Short post tonight, as demands on my time are in excess of even their normally overwhelming quantities. Hopefully I'll make a bigger return to the blog with the last piece of the beginner's guide (on analytics), a post on my recent, amazing trip to Iceland for RIMC and more depth and detail on using Nick's phenomenal new Top Pages Tool (seriously, it's a game changer).

One search result I watch a lot is the query "SEO" at Google - mostly because SEOmoz itself fluctuates so frequently between positions 7-15 (sometimes even hourly). I know I shouldn't be watching rankings, but hey, I'm just like any other SEO, a little addicted :-) Quite recently, we saw a new website enter the top 10 at Google on a consistent basis - OpenCube.com. OpenCube is a great little online CSS menu builder that's easy to use and has tens of thousands of sites employing its clean, clever CSS menus. And just look at their links:

Since Linkscape just updated again this past week, these numbers are really fresh, and we're talking about 1.1 million links from 10,000 domains. Yahoo! shows even more (but they count nofollowed links while Linkscape excludes them). At first, I was sure that OpenCube must have started getting lots of new links containing the anchor text "SEO." Luckily, the new backlink anchor text tool in Labs is great for this:

It looks like, at least from their top 3,000 links, there's not even a single anchor text link saying SEO, but to be sure, I ran an extra advanced query on Yahoo! (which allows for some pretty spiffy operators to conduct investigations like this). I used:

linkdomain:opencube.com seo -inurl:seo -intitle:seo -site:opencube.com

This essentially shows all links to the domain that mention the word SEO, but don't have it in the title or URL and aren't from Opencube itself. There's about 3,000 results, but looking through, not one of the links contains the anchor text "SEO" when pointing to Opencube (although I didn't check every link).

Now, to be fair, I'm using this as an example to illustrate a few points:

1. We've noticed on a lot of search queries at Google, not just this one, that anchor text seems to be losing a bit of its luster (or at least, doesn't have all of the overwhelming power it once did)
2. Similarly, we've seen that sites that have a large number of diverse root domains linking to them have gained over their more niche and focused peers (perhaps a part of the "branding" update "Vince" that was so popular in SEO discussions a few weeks back)
3. An embeddable widget or piece of code that installs on sites that use your product is one of the most incredibly valuable and powerful link acquisition targets.

Just think - Opencube didn't get one non-editorial link. Every single site and page that points to them is implicitly endorsing their work by saying "this is what we use and we're proud of it." When it comes to link building strategies, this is a clear favorite of mine, and clearly, one that works. Bravo to the OpenCube team; we'd all do well to learn from their brilliant strategic example.

p.s. Check out some of the other impressive rankings OpenCube has - CSS Menu, Pure CSS, even Capable Navigation. :-)

p.p.s. Many in the comments noticed their rankings falling this morning, and I think it's my fault for not doing a more thorough investigation last night when I wrote about them. Sadly, many of their links are unnecessarily hidden because of how they make the link embeds. For example, here's a bit of code they use when you install their menus:

<a href="http://www.opencube.com" "display:none">Infinite Menus, Copyright 2006, OpenCube Inc. All Rights Reserved.<a/>

Obviously, these are completely unnecessary as they earned those links editorially and aren't "spamming" at all. I'm not sure why they decided to go this route, but they're not quite the perfect example of link building that I thought they were. If they just removed that "display:none" they'd be in very good shape (and, they might want to optimize anchor text a bit). So, it's a great example of what to do, and tragically, what not to do. :(

One more postscript - looks like they're back and ranking at #10 for SEO and high for CSS Menu and their other queries. In the comments, Mert points out that only a limited set of their links have the display:none, and it was unintentional (which is clear from the un-optimized anchor text). I don't think they were trying to spam or manipulate, so let's hope they continue to benefit from their smart embedding strategy.