A Surefire Recipe To Getting The Links You Deserve

Columnist Julie Joyce explains how one site takes advantage of users' search behavior and explains how you can do the same.

A few months back, I was trying to figure out just how to replicate the Olive Garden’s insanely amazing salad dressing, and the first thing I did was look at a copycat recipes cookbook given to me by my mother. The second thing I did was wonder why, as a person who spends so much time online, I didn’t think to just look it up online.
When I did, I was quite surprised to learn that Olive Garden puts recipes for their products on their site. I decided to see if some other big chains did the same thing, so I chose one of the most popular chains in town, P.F. Chang’s, and took a look. No recipes. Interesting, right?

Why Should You Care?

Let’s look at the searches for recipes so you’ll see why this was such a clever move.
A search for “Olive Garden recipes” returns over 6 million results, and guess who’s number one? That’s right: Olive Garden.
A search for “PF Changs recipes” gives you 244k results, and guess where P.F. Chang’s ranks? Number 6.
The number one result for that query is a page on Food.com; the number of unique linking domains to that page? Two. Dinky, right?
However, let’s look at just one more URL ranked above the P.F. Chang’s site so you can see why this matters:
The fifth result, a page from Damn Delicious, has 94 linking domains — 94 unique linking domains! Heck, some sites that do well online barely have half that number.
Wouldn’t you rather have those links than not have them?
For Olive Garden’s recipes page, there are 119 unique linking domains. Those are 119 domains that link to the site but wouldn’t if that recipes page didn’t exist. They are totally using resources that they have to get the links they deserve.
Now, if you offered a product, and a search query for it returned a copycat version on someone else’s site, wouldn’t you think, “Maybe I should have this info on my own site!”?
Sure, you can argue that giving away that info might make customers less likely to frequent a restaurant. I could point out that knowing how to make their fettuccine might mean I don’t go there for it – but then I’d remember that I am a busy person, and I really don’t feel like giving up all my guilty pleasures.
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