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Posts Tagged ‘Backlinks’

What Backlinks Count For What

April 4th, 2009 |

Author: Kelly Ifrah

: Image via Wikipedia

There have been many discussions and there are still many different theories on backlinks and what they give you and what they don’t.

We know links are important and I have already discussed the issue of who links to you and who you link to, but I was asked by a client about reciprocal linking so I did a bit of investigation before confirming my views.

I did some research and came back to Matt Cutts’s blog, as I so often do. In summary I could not find much info on reciprocal linking, but stumbled on a very interesting post about ‘paid links for passing pagerank‘. Matt stated …

Clear disclosure of sponsorship is critical, and that includes disclosure for search engines. If a link in a paid post would affect search engines, that link should not pass PageRank (e.g. by using the nofollow attribute). Google — and other search engines — do take action which can include demoting sites that sell links that pass PageRank, for example.

He then went on to say …

The Forrester report discusses a recent “sponsored conversation” from Kmart, but I doubt whether mentions that even in that small test, Google found multiple bloggers that violated our quality guidelines and we took corresponding action. Those blogs are not trusted in Google’s algorithms any more.

So, what did we learn here? Google wants to see natural linking. It does not want you to link to someone because they paid you to. Why? Because they want to provide relevant and unbiased content to thir searchers. This method of giving their searchers the relevant unbiased information has earned them approx 48% of the search market. Due to all their extra activities, like Adsense and Adwords, you can understand why they do not want to loose their market share.

To prove thier point they even penalised themselves. Their Japanese site was getting links to themselves that did not have the ‘nofollow’ attribute. You can read more about it here.

Also, Matt’s post mentioned an ‘paid’ article about brain tumours. I live in France and they are talking about making any website with health related items on illegal, unless they get checked over by the person in charge of the health here.

If you want to learn more about Google’s quality guidelines, you can see them here. They can and do follow though on these things.

So, with regards to reciprocal linking …

It seems that it is not frowned upon, but one way links are better. The thing with reciprocal linking too, is that you have to check that the links back to you are still there and that the sites are not now in bad neighbourhoods. In my opinion it is better to use one of these ‘3 way linking’ programs. I use Neurolinker on my sites and have found that the slow growth looks and feels more natural than other programs. Don’t go mad though, get only relevant links.

What are you using on your sites, if anything, and how is it going?

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Posted in General |

Tags: Backlinks, Blog, Blogging, Google, link building, Matt Cutts, Nofollow, PageRank, paid links |

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Top Tips To Improve Page Rank

March 25th, 2009 |

Author: Kelly Ifrah

: Image via Wikipedia

Carrying on on my backlinking post from Tuesday I just wanted to go into page rank a little, because it seems that people are really bothered by it when they don’t need to be.

In basic terms it is a number from 0 to 10 awarded to a website. A link analysis algorithm is used to assign this numerical weighting to each element of the site. Having a good page rank can be beneficial in terms of rankings, but there are may sites is the top 100,000 sites (according to Alexa) that have a very low page rank if any.

You DO NOT NEED page rank in order to get traffic. Stop worrying about it and worry more about getting traffic. If you get traffic and rankings page rank will come.

Now, onto the linkbuilding part of it. When you have a link coming into your site that has a page rank and no “nofollow” tag then the page rank leaks, if you like, to your site increasing yours. When you link to a site that has no page rank or has bage rank, but is using the “nofollow” then no page rank is leaked. It is still a link though and if it is using your anchor text will still count towards your ranking position in the search engines.

So, following on from my last post where I said you should test to see if linking fast or linking slow is better for you and your sites, one thing is definitely true … if someone over at Google decides to take a further look into your site and sees only links coming from high page ranked sites not using the “nofollow” then this puts up a red flag for sure and says unnatural linking.

When people say make it look natural they don’t necessarily mean do it slowly, but also spread it out over all types of sites.

In conclusion test your link building strategies/systems against themselves to ensure you are using the best one for the type of sites you are building and get them from everywhere you can. Wether they are high page rank, no page rank, “nofollow” or no “nofollow”.

You should also take into account that page rank means nothing to your visitors as you would only be looking at the page rank of a site if you were in the business and most of us are marketing to people outside of it.

If you want a more indepth description of Google Page Rank then Web Workshop has a good explanation.

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Posted in SEO |

Tags: Backlinking, Backlinks, Building Links, google pr, link structure, page rank, search engine optimisation, SEO |

1 Comment »

I Want To Learn About Link Building

November 27th, 2008 |

Author: Kelly Ifrah

John signed up at IMMembership.com yesterday and said he wanted to know more about link building, so I decided to answer him as fully as I can today.

Firstly before any sort of link building is done you need to have a website with content. This can also be an affiliate link redirect, but I would always use some form of content.

Now this man John used an e-mail that was from a domain he owned, so I went along to have a look. I wanted to see if I could get some background on him, but the site is just a fresh wordpress installation. I had a look using the way back machine as the domain is well over 4 years old, but there is nothing but a holding page to see.

There is something holding this man back from building a site and in most cases this is either that the person is chasing the next ‘greatest thing’ or they are worrying over building the best site in the world.

START TODAY. Get something up on the site, even if it a ‘I don’t know where to start, but I will’ kind of thing

Now once you have something on your site you can start building links. Below is a list of how to do build links, in no particular order. You will no doubt have seen this list before, but if you don’t do them you will not get backlinks. People always seem to think there is something missing and 99.9% of the tilme there is … they do not take action.

1) Social bookmarking - use a keyword rich title, description and as many tags/keywords as you can. Varying your title and description will help too.

2) Article Marketing - Completely unique articles will do the best, but If you are no good at writing you can just write one unique article and spin/re-write it to be about 40% unique (although the more unique the better) and submit it to the article directories. You can check the uniqueness for free at Dupecop.

3) Submit your RSS feed to the RSS Directories - if you have a html or php or asp site and are not using a blogging platform like wordpress that gives you a feed automatically visit Dapper.net and get an rss feed.

4) Trackback - this is only relevant to wordpress users, but if you link to another wordpress users blog post and they have trackbacks enabled they will see the post you made the next time they log into their dashboard and can approve or not approve it like a comment. Most people approve these trackbacks giving you a relevant backlink.

Now this list of 4 ways is not in any way exhaustive. You can also comment on other people’s blogs and post in forums with a link in your signature to your site. Like I have said more than once the most important thing is to start and once you have a few links in forums and on other people’s blogs and in the social sites other people will start to link to you too, if your content is worth linking to of course

A great example is at the end of this post there is a link with the title ‘Related articles by Zemanta’. Zemanta is a firefox add on that integrates with your wordpress dashboard. It might integrate with blogger too, I’m not sure. Anyway the link below was a suggestion from them on related content to what I am writing about in this post. Now the guy who wrote the article on the link missed out any links to his website in his article which completely defeats the object of article writing, but it still proves my point. People CAN and WILL find your website and use your content if you put it out there.

So get to it. Create 10 links to your site every day in the hope to get 4 and after a month you could have as many as 300 backlinks meaning you would beat most of your competition out of the water.

Let me know what you do to get backlinks or if you have had success doing the above. I love to hear from you.