The fixed link between Denmark and Germany is still in it’s planning phase, and is now starting to take shape.

Femern A/S is in charge of the designing and planning of a fixed link between Denmark and Germany across the Fehmarnbelt. They have just launched new websites, where you can follow the development and progress of this very big and exiting project.

The English site can be found on www.femern.com, and a Danish version are available on www.femern.dk.

OMMA Global New York is a very nice event, and 2009 was my third year at this conference. This year Social Media was really dominating the event.

I must say I was a little surprised to see how far social media has come since OMMA 2008. Social Media is no longer only theory and visions; it has been implemented widely by some of the big companies.

Ford Motor Company and social media

One of the highlights of OMMA Global was Scott Monty from Ford Motor Company. Scott is Head of social media at Ford Motor Company, and responsible for a lot of the impressive efforts Ford have made in the Social Media area. Ford is very active on Facebook, Twitter and other social media, and with a clear strategy.

Here is Scott’s presentation from OMMA. The PowerPoint presentation is not fully visible on the video, but can be found below on this page. Hope you enjoy Scott’s presentations.

Source: Mediapost

Scott Monty’s slides from Omma Global

We have always wanted test the dynamics of link building, as the dynamic effects sometimes can be rather dramatic, and even get you penalized by the search engines.

So we decided to use a little time on a small scale live test of link building to a new site. The results were quite interesting, and somewhat surprising.

The Link Building test

We did a small scale test on link building to a new Danish domain (.dk).

The links were build organically by making comments on random blogs covering the same topic as the site. The comments we did were on topic, and made individually for each comment – so no blog-spamming. We made comments on both nofollow and dofollow blogs.

During 2 months in the spring of 2009 we build 257 links to the site. The maximum number of links build in one day was 17, but most day’s five to ten links were made, and some days we were really lazy and nothing was done.

Search Engine link reports

We monitored the link building process with Yahoo Site Explorer and Google Webmaster Tools.

The link reports from Google and Yahoo are as you all know not always very accurate or consistent for that matter. So we wanted to check how these tools performed in a relatively controlled test.

Link building test – Results

The graph below show the links reported by the two tools. The first observation is that the links to the site increases very quickly after one month.

Our research showed this increase was indirect effects of the link building, as most of these links were additional links from the sites were the link building was done. The main source was links from “recent comments” widgets on the blogs, where we almost got a link per indexed page of the blog.

Actually the number of backlinks topped at 3500 links, where only 257 links were build, and only a few other links to the site were found in the link reports.

The graph also shows that Yahoo reports the links quicker than Google, but this is mostly due to the fact that Google only made a weekly update of the report in Webmaster tools. It also seems like Yahoo keep the links longer in the index, after the links are removed from the sites linking to our site.

Take Away

The most important take away is the dynamic effects of the link building i.e. the extra links created on the blogs in the form of links from “recent comments widgets” and other site wide links.

These links can really create a balloon effect in your link building, where you create 200 or more links by making one comment on a blog. These links are not permanent and could create problems with the search engines. Getting 3500 links in only two month on a new domain can easily catch the search engines attention, and get you penalized.

It’s therefore important to check the blogs out before you make the comments. If they have links in a “recent comments” widget then be careful, as you might get a link from every indexed page on this site, just from making one comment. If your site has many links, and is established then there is no problem, but if your site is new, with very few links, then 300 links from one site could get you into trouble with the search engines.

Footer links have for a long time been used to do simple PageRank sculpting. A lot of sites have links to the most important pages on the website, thus transfering PageRank to these pages.

Footer links: Do they transfer “full” PageRank?

In the beginning Google treated all links more or less equal. But the PageRank model is much more advanced these days, and a lot of people talk about the decreasing value of footer links, and other links placed outside the main text area.

I think it’s safe to say, footer links are loosing value, and Matt Cutts more or less confirms this in the video below. Not a clear answer, but still a clear indication that Google don’t like sculpting and other manipulation of the PageRank flows.

Mel Carson from Microsoft UK made an interview with one of the founders of Twitter, Biz Stone, at Cannes Lions 2009. As allways Mel Carson is doing a great job with the interview – so take a look, or visit Mel Carsons Blog.

File extensions are not used by everyone on the web. Some CMS systems don’t ad the file-extensions, others lets the webmaster decide if the extensions should be included in the URL’s.

But what does Google prefer? Matt Cutts from Google have made a short video on the topic, explaining how Google view file extensions.

Normally we recommend the use of file extensions in the URL’s. It’s a help to the search engine, and you are sure they don’t guess wrong, when the try to interpret the content on your website.

If you use a CMS system like WordPress then it’s not a big deal, Google are very good at indexing WordPress sites. But if your site is a little more customized, then it could help you to include the file extensions in the URL’s – even the .html.

We have experienced Google had problems with indexing of pictures on a website because we didn’t use file extensions on the files. When we changed this, a lot of pictures got indexed immediately. File extensions can make a difference!

PageRank sculpting can be a very efficient SEO-tool, but what is Google’s view on this topic?

Link sculpting or PageRank sculpting is when you optimize the internal link architecture on your website, so link juice (PageRank) flows to the most important pages on the site. These pages will then rank higher in Google, and you optimize the value of your link building efforts.

Matt Cutts from Google have made this short video about PageRank sculpting.

Google have started the PageRank update. Wednesday the 27th the first reports on changes in the Toolbar Pagerank got published. Last update happened around April 1st.

Early reports suggest a general downgrading of Twitter profiles, and otherwise the picture is more mixed.

PageRank is not important these days, but still it’s regarded as a indicator used in link building, and changes in PageRank still creates some attention.

Blogs get indexed by Google very fast. Sometimes it’s possible to get a post indexed by Google Blog Search within minutes, and even in the big web-index within very short time.

But does Blogs really get crawled more, and the pages on Blogs indexed faster?

Matt Cutts from Google have made this short video, where he explain how Google crawl and index normal websites and Blogs.

Reputation management using SEO was not very well known in Denmark until 2008, where a big financial scandal brought the topic to the media.

The IT Factory scandal
A company called IT Factory was closed down, after CEO the left the company, his wife and everything else on a business trip to Dubai.

People at that point began to investigate the CEO, Stein Bagger, and it turned out he had used a SEO firm to do reputation management. The SEO Company had optimized pages to push down negative posts and articles about the CEO.

From that day reputation management using SEO was a part of the PR toolkit even in Denmark. And with social media growing i’m sure reputation management will be a very important part of the SEO job in the years to come

David Naylor on reputation management
At Search Engine Strategies in London reputation management, and reputation management was one of the key topics.

The very competent and colourful SEO David Naylor spoke on reputation management at SES London 2009. Here is what he said when he was interviewed after the session.