Sitewide links, Deep links, Sponsored links, Carefully crafted anchor texts, Blogroll link lists - Well, they are not probably worth tying together, but I’m beginning to think that they have some similarity of sorts and are more junk than anything else these days, that Google might be discounting them no matter how valuable they might seem. And I have the reasons.
With the September Page Rank toolbar stats update, we’ve seen more “downgrades” than “upgrades” right ? Many popular blogs have dropped by one point, some of them even further down.
Reasons are diverse, but let’s see if we can find a pattern.
Age old concept I know, but I think this is becoming more prominent.
Here are some factors I can think of to help Google decide if a link is actually a “vote” or not.
Well, these points my sound lame, but I think there is a possibility to this concept, getting stronger as we go ahead and Google acquiring more “networks”.
If we look from Google’s perspective, it all makes sense, it only would want to take into consideration the genuine links and recommendations and not the “scratch me, I scratch you” networks that might be gaming the system.
It is also a fact that the networks and the user interactions will grow stronger, and the “favor” links will keep coming in. I can only guess, that they might only carry less value than earlier.
Search Engine Land reports Google testing image banner ads on Google Image search. Aaron Wall has a confession to make and a question for you - Is buying links stupid ? If you’ve been thinking if Google ever forgives a penalized site, you better read this. Bill Slawski has a list of suggestions for blogging beginners – good read !#
Stephan Spencer spoke at the Startonomics on SEO, and he has a good video for you. (It was not that all good quality for me, see if you get a good full session, but insightful talk there)
Brett Lane has a very interesting post on the five things to consider while hiring a Social Media Consultant, seriously interesting one that.
And here is my favorite. Eric writes about why and how he thinks that Google weighs the anchor text less and the content of the linking page more. I cannot disagree with him.
Some of you have been asking me if I use any “secret SEO tools” to gain that edge over others.
Good question, but there aren’t any that are “secretive”. For those of you reading this blog for some time now, knows that I make it a point to reveal as much as possible, and keep no “secrets” to myself.
On a different note, tools and wizards only help you do the basic stuff which I think is only the tip of the ice berg. I always like human algorithm and wouldn’t want to trust the tools.
Having said that, tools are the best way to get the information dug out.
And I’ve been mentioning them here(Free site stats checkers), here(Free link checkers), here(keyword density checkers), here(SEO friendliness), here(Rank Checkers) and here(Site validation tools).
And if you are looking for more from the SEO experts, check this story. It has a list of all the SEO experts reveal out their secret SEO tools !
Back to basics now. Article submission might be one of those oldest methods webmasters still rely on for link building methods - unfortunately. But are they really working? Do they give you backlinks, and if at all they do, how much of that time and energy you spent actually get converted to “authority”? That would raise more questions than answers.
Well, just to make sure all of us on the same level of understanding, let’s see what article submission really is.
Article submission is the process where an article on a targeted category/topic with crafted text and embedded links is distributed to channels that distribute them.
That’s a very crude definition I know. Well, two things here.
1 - The Article and 2 - Where is it submitted to
Ideally, and article should be unique, well written and original with meaningful, contextual links and references. (Now, that’s an article I haven’t seen at all anywhere on the channels.) And the channel which receives the article is ideally one that is again exclusive, and original (yea alright..).
Now, article submission can really work if the above two factors are as close to the ideal one. Original source and original channels. But today (at least in my exp) both of them are heavily skewed. There are no original articles. All of them are either copied, or written to serve many. Let’s not talk about the relevancy of links here, that’s a different chapter, book altogether. And the channels that distribute the content is so original that they take articles from everyone, copied/scraped whatever, all they want is a few chunk of text to fill in, to show AdSense ads. Now, that’s when the whole process goes junk. Lack of original articles, and lack of original channels.
How can article submission be done right?
Can it be done? Yea, why not?
First off, article submission has to be seen as a method to increase the reach and length of your “tentacles” and not as backlink source.
When it is seen only as a backlink source, it is quite natural that it gets spammed.
- Write lot of articles and make them unique.
Submit each to only one source, and not multiple sources.
This will ensure that the same article does not appear on multiple sites, and thus avoiding duplicate content. So, whatever you grab from it, remains unique.
- Rotate the anchor texts.
Don’t use the same keyword as anchor text, use your creativity and make different versions of it, include them on each article.
- Do no submit to automated sources.
Yea, they’ll promise you a thousand backlinks in a week, but I can guarantee that all of them would be scrap. Because, all the articles on all those sites would probably be the same as they all got it automated.
- Submit only to reliable sources.
Like websites, that’s been there for some time, and not super scrapers that sprout out yesterday.
- If at all you want it automated, limit the number of pubishing to bare minimum. At least, you’ll save al those scrap websites from linking to you.
So essentially, article submision works or not, they’ll collect some backlinks for sure. To make the best out of them, don’t automate things, handpick sites and channels and spent some time writing stuff. The more the merrier !
Link building is a tough task I’ve to admit. No, it’s not difficult to do, but doing it the “right way” demands more time and energy or else, you end up being a nobody at it.
Personally, I go for natural link building developing content that’s “linkable”. Use it in combination with the social media and things can get very interesting ! Now, the problem arises when not all of your content is really potential link bait stuff.
I mean, how successful can one be trying to link bait for “101 Home Loan Services” ? Lyndoman may have an idea here, but I’m of the opinion that you better don’t do it rather find other channels where you can develop potentially viral content, that closely resembles the original idea/product and find a bridge between the two.
Drifting away from the topic, I wanted to talk about blog commenting - a very popular tool used these days to gather links. (And I think it’s more popular these days for it’s quick turn around time compared to other methods.)
How do you do blog commenting?
- By finding out blogs that allow “do follow” comment links related to your content, and actively commenting on them to source links.
If not for the time required to deliver real comments, this could’ve been the next best weapon for spammers (it already is).
How to find blogs that pass link juice?
1. Find out from Google using search queries, blogs that have the “Top Commentators” plugin installed.
Ex:- Google for “allintitle:top commentators” and you could find them. (the query may be blocked by Google if too many people are searching, so try alternate ones.)
2. Find out using Google, blogs that use the “Comment luv” plugin.
There may be both “nofollow” and “dofollow” comments here, you may have to sieve them out.
3. Find out resource lists on the web like this one.
Believe me, there are lot of blogs out there that offer dofollow comments and links, it’s only a matter of finding them. But once you have them make sure you only use the best ones, that are -
- High PR (Preferable 4 and above)
- Related to your domain and content
- Not penalized by Google
- Not in bad neighborhood
And, don’t get carried away with all the links you are gathering, make sure you don’t do it the “bad way” and stick to these guidelines while commenting.
To some wholesome, quality backlinks !!
So you know that footer text is a good real estate option in SEO. And you’ve been placing your sitemeter button and credit texts there. Some of you are clever I know, you have that “natural” looking two lines to text there with links to totally un related websites! Guess what, I have some better alternatives for ya.
Still don’t get the idea? Ah! Forget it.
Okay, let me not even dare to explain what “better indexing” means generally. From an SEO perspective, better indexing to me is getting all the important pages from your site getting indexed with the right importance and “weight” with the search engines. So, if I have ten pages on my website, I’d say success is to have all those ten pages with equal importance and page rank that searching for the primary keyword for each of those pages would result in a top ten listing. Makes sense right?
As a matter of fact, many of us work towards the “improvement” of our site’s metrics like page rank and ends up doing just that. All the link juice gathered, all the submissions made, all the onsite optimization done, all goes to the homepage and we do pretty much nothing except linking to the internal pages. As a result, not every page on the site gets the chance to show theur heads on the search engines front page.
Undispuedly, the major part of search engines traffic comes from the internal pages for an average website with lot of contents. In order to enjoy the traffic from long tail keywords (which form more than 80% fo the entire traffic chunk), you got to make sure that your internal pages gets the right importance on the search engines.
Gone are the days when SEO Tools was al about page rank checks and keword density checks. Today we have seo tools to analyze backlinks, wikipedia links, digg submissions, delicious bookmarks, neighborhood ip checks and all that external seo metrics.
Here’s a list of twelve such free tools that you can use to analyze the stats of your site.
But, honestly, it’s fair to have one(or a few). Because there are lot of changes happening, and algorithm updates that it’s not possible for everyone to stay updated and tuned on SEO. Many of us bloggers have certain SEO misconceptions just because we haven’t updated ourselves, aligning to Google.
Here are some SEO misconceptions that I found common with more than one person while engaging in conversations with them. Feel free to share your thoughts on them. I hope you will clear them and grow yourself up to SEO 2.0 and break out of the old-school SEO kid image.
Essentially, it means that there is no formula for SEO available, that if applied will give you instant results. All the metrics have to be weighed and calculated to design the right strategy for each website.
Today on, top commentators on DailySEOblog will be featured on the right hand sidebar, with a link to their websites. The list will be refreshed every day, and the readers who’ve commented most on the articles will get a free link back.
With great powers come responsibilities !
I realize that with the top commentators list, there would also be a lot of spam coming in. So I’m going to spent more hours filtering the list.
Please note that - Links will be selectively nofollowed to websites outside the “neighborhood” (unrelated websites), and user names, if found crafted to source link love.
This is to avoid strangers taking advantage of the opportunity, but I know my regular readers and sincere commenters, I may discount it if they “try” something as well.
Hope you’ll appreciate the jesture, and give me less time fighting spam.
Passive and silent readers and fans out there - if you haven’t commented yet on DailySEOblog, this is probably your opportunity to do so. You may just pick up some traffic and link juice from the blog, so move your lazy ass today!
(I’m reviewing the progress on this, will keep you updated if things go out of hand, which I prefer to believe is a distant possibility.)