SEO Link Building with Clusty
For those looking for sites to target for link building efforts, Rob Sullivan at Text Link Brokers has been looking at ways to identify such authority hubs outside of the normal Google search result identification methods. Last week Rob looked into identifying authority link sites via Ask.com‘s ExpertRank algorithm and today he published a useful piece on using clustering engines such as Vivisimo’s Clusty for finding and identifying such sites.
Rob writes in his post, Using Clustering Technology to find hub authority links:
“Clusty is a clustering search engine. It is very similar to Ask in that it shows clusters of results, and allows you to easily navigate between clusters.
In fact, Clusty actually uses and displays clusters in its search results opposed to Ask that hides most of the clustering from users and only displays a selection via the widen or narrow search options.
If you want a true clustering engine, I’d recommend Clusty because it is fast and easy to use.
But, there is also great potential for link building through Clusty because of its clustering abilities.
You see, much like Ask, Clusty will organize results into groups called clusters. The following quote comes from Clusty’s site: “Thus a search for ‘pearl’ organizes the top 250-500 results into subject folders such as Jewelry, Pearl Harbor, Pearl Jam, Steinbeck Novel and Daniel Pearl.”
That means that not only has Clusty grouped results, but it has also applied similar ranking algorithms to those results ensuring that the “best” sites show up at the top. “
And besides identifying the authority sites under an obvious subject cluster, Rob writes that Clusty can open up your linking campaign to new and previously unconsidered opportunities in site optimization:
For example, let’s say I work for an office supply company. Of course, my first query will be for “office supplies” and I will gather as many of the sites there as possible that I think I can request links from.
But, I wouldn’t stop there. I’d also take some time to look at the other categories (clusters) available to see if there are other potential similar results, and then view the top ranked sites there as well.
For example, I see an “Office Products” cluster and an “Office Equipment” cluster that I would want to look more closely at as there are likely sites within these clusters that aren’t shown in my search results but are considered authorities.
There are also “forms, labels”, “discount”, “sales” and more categories for me to review. And this is just from a single phrase. Imagine if I were to perform this same search for a dozen other phrases?
By now you may have discovered another great use for Clusty: Keyword researching.
That’s right, the clusters themselves could be potential keywords you could further optimize your site for. Using some of the clusters as well as a free keyword research tool like Yahoo!s Search Marketing Search Term Suggestion Tool.
