I’m a pretty big fan of LinkedIn and use it often. If you haven’t heard of LinkedIn it is a social network for business and I highly recommend you join. You can use it to find answers to business questions, jobs, employees, and make connections that can help you with a lot of search engine marketing projects. And if you want to add me my profile is here. Let me know if you have any questions.

PageRank sculpting refers to the act of using nofollow tags on internal site links to focus page strength or link strength to the pages and anchor text that a site owner wants in a search engine. Over the last few months this has been a tricky subject with it being recommended by some and warned against by others. Comment discussions at Sphinn, SEL and SEJ has been long and lethal and a few days ago SEO Scientist posted an article reporting that it might have caused a brief penalty for a site in combination with other flags.

We emailed 10 SEO experts and asked them two questions about PageRank sculpting:

Question 1. Do you use “rel=nofollow” on internal site structure for your sites and or clients?

Question 2. Do you think the use of “rel=nofollow” tags internally is a giant red flag to Google that on its own, or in combination with other flags, might cause a penalty or problems?

Huge thanks to everyone that responded, here are the answers we got in the order received:

Joost de Valk’s answer:

1. Yes, for myself AND for clients (and large ones at that).

2. Well it might cause a look from a search quality agent, but if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to loose. It is VERY hard to do right though, and in my experience, most people claiming it’s a penalty have just been doing something wrong, in the process taking too much link juice away from pages they needed to rank .

Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim’s answer:

1. Yes, very occasionally and very carefully. My favourite use of nofollow is for useless anchor text. If I have a page with two links pointing to the same destination, one with the anchor text “services” and the other with “search engine optimization services,” you can guess which one will have the nofollow added.

2. No. I’ve not seen it myself and would guess that other “flags” are causing the problems.

DazzlinDonna of SEO Scoop’s answer:

1. Yes, but in a limited fashion. I think the use of NoFollow for forums or community sites is important so that all of the juice isn’t flowing to member profiles, etc. If you have 50,000 member profiles, you really don’t want to waste all of your juice on those pages, especially since most of those pages will be almost exactly alike (and may include links to bad neighborhoods as well). For many forum and community scripts, the script itself may automatically NoFollow such pages. (Note: In some community sites, the member pages ARE the main pages of the site, so of course, you DO want juice flowing to those pages, and would NOT want to NoFollow them.)

Likewise, extremely large sites can make use of NoFollow for the same reason – keeping juice from flowing to thousands of non-essential pages such as near-duplicate content from printable views, etc. Those are the exceptions in my book, however. The vast majority of sites don’t fit into those molds, and really don’t need to devote time to using NoFollow for PR sculpting purposes.

2. If the page-sculpting isn’t standard then…maybe. If a popular forum or community script automatically slaps NoFollow on certain pages, then no, it would be ridiculous for Google to even think of that as being worthy of a second look. However, any SEO footprint that is out of the norm has the potential for causing Google to stop and take a closer look. If the use of NoFollow makes sense in that it is being used in the ways Matt Cutts has described as being useful, then I wouldn’t be concerned at all. However, if you are already doing a few things that might put your site on shaky ground, then certainly adding one more SEO footprint might be the tipping point to getting noticed, and then penalized.

Keep in mind that any significant changes to a site OF ANY SORT could cause Google to stop and take a second look. So, sure, adding a ton of NoFollows one day could make rankings fluctuate as Google wonders if the site is still trustworthy. Then again, adding a ton changes of any other kind could affect rankings in the same way. So, if someone is noticing fluctuations, it may be due to large site changes in general, and not necessarily the act of applying NoFollows. In addition, you may *think* you’ve done a good thing by applying NoFollows, but you may have accidentally borked the flow of PR in a way you hadn’t anticipated. So perhaps the changes you made actually stopped the flow to some important pages, and you haven’t even realized that.

Summary: Some situations make the use of NoFollow a NoBrainer. Large sites, forums, and communities probably warrant the use of NoFollow in certain ways. Most sites don’t warrant the use of NoFollow, however, and worrying about sculpting PageRank flow on those sites is mostly a waste of time. In some limited circumstances, using NoFollow might be just enough of a tipping point to get an already-shaky site noticed, but for that matter, any SEO footprint could do the same.

Caveman SEO Consulting’s answer:

1. Almost never.

2. The question IMHO is, should people use nofollow attributes on internal links to “sculpt PageRank” and generally I think that the answer is “no.” The Google Web Spam team works to stop people from “cheating.” So, is it “cheating” to add the nofollow attribute to links pointing to photo galleries with no text and unoptimized pages? I would think not, since you’re keeping essentially duplicate, unrankable pages out of the index.

But is it “cheating” to add the nofollow attribute to a couple of sitewide nav links to refocus more link equity into critical parts of the site? The question is debatable, and to some extent depends upon degree, the intent of the site owner, and the perceptions of a search engineer. Based on the patterns of thinking I’ve seen from Google in the past six or seven years, I suspect they think that altering the nature of sitewide nav links for ranking purposes could indeed be cheating.

Matt has made some comments that lead people to believe that the use of nofollow attributes at the link level is not cheating. The problem is, people have a tendency to take individual comments out of context. Like most coding elements, it’s all down to how you do it.

Knowing that it is not hard for the search engines to identify nav links on a site: If you’ve got a site with, say, 15 sitewide nav links to core sections and pages, and suddenly a third of those are modified with the nofollow attribute at the link level…would that raise a red flag? How about two thirds? I have to believe that at some point it’s an issue.

So for me the question is, why use it? Personally I think it started as a way for the engines to get site owners to do their work for them. Now it’s evolving into a sort of link level site sculpting tool, and it’s hard not to regard it as a possible means of abuse. Using it when there are other equally effective options available makes no sense to me.

There have been a very few cases when we have recommended it to clients, when there was just no other easy alternative. But we recommend it rarely, and regard it as a last resort. Basically, with a few unusual exceptions, if your site is unable to achieve top rankings without using nofollow to sculpt PageRank, you might be better off rethinking what’s going on with the site.

Rand of SEOmoz’s answer:

1. Yes, we absolutely use nofollow to sculpt the flow of search engines link juice through a site, and have done so both on our own domain and recommended for nearly all of our clients (which includes companies like Yelp, FastCompany, Inc, Village Voice Media Group (which owns 17 national papers), NPR, Seattle Children’s Hospital, Farecast, AllBusiness, and many more.

2. No. I believe that Matt Cutts and the other search engine representatives certainly would not penalize for the use of nofollow internally after specifically noting that this was an approved SEO technique. After all, this is simply a new way to use a very old process. Webmasters since the late 90’s have used javascript links, links in Flash, links in iFrames that were blocked by robots.txt, etc. so flow link juice through a site. The concept that suddenly, nofollow would trigger negative attention is not only paranoid, but would necessarily mean that the search engine representatives are directly lying to the webmaster community.

Jane Copland of SEOmoz’s answer:

1. Previously answered by Rand.

2. It’s something I’ve been taking quite an interest in lately. I read that post over at SEO Scientist this morning, actually, and it surprised me… I hadn’t heard – and still like to think I haven’t heard – any definitive evidence that using nofollow for PageRank Sculpting acts as a red flag to Google. In fact, in this interview with Matt Cutts that Rand conducted in 2007 suggests the complete opposite. In the interview, Matt says:

The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt’ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There’s no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow’ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don’t even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.)

However, that interview took place in August, 2007, and there is no reason why Google hasn’t “changed its mind” or modified its views on the practice. If they’ve seen significant manipulation to the extent that their search results are compromised, I see no reason why they’d put an end to any tactic, no matter whether they’ve approved it in the past or not. We saw something similar happen quite recently with the badge and widget-bait debate.

As for using nofollow on our sites or those of our clients, we do it at SEOmoz (have a look at any of our pages with the nofollow display Greasemonkey plugin) and I use it on various sites of my own. I’ve also recommended clients use it and recommended it to PRO members at SEOmoz. In two instances, I noticed an increase in SERP placement after carefully nofollowing certain navigational links. The two most popular stories I hear regarding the use of internal nofollow is that search traffic either doesn’t change or gets better. I have never before heard of it getting significantly worse.

Like I said, I’m not convinced that it’s a dangerous practice, but I’m of course open to new evidence, as Google will undoubtedly change the way it views most of our optimisation tactics at one point or another.

Aaron Wall of SEO Book’s answer:

1. If a content management system (like a blog) has nofollow in it by default then yes I leave those links there. Otherwise I generally do not use nofollow much on most of my sites because I generally think Google engineers despise SEOs, and since I am well known as an SEO and have had an engineer hand edit one of my sites before I feel that using nofollow is just another way to put a kick me sign on my sites.

2. I think it is a red flag if you are…
- a small publisher with limited reach on a commercially focused site (especially if you are in a spammy or seedy niche)
- an affiliate (the thinner you are the higher the risk)
- a well known SEO (Google hates you)
- or just about any publishing/arbitrage play where you are not an obvious leader in your category, you do not have a well known brand, and/or you have not spent millions on branding, public relations, & advertising.

If you are a corporation you are OK to spam, but Google engineers get their kicks by crushing small webmasters. They keep the web safe and healthy by policing smaller players, hoping that this consolidates traffic against larger corporations which will grow dependant on Google traffic, and will end up easily swayed by Google’s business interests. Short term the corporations are not well policed so that they can become addicted to free traffic, but after many of the smaller players have been driven off the web (largely in the next 5 years) Google will start policing the profits out of corporations too.

Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting’s answer:

1. We do use NoFollow on selected elements of web sites, whether they be ones that we publish for ourselves, or on our client sites. We use them judiciously, to simply cut down PR flow to no value pages. For example, your “Contact Us” page, or your “About Us” pages.

We don’t completely cut these pages off by the way. We just link to them without a NoFollow from the home page only. We think they should still show up in the search engines. They just don’t need to be considered the most important pages on the site.

2. No I don’t think it’s a giant red flag. In the interview I did in September with Matt Cutts he openly recommended that NoFollow be used as a tool in this fashion. He also made similar comments in an interview he did with Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz. We have never had any problem with it on any of the sites we work on.

However, SEO is a VERY complicated science, so there could well be scenarios where this could be a flag. In particular, it could flag the publisher as being SEO savvy. This is not inherently bad, but if there are other signals that merit the attention of someone at Google, it could be used as an indicator that would increase the chance of a human review.

For example, if you had several potential signals about your site, it could be an additional signal that would increase the chance of a report. Or, if you are using a lot of NoFollows, and your competitor reports you for buying links, it could be an extra flag to look at a site more closely.

In spite of the SEO Scientist report, I doubt that there is a standalone algorithmic penalty for using NoFollow like this. There must be something else going on as well. We have simply used this on too many sites with no problem at all. Bear in mind, though, that our approach to SEO is as white hat as it gets.

As a final note, I also don’t believe that Matt would publicly make the recommendations that he has, if it was fundamentally a bad thing to do.

Branko of SEO Scientist’s answer:

1. I have presently taken off all of the nofollow attributes from our clients’ sites, after the bad experience I had. Additionally, not all our client’s sites need nofollowing. I am using nofollow on some of my test sites, but that is for research purposes only, testing in which cases nofollow helps and in which cases it actually hurts the site.

2.Is it a GIANT red flag ? I don’t think so. After all, Google themselves said it is OK to use it and I don’t believe that Matt would purposly mislead anyone. Is it a signal that could be used in combination with other signals, definitely yes. I think that it is important do discern penalties from filters here: filters are more automatic and can be keyword and even country specific. Since they are automatically applied, I believe that there is some kind of negative point system that accumulates for each site that is doing things Google deems manipulative. Selling links gives you X negative points, over-optimization gives you Y negative points, etc. Of course each of those penalties could be invoked manually, but I think the majority of them are automatic. Once you reach a negative point threshold the filter gets applied and your site goes down by X places (-60, -900, whatever). In this model, I do believe nofollowing your navigational links extensively could serve as a signal.

Neil Patel of Pronet Advertising’s answer:

1. Yes, I do use them internally for my sites as well as client sites. It is a great way to control PR.

2. I don’t think it would cause any problems or raise any flags. I have been doing it for a while and have not run into any problems yet.

Thanks to all the SEO experts who contributed their time and knowledge to this question!

Matt Cutts And What Google Says About PageRank Sculpting…

So the first question we need to answer is what does Google, i.e. Matt Cutts, specifically say about PageRank sculpting?

In August 2007 Rand of SEOmoz did a fantastic interview with Matt Cutts and asked the very direct question:

“Does Google recommend the use of nofollow internally as a positive method for controlling the flow of internal link love?”

Matt Cutts responded with:

“The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt’ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There’s no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links…”

This was followed in October 2007 with a posting on Google Groups and an interview with Eric Enge of Stone Temple on the subject. In the Google Groups post by Matt Cutts Aaron asked him “What are some appropriate ways to use the nofollow tag other than to protect against blog comment spam?” Matt responded with this post and here is the key part:

“What are some appropriate ways to use the nofollow tag? One good example is the home page of expedia.com. If you visit that page, you’ll see that the “Sign in” link is nofollow’ed. That’s a great use of the tag: Googlebot isn’t going to know how to sign into expedia.com, so why waste that PageRank on a page that wouldn’t benefit users or convert any new visitors? Likewise, the “My itineraries” link on expedia.com is nofollow’ed as well. That’s another page that wouldn’t really convert well or have any use except for signed in users, so the nofollow on Expedia’s home page means that Google won’t crawl those specific links.

Most webmasters don’t need to worry about sculpting the flow of PageRank on their site, but if you want to try advanced things with nofollow to send less PageRank to copyright pages, terms of service, privacy pages, etc., that’s your call. “

And the interview with Stone Temple Consulting Matt Cutts goes over the same issue. Eric Enge asks some really great questions on how it is all handled and here is what Matt has to say:

“Matt Cutts: Another good example is, maybe you have a login page, and everybody ends up linking to that login page. That provides very little content value, so you could NoIndex that page, but then the outgoing links would still have PageRank.

Now, if you want to you can also add a NoFollow metatag, and that will say don’t show this page at all in Google’s Index, and don’t follow any outgoing links, and no PageRank flows from that page. We really think of these things as trying to provide as many opportunities as possible to sculpt where you want your PageRank to flow, or where you want Googlebot to spend more time and attention.

Conclusion and Confusion Over Google’s Stance

Google’s message seems to be pretty clear on this issue. I think the problem is this seems to contradict their previous actions as well as possibly Google’s Quality Guidelines. Google says to make “pages primarily for users, not for search engines” and asks webmasters to ask themselves “would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?” and “Does this help my users?” All those statements seem to contradict to some degree what Matt is saying about PageRank sculpting. Maybe they need to write a new guidelines section entitled “Guidelines For Advanced Webmaster Practices” which explains what is allowed when tweaking your site for what search engine’s see and how they attribute link weight.

June 2008 Update From Google

Google issued several changes along what everyone was complaining about! First they posted new guidelines on the nofollow tag and they changed their mission statement to say that you should design primarily for people but also help serach engines. Good update that helps to clear up some of the misconceptions.

References Articles On PageRank Sculpting – In rough order of mention…

SEOmoz posted an in depth article on using PageRank sculpting on their site and the results. It very clearly helped boost their traffic and the rank of the pages they wanted. A must read if you are going to follow this path.

The SEO Scientist wrote a wonderful article entitled Anatomy of a Google Filter/Penalty (or how not to do nofollow PR sculpting). In the article he believes that there is a chance that PageRank sculpting, together with other manipulations on his site, caused a filter that then caused a penalty. Great read and graph of the timeline of the problem.

SEOmoz interview with Matt Cutts where he clearly explains what you can use NoFollow to do. Stone Temple interview with Matt Cutts on exactly what you can do and a lot of other great info. I highly recommend you read both of these interviews as they are fantastic! Great questions and detailed. Also be sure to read this Google Groups post by Matt Cutts on the same subject.

GrayWolf adds another positive vote to the use of PageRank sculpting with his post “Why there is nothing wrong with sculping your pagerank”. I love his writing style and some great user comments.

The Search Engine Journal posted a key article entitled NoFollow: An SEO Red Flag? Pages and pages of comment discussion on this one and a must read. And Sphinn off that article with discussion.

Hobo posted a very well put article on NoFollow tags saying he would not be using them for internal links but rather optimising his pages through other means. He wants to save nofollows for bad neighbourhoods.

Dave Naylor’s take on PageRank sculpting is that it is good on short tail but bad on long tail and good on slightly higher traffic but bad on overall rankings. A good read with his experiences and thoughts. Recommended if you are implementing on a long tail or e-commerce site possibly.

Joost wrote an excellent article entitled PageRank sculpting – Siloing and more! He makes a great point in that this is not a new tactic but rather just a new method that appears to be ok with Google. Very well written article.

SEO Fast Start wrote on their blog that it is a tactic they are using to get more pages indexed. They see the discussion as being one of discounting pages you don’t want indexed in order to give more weight and index space to those you do.

The SEO Theory blog makes the point that you can’t sculpt PageRank until you can see it. A good article with some interesting points about why Google is approving sculpting something that is semi invisible to webmasters.

Search Engine Land posted that you’d be wise to NoFollow this dubious advice in response to the argument. This is an excellent article about the slow move of the nofollow tag from being a no vote in the link to a hacked use in explaining the site hierarchy.

Alan asks “Should You Sculpt Your Google PageRank Via Internal “No Follow” Links?” This is a great summary of the argument and some solid comments on the bottom.

If I have forgotten a link to anyone or any article please let me know. It is never my intention and I apologize ahead of time if I did.

Google UK Ranking Factors – Not In Any Order Of Importance

1. Google Webmaster Central Region Targeting – Choose what country your site should be associated with (United Kingdom). Pretty self explanatory. I use Google Webmaster Central and don’t think it is part of Google’s master plan to take over the world but some people think otherwise. Just bear in mind you are giving more information to the monster.

2. Domain Ending – Having your domain end in .co.uk is a strong signal to search engines and people where your focus is. Using a .com, .net, or other domain ending is not the end of the world but if you have a choice go with a UK specific one.

3. Location Of Hosting – If you are targeting the UK make sure your web hosting company is based in the United Kingdom and their servers IPs trace back to the UK. To check on this just do a whois.sc on the hosting companies domain and look next to the “IP Location” bar.

4. Address And Phone On Site – Having a UK addresses and phone number on the contact page or footer of every page is a pretty clear signal to both humans and search engines.

5. UK specific Content And On Page Optimisation – This will happen naturally with UK spellings, keyword usage, and content on the region as you write. If you are focusing on a broader topic just try to include a post once in a while that mentions your area. So if you are talking about gaming make a post about how expensive the PS3 is in your home town of Nottingham.

6. Meta Tag For Country And Language – This probably has no impact on Google but I still recommend doing it just for the sake of good practices and other bots/engines that use it.

7. Links From UK Focused Sites Or Content – Links from sites Google believes are UK specific due to any of the above factors are going to be a huge factor. Directories that are listing United Kingdom businesses, local trade organizations, commerce organizations, any links from other .co.uk sites or sites that are clearly in that area will help. Links in content Google will deem UK specific and link anchor text can help too. For example a link called “London Plumber” instead of just Plumber would be nice to get.

8. Activity On Google Toolbar – If visitors to your site are from the UK the toolbar will track it along with some other factors and this might have a small impact. I am not sure how much of a factor it is currently and I remain undecided.

9. Listing In Google Local – Listing your business on Google’s local listings for the UK is a recommended move. Not a huge impact yet but that could change.

In terms of importance I would say that the key ones are links from UK specific sites and having content and keyword usage that reflects your location. Having your location and phone on the contact page or footer will also help. Having the domain end in .co.uk is going to be a big bonus and you basically want to hit as many factors as you can.

If you have any suggestions please leave a comment and I will add it.

Search engine marketing is a balance between optimising for search engines and optimising for people. The balance between those depends on your goals, immediate focus, and ethics. Here is what the yin and the yang of search engine marketing cover in the real world.

1. Optimising For Search Engines.

Everything done to optimise your site or brand so that you rank for keywords you deem applicable to your site on a search engine.

2. Optimising For People.

Optimising your site so that the content has incredible value for visitors, the highest degree of usability for those visitors, and harnesses the power of your visitors to spread your site’s marketing and information to places you never imagined.

Fred’s Online Pet Store – Real World Search Engine Marketing Example

All this lingo can get pretty old so lets take a look at a hypothetical example of how it all works. Fred runs an online store that sells pet related items and he is new to search engine marketing and not sure how it can benefit him. We are going to walk Fred through the process of applying it.

Analytics and Keyword Research
Looking at the info Fred has on visitors to his store is the first step as well as setting up any that are missing. He needs to know how people are getting to his site, which of those people are converting to customers, popular products, the value of running promotions, coupon usage, and a number of other useful measurements. Just by looking at what searches visitors are using to get to his site currently helps Fred to know which keywords He should be trying to rank for. For example Fred ranks for “buy dog food online” and visitors from that search are converting at a very high rate. Therefore it would probably be beneficial for him to rank for “buy cat food online”, “buy fish food online”, and other related phrases. Using this information Fred can start building a list of searches he would like to rank for and analyse future data that comes in.

Site Review, Structure, and Usability
A site review is needed to make sure the current site is optimised forsearch engines and people. This is an important part of SEO and after you have a ruff idea of what keywords you want to rank for you need to make sure your pages answer those search engine queries. This is core search engine optimisation and doing things like page rank sculpting, on page optimisation, tweaking title tags, content, and a number of other things. The human factor is also key as ranking for a keyword is worthless if your visitors can’t use the site or find value in it. For Fred usability means making sure that when a visitor who searched for “high protein dog food” lands on his page that question is answered with what the user needs. Or when a visitor comes to the main page they can easily understand the hierarchy of the site and how to get to what they need without being frustrated.

Conversions Focus
So now Fred knows what keywords he wants to rank for, his site is optimised for search engines, and the site’s usability has been improved so that the user experience is improved. He is ready to take the first step in the never ending process of increasing conversions. This is just an extension of usability and you want your customer to clearly know where to click to buy, easily checkout, and have clear communication about the purchase. Fred is now ready to increase traffic using pay per click, organic rankings, and the power of people because he knows he will be testing and aiming to convert the highest possible percentage of visitors into customers.

Pay Per Click and Landing Pages
Fred starts using Google Adwords to buy advertising under certain keyword searches on Google. He builds pages specific to those keywords so that user’s who click land on a page that has just what they were searching for and a clear click to buy button. Fred is happy as his traffic and income have increased. He also knows which keywords are converting and has an even better idea of what he would like to rank for in organic search.

Search Engine Optimisation and Link Building
Fred is ready to start getting more traffic from organic search. Just from the improvements from the site review Fred has increased traffic moderately but he wants to rank for the keywords that describe his site. Fred needs to show search engines he is the site that should be ranked first for those keywords and that he is the best choice in answering user’s searches. First Fred starts a blog on his e-commerce site and writes two posts a week, one that reviews a product he has in stock, and one on a pet subject of his choice. The search engines see this and trust him more because they see people linking to his posts, user’s visiting, and they give more credibility to his site. Next Fred builds a widget that let’s people choose what type of pet they have, the pet’s name, and choose an animated picture of their pet. Then they can add this to their blog or site and Fred’s store gets a small mention at the bottom of the widget. This builds user traffic and search engines see the widget as well. Next Fred finds the top 1,000 pet forums and sites and over the next few months works with them to build a name for his site, the search engines see this and trust him more. Slowly Fred is ranking for all his keywords as well as getting more and more traffic from the content he has created. Fred does not buy any links as he knows Google would have him killed for that.

Power of People, Linkbait, Affiliate Marketing, Social Media, and Viral Marketing
The widget Fred built has gotten super popular and people are using it all over the web, it is a good thing he added a small line to the bottom of the widget that told people they could add one to their site. By using each widget created to advertise he used the power of people to build a viral idea. Each widget that got added to a blog spread the idea and helped bring in massive amounts of traffic, links, and trust. Fred also has a talent for writing blog entries that really grab people’s attention, or linkbait. One of Fred’s best posts was “The 10 Worst Ways To Find Out Your Dog Pooped” and was filled with funny personal stories of finding dog poop on his bed in his closet. Bloggers loved it and links spread everywhere bringing him trust in the eyes of search engines and human traffic to his blog and store. Fred also started an affiliate program where he pays people to promote his products and gives them a small percentage of his profit. This has worked out great and his affiliates advertise in places he would never think to try and have written a lot of content about him. He also is using social media to bring in traffic and build his brand by offering his pet widget to FaceBook and MySpace user’s.

Branding, Building Trust, and Reputation Management
Fred doesn’t know it but his brand is already known and helping his conversion rate. People have seen his widgets with a link to his store as well as read an article on his blog at some point. Now when they go to buy pet supplies they go straight to his site or find it through a search engine but remember his name and feel good about ordering. Fred also keeps a close watch on any mention of his brand and site. He wants his reputation to remain stellar and if he sees any bad remarks he responds to help the person and make sure he leaves a positive footprint wherever his site is mentioned.

Community Building
Fred’s store is doing great and he had to buy a warehouse to hold all his pet supplies as well as hire a team of people to manage everything. If Fred wanted he could work to build more of a community around his blog and store by building a forum or a wiki on pets his visitors could all contribute too. He realizes he could even start a new site focusing on just pets and use it to advertise his store.

Conclusion
I hope that helps the people who are new to this. I kept this pretty general and tried to avoid the lingo that I am so used too. Please leave me a comment if you found it useful and with any tips you have.