Here’s a recent example of something I got.  There are a lot of reasons why this pitch will got straight to the trash, but for fun I thought I’d dissect it:

The Suspicious Sender

The “from” address is “@indiasem.net” but he’s asking for links on 3 websites, so it’s obviously not from the site owner.  Well, that’s ok, I know there are quality folks like Eric Ward who do link building for their clients.  No harm in having an agency, right?  But wait, why doesn’t this guy, Julian Levin, have an email like jlevin@indiasem.net.  It just says “custom@indiasem.net”.  That’s kind of weird.  Sort of makes me think he forgot to replace “custom” with something more personal.  Might some mass mailing software be at work here?

You Had Me at “Dear Webmaster”

Boy, it must be hard to check the About page on a site to see who founded it.  Or maybe search Linkedin.  But no, Julian did not deign himself to either of those steps, going for the ever-effective “Dear Webmaster” opening.  But let’s see what he has to say.  Maybe Julian used the time he saved in not researching who runs the site to draft a really awesome, personalized note…  Ok, so he writes, “I have visited your site and thought it was excellent. I particularly liked content of your site.Your site is professional and offers excellent value to your visitors.” Wow, thanks!.   So you’ve written 3 sentences that state wholly generic platitudes that could obviously be sent to ANY website.  Well, personalization shall go wanting today.

Hey, have you even LOOKED at My Site?

As I read more, the text generally doesn’t make sense (“I noticed that you have linked to other sites and thought my website might be of interest to you and your website visitors” — um, no I don’t have any links on the page you mention (it’s just the URL contains the word “Links” as in “golf links” perhaps an idiom with which you lack familiarity).  Maybe you’re using Google to search “allinurl:links” and spamming every site on the list.  Hey, I’ll bet you never even looked at my page.  You realize of course that my page is specific to a small city in Florida, right?  But yet you don’t mention why you’d want the link there…

Why Again Should I Link to Your Paper Bag Site?

Then Julian writes “Please add links here…”.  Wait all you care about is getting your links to paper sacks, corrugated boxes, and commercial warehousing on some deep-ass page of my site (that you mistakenly stated has other outbound links) without explaining in any way why it makes sense. OK!

Poorly Written Site Descriptions

And then he provides title, URL, description for 3 sites.  Hey Julian, have you ever heard the expression beggars can’t be choosers.  If I do add your links, it’s going to be because I think they add value to my content and make sense for my users.  And btw, the proper grammar is “We specialize,” not “Web specializes” and it’s a little wordy not to mention your punctuation is a disaster.  That’s ok, if I add a link, I’ll probably have to rewrite it (but then again, that’s one more bit of work for me to do now).

A Little Bit ‘O Black Hat

Then comes the quid-pro-quo (“Sites where i shall publish your links”) followed by a list of 5 directory sites (notice the mixed formatting, likely from copying and pasting without paying enough attention).  Oh, I get it this is a pyramid/triangle link swap deal you’re proposing.  Well, let’s have a look.  The first site I go to (SurfGizmo) is flagged by Firefox as a “Reported Attack Site” which means, “Attack sites try to install programs that steal private information, use your computer to attack others, or damage your system.”  Sweet.  Good thing it’s been months since you first emailed and Firefox caught this.  If I’d given you the link straightaway, I would probably now have a link from the worst kind of neighborhood.

Offering Link Exchanges from Oversubscribed Pages

So let me get this straight… I’m going to give you 3 links on my site to unrelated content and in exchange you’re going to give me 1 link on 5 crappy sites that are security threats, low/non-existent PR, may or may not be indexed by Google (btw, I’d need to go research this for each site), have hundreds of existing external links, and were obviously created to have loads more (so any links I get from you will diminish in value over time).  How can I refuse!

By the Way, Do You Exist?

And then there’s the question of “Julian Levin”.  Is this a real person?  Well, let me Google that and find out… hmm, lots of Julian Levins, but none who seem to be associated with IndiaSEM.net.  Well, maybe IndiaSEM.net has an “About Us” page with bios of their staff.  Maybe Julian is a straight shooter and I just don’t realize it.  Oh wait, their site has no information just a strange form for “Just Financial Administration.”

Well, I could go on.  But you get the idea.  This is a classic example of spray and pray pitching.  Relevance is an afterthought.  I hate to think  this guy’s clients are paying much for this “service” which frankly could be automated with a robot (and let’s be honest, 95% of the work probably was).  Sadly, even SEO firms with good names are taking the low road.

I’ll post shortly on the right way to pitch a link.  But let me say this, Julian, I think job #1 would be to actually look at the pages where you’re requesting links before you email anyone.

Steve Rubel and Katrina French (by way of Jason Falls’s blog) got me thinking about my experience and that, thanks to Google, SEO and PR are ultimately becoming the same activity.  Same strategies, same tactics, same metrics.  Steve writes, “Google Page Rank is the ultimate way to measure online influence“, and Katrina says, “search and social are…intrinsically linked.”

So if you believe that the goal of PR is to get influencers to bring attention to your client or company, and Google PageRank is the ultimate measure of influence (and since we know that PageRank flows from one party to another vis-a-vis links), then a central goal of PR should be to acquire valuable, PageRank-passing links.

If you apply this to social media (which traditional PR agencies are now beginning to seriously engage), as Katrina points out, all these things that we’re doing in social media– building relationships, participating in conversations– all ultimately relate to search.  What’s search driven by? PageRank. Which goes back to links.  So this is all a big PR strategy.

I predict that we’re about to see a merger between two fields that couldn’t be more different.  Public Relations pros are (and I’ll generalize gratiutiously) some of the smoothest and nicest people you could meet– they are fantastic at building relationships.  SEO’s are, to put it nicely (and I count myself among them), usually geeks and hackers who have been toiling away in ways only alchemists would appreciate.

Lately, SEO’s have been talking about the fact that 75% of what moves the search results needle are off-page factors, and highest among them is link-building.  Yet the old methods are starting to falter — nowadays it’s about linkbait, better link pitches, press release optimization, and social media engagement.  And that pushes us toward doing things the old-fashioned way with human relationships.  You simply cannot expect to pitch bloggers, promote linkbait, ask webmasters for links, propose link-positive content partnerships, comment for dofollow links, promote your content on Twitter, etc. without quality relationships.  As Chris Brogan suggest, get to know people first, then ask.

For a lot of SEO’s, the prospect of our jobs relying on relationship-building is a little scary, which is why the merger with PR is inevitable.  PR people’s skills are simply too relevant and valuable to this process.  For PR, the Google PageRank paradigm is simply too dominant a measure of influence for clients not to expect their agencies to direct their efforts to improve it.  So look out, these two industries are about to merge.  It should be fun!

Updates/Comments

#1 Response to the argument that PageRank isn’t the best influence measure.

A few folks have argued that PageRank is not the best measure of influence for a variety of reasons.  Let me make a distinction– I care about measuring my influence in terms of the PageRank that I acquire– not particularly the nominal PageRank of influencers who link to me.  You can’t go around evaluating every prospective influencer by the PageRank stamped on their head.  However, your PageRank is a valid measure of your online influence compared to your competitors (which is ultimately what matters in the search results).

#2 Response to the argument that nominal PageRank is inaccurate.

I don’t want anyone to be confused that I’m saying they should focus on the nominal PageRank that’s displayed in the toolbar.  It’s a subtle distinction, but somewhere in the Google universe there exists a very precise, up-to-date calculated value of PageRank which I’ll call “true PageRank” that is factored into your position in search results.  For stats folks, the “true PageRank” is like the true regression line.  It exists in theory, but we can only see it via estimation, which contains error. Anyway, the point is that we should be focusing on activities that drive up our “true PageRank,” and evaluating how we spend our time and resources in light of it.

• 30 minutes per day. Spend 30 minutes a day reading Google Alerts, Reader, and bookmarking relevant coverage in your space.  Use this process to build your media list (keep it in Excel or Access or whatever works for you).
• 20 seconds. When you create a pitch, use this test: ask a non-tech spouse or friend to read it.  Count to 20, then take it away.  Ask them what they can remember.  Did they understand the hook?   If not, revise.
• 10 journalists per segment.  When I did PR outreach for ApartmentRatings, I often had 50+ journalists I was planning to contact.  But I would always break my lists down into interest groups of no more than 10 each, based on stated interests or coverage memes.  This kind of granularity allows you to more effectively address their interests and, if all goes well, get their attention.
• 5 days.  Brian Solis says, “Allowing journalists and bloggers adequate time to prepare advance is critical. Determine…who should be part of the initial news discussions…find the people that would be interested…as determined by their previous work and coverage.“, in a great post about relationship building in blogger outreach. I’d advise that you start reaching out to key bloggers five days before you release news on your blog.  You can’t expect them to cover your story the same day it starts hitting the general news.