers links at less than 10 percent of the rate a piece of BBC or New York Times content does. A December 2010 story on BBC regarding evidence that Neanderthals cooked and ate vegetables (www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12071424), for example, has links from almost 4,000 unique domains!

So, we know we need to raise the bar. The question is “how” do we do it?

I think the answer looks something like:

• Use only great writers.

• Apply quality control at multiple stages of the process.

• Automate what you can.

• Fill the content hopper intelligently, based on what the Linkerati really wants.

• Don't be afraid to scale.

Here's how I think this pans out in more detail.

Use Only Great Writers

We have some great writers on our team (in my opinion), but when we start talking about increasing scale, it doesn't always come with full-time employees. My mantra for this is that we want to be a model agency for writers when we are doing this kind of work. Whereas many of the writing services I've come across seem to be more like marketplaces, we want to behave more like a model agency. Model agencies don't just take on anyone—they have a selection process to make sure candidates have the looks, attitude, and skills to succeed. We don't just want people who can string a sentence together; we want people who can make words sing.

This does affect the cost part of the equation. You simply can't achieve this at the rates Demand is paying. By paying many times as much (as much as freelance journalist rates in many cases), we can create the selective environment we are seeking.

Quality Control

A benefit of the “model agency” approach is that you can apply much of the quality control early in the process to the writer instead of the writing. Once you are confident in the skills of the writer, the quality control can become much more light-handed. As even high-profile journalists have proven, however, you can never give up quality control entirely. We think about three kinds of quality control:

• Automated (see the following section)

• “Second opinion” from another writer

• Editorial review from a dedicated editor or consultant (or, occasionally, a client)

Automation

Much of the automation we have layered onto this process is driven from third-party APIs that make it easy to do relatively complex things. We already have a workflow, plagiarism checking, the ability of qualified writers to select the jobs they want, and automated Google Doc sharing based off the workflow/approval process.

Future automation might also include these features:

• Additional quality checks (spelling, reading level, etc.)

• Headline suggestion/refinement tools for consultants

• Resource suggestion for writers (useful links, a la Zemanta (www.zemanta.com), images, videos, etc.)

• Better notification and alerting around the process and deadlines

• Additional services such as transcription

Filling the Hopper with Good Content

At the moment, generating good content is probably the least-thought-out part of our system. In contrast to the apparently almost-fully-automated Demand system, we are still at the stage of having our consultants (in conjunction with clients and writers) suggest and decide upon the specific content to be written.

In contrast to Demand, whose model targets keyword volume, I think our hopper should be filled with link-worthy content ideas. Perhaps this starts to look like a traditional newsroom.

Scaling

As I started thinking about how to scale content, one of my first thoughts was to emulate the industries that have been scaling content for decades. News organizations have been refining the systems and processes needed to address several tasks:

• Gather ideas from a diverse set of sources.

• Write copy using both staff writers and freelancers.

• Apply quality control.

• Write compelling headlines.

I think we can learn several lessons from examining the work of masters. My wife is a journalist, and these are some of the things that have impressed me most about her team:

• It turns out that the people who are good at quality control are often good at writing headlines (they're called copy editors or sub-editors).

• A small core team can manage a large volume of high quality output using a team of trusted freelance writers.

• The person writing the copy isn't necessarily the same person that decides the topic or the same person who writes the headline.

However, I do think there are some things many journalists could learn from the geeks among us—mainly lessons about the utility of web apps:

• Version control—one of the first things I built into our spec was the ability to see who had made which change to a draft and when. I was amazed to learn that this simple feature (present in such ubiquitous software as Microsoft Word and Google Docs) is not standard on all news desks.

• Project management apps—for similar reasons, there is often no end-to-end system managing the process of where everything is in the system. One of the things I wanted our system to have was a simple way for all interested parties to see the status of everything. In my mind, this includes:

• Editors/owners being able to see all outstanding jobs

• Writers having their own dashboards to see what they are working on

• Consultants having project dashboards

• Finance having reports on spend (both across the board and on specific projects)

References

“CORRECTING THE RECORD: Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Deception,” The New York Times, May 11, 2003 (http://mz.cm/15NGTfy)

Do We Have All This Stuff?

The short answer is “no.” We have made big leaps forward in automation, but we still aren't hitting the lofty heights we'd love to achieve when it comes to quality, or scaling at the volume we know we need to be doing. As we put significant five-figure monthly spends through the system, however, we learn the patterns that will enable us to be more successful in the future.