Reading Time: 4 minutesVizion had the pleasure of speaking with Dixon Jones at this year’s Dallas Digital Summit 2016. Dixon is the marketing director for Majestic.
Check out our interview with Dixon below, as he discusses link building, the difference in writing content for sharing versus link building, as well as tracking unlinked mentions, and more!
Check out more interviews with the DDS 2016 digital marketing pros, on our blog:
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Ann Handley | Bestselling Author of Everybody Writes & Chief Content Officer, Marketing Profs
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Curtis Midkiff | Senior Advisor, Social Business Strategy, Southwest Airlines
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Leo Sei | Product Manager, AdWords Team, Google
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Michael Barber | Founder, barber&hewitt
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Anne Gherini | Head of Marketing & Communications, Node
Kristien: I’m Kristien with Vizion Interactive, here at Dallas Digital Summit 2016. I’m here with Dixon Jones. Thanks so much for being with us.
Dixon: Thanks so much for inviting me.
Kristien: Sure and so tell us a little bit about what you do in Majestic.
Dixon: Sure, so Majestic is a web crawler but it’s a search engine which analyzes backlink so we’re the biggest data source of backlinks to website. [inaudible 00:00:27] just put a website into the system and it will show you all the web pages that link to that website and information about you know, the topics that are about and the strength of those pages.
Kristien: Awesome. And you just gave your talk and can you tell us a little bit about it. Highlights?
Dixon: Yeah, I was talking about the difference between a link, writing content for sharing that people share versus writing content that people link to and there’s quite a big difference between the motivations between people sharing content which is kind of…people share content to you know, be part of a tribe to work with friends around them and to feel they’re associated with ideas and thoughts. People link to content and that’s a lot harder for people to do because they’ve got to be able to write a web page for a start than instead of pressing the Like button. So, we we’re looking at the different data sources and what kind of things attract links as opposed to shares. We use some interesting stuff from [inaudible 00:01:22] that done some research on this because [inaudible 00:01:25] just started integrating our data into their tool until you guys see you know, use [inaudible 00:01:29] as well. So now, they got the link information that’s they could very quickly see the stuff that got shared versus the stuff that gets linked so it gives some good insights and good examples of things that got really good links.
Kristien: Right and then link building versus link earning, where do you see that going?
Dixon: I think it’s semantics, really. I started the presentation by showing three concrete examples that links are still very important to Google. One was a research from Stone Temple. One was some information from one person on Google that talked it and one was another person on Google that have all talked about it in the last three months that have said links are still a major factor in the algorithm so you need to build links. The link earning versus link building, to me it’s the same thing. I think people like to use the phrase earning to try to make it cleaner somehow and I would say that link earning is the same as link building but you know, there are different groups as ways to get links for sure and I wouldn’t recommend those but I think the semantic’s how you call it.
Kristien: Okay and then as far as tracking unlinked mentions, that’s becoming more of a thing. Is Majestic coming out with a way to do that?
Dixon: You know, we’ve actually done that for 10 years. It’s not so easy to find but in our advanced reports, we track mentions so you can go and get an advance report and then you can filter that report and say, “Right, just give me all the mentions of a website that aren’t linked.” So, we’ve been doing it for 10 years, you know.
Kristien: Well, great and then you’re also coming out with an app or you already have an app out. Tell us about it.
Dixon: Well, I do. Yeah, we don’t have a lot of people using it but I use it a lot and it was a bit of a side project for me, honestly. I wanted my Twitter client to have flow metrics built into the Twitter client and there wasn’t anybody that was prepared to do it so I got somebody to build a Twitter client with flow metrics built in. So, you can now download the Majestic Twitter app on Chrome and iTunes and iPhone and Android and I think we might have done it for Opera Windows but I suspect not. Then, you’ve got a typical Twitter thing but if you type in a keyword, then it will show you people talking about that keyword but now, it’s got the flow metrics and you can slide across and say, “Right, this person is influential in news and media. This person is influential in operating systems, whatever it may be.” So, you can choose which people are actually influential in the Twitter stream.
Kristien: Right. That’s interesting and then, so you have that. Do you have anything else coming out for 2017 that you can talk about?
Dixon: We got a couple of really good things that we’re working on and I can’t talk about them yet which is really annoying because you told me you were going to ask that question so I’m just going to say that we’re really hopeful. We’ve taken a 3-D printer out into space this year and we’re printing the Internet on the International Space Station. You can find out about that on the blog that has had lot of conversation. But the exciting thing for us is that, that is going to get printed next week, we hope and it’s going to come back down in January on SpaceX and if SpaceX doesn’t crash, then if you come to conference next year, we will have the actual 3-D link profile of the Internet that was printed on the International Space Station on all our conferences so…
Kristien: Amazing, that’s pretty cool.
Dixon: Kind of weird but you know, cool.
Kristien: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being with us today.
Dixon: Thanks a lot, Kristien. Cheers.
