The SEO Galaxy

Outbound links play a critical role in your overall linking strategy. This runs counter to the philosophy that used be popular in the industry, that of hoarding PageRank. You do read less about the notion of hoarding PageRank these days than you used to, but I still think that many publishers do not fully understand why outbound links are important.

Understand Your Target

It all comes down to what you need to do to receive authoritative links. You have to get inside the head of the person who is going to make the decision about linking to you or not. If you don’t understand their mindset, your chances of success go down dramatically. Remember that these people are going to the sole judge and jury in terms of deciding whether or not to give you a link.

For example, someone that works at MIT lives and breathes an academic environment. Here are three quick facts about that environment:

1. There is a lot of cutting edge research taking place there.
2. People are voraciously reading the latest research papers published by others.
3. They aggressively credit the sources they use (citation is required).

Imagine when that person comes to your site and sees nothing new under the sun in terms of content and no outbound links. It just does not feel or look right to them.

As a brief aside, earlier this week I reviewed a web site that had been heavily over-optimized. For example, it had links that had been crudely stuffed into the home page and pointed to lower level pages that added no real value. They were there purely for the purpose of linking to a page with anchor text that corresponded to a key search term.

When people go off the deep end with SEO, you end up with sites that don’t even read correctly. An end user who did not know about SEO who read such a site would literally be scratching their head when they see the site. This certainly lowers the ability of the site to close business. In addition, such an over-optimized site has no chance of getting links from an authoritative site. None.
Your Targets

This phenomenon is not limited to the academic world. You will encounter the same conditions at government sites, or amongst people at major media sites, such as the NY times. The nature and depth of the types of research may be different, but the idea of citing sources and looking for high quality content to link to remains the same.

You can extend this notion further. Any time you look at a site and see that they have gone to the trouble of creating authoritative content (and cite other sources as well), you know you have someone that is going to expect similar behavior from any site they would consider linking to.

It’s kind of a club, really. Once you become a recognized authority in a field, you are a part of the club. Along with other authoritative sources in the same and closely related fields, you will start to get links flowing without a tremendous amount of effort.

Publishers of authoritative sites almost always care about their users. They spend time thinking about increasing content quality and adding new content to their site. They are not afraid that when they link to someone else, they will lose traffic that will convert into business for them. They know that the links they send to others will mostly be used by people that are not finding on their site what they are looking for (so there really is very little to lose).

Picking Sites to Link To

The first thing that needs to happen is that you have to have the authoritative mindset. As outlined above, this means that you embark on a deliberate campaign to achieve a status of being an authority in your field, and demonstrating that authority in what you publish. This includes building relationships with other authorities in the field.

As you are researching on the web to learn the things you need to become an expert, make note of the sites that help you the most, in particular those that are not your most direct competition. Cite these sites as sources along the way. Your visitors will appreciate your site more, and you will make a much more attractive target for other authority sites to link to.

Source

Directories can provide a rapid way to get new links to a site. Opinions on how to approach this range from submitting to every directory in site, to being highly selective. This post will discuss what’s happening under the covers to provide some perspective on how you might choose to approach it.
The Basics - Yahoo

The key things that search engines look for in determining whether a directory will pass link juice are pretty basic. They are:

1. A submission policy that states that you are paying for an editor to review your listing, not to get a listing. The key subtlety here is that they can review your proposed listing and decide that they don’t like it, and then keep your money without listing you. The importance of this is that it means that there is real editorial judgment implied by the policy.
2. Evidence that the policy is enforced.

Ultimately, “Anything for a buck” directories do not enforce editorial judgment, and therefore the listings do not convey value to the search engines.

To take a closer look at this, let’s examine some of the key statements from Yahoo’s directory submission terms:

For web sites that do not feature adult content or services, the Yahoo! Directory Submit service costs US$299 (nonrefundable) for each Directory listing that is submitted.

I understand that there is no guarantee my site will be added to the Yahoo! Directory.

I understand that Yahoo! reserves the right to edit my suggestion and category placement; movement or removal of my site will be done at Yahoo!’s sole discretion.

The key thing to understand here is that you pay your money, and you have no guarantee of getting a listing at all, and your listing can be changed at will by Yahoo’s editors. You can pay your $299 and receive essentially nothing in return for it. From a legal perspective, what you pay for is the review by Yahoo’s editors.

Now here is the key point that you won’t find in print on Yahoo’s page. Google trusts Yahoo’s editors, and Google believes that Yahoo does in fact attempt to turn away all the poor quality sites that get submitted to it.

Of course, mistakes do happen. Sometimes relatively poor quality sites do get in when they should not. That’s a shame when that does happen, but in general, the editorial policies are real and enforced.
Other Directories

Do search engines respect other directories? Yes, they do. Here is a small sampling of some that we believe do pass link juice, courtesy of The Professional’s Guide to Link Building on SEOmoz (within the PRO Content section):

• DMOZ
• Starting Point
• Business.com
• ExactSeek
• Best of The Web
• Librarians’ Internet Index

The guide shows a much longer list of directories that SEOmoz believes have value.

Note that the search engines do try to use an innocent until proven guilty approach. Directory sites will most likely pass PageRank, regardless of their editorial policy until someone reports them, or a human review is initiated on the directory for some other reason.
Steps for Analyzing Directory Value for Yourself

Now you have a directory that you are interested in contacting. What do you do? You should attempt to make a determination whether or not the directory is truly serious about the quality of their listings. Directories that currently pass link juice may not later on, so you want to be careful about investing in those.

Of course, if you are able to get the sense that a directory currently passes link juice, but is a poor quality directory, the only real downside to buying into it now is that eventually that link will not pass value any more.

But, let’s press on with trying to find the higher value directories. You need to look for clues that they will stand the test of time. Here are some things that you can look for:

1. Was it funded by a serious VC firm, or a major company in a given vertical space? If so, they are more likely to care about the quality of what they are building.
2. Has it already been around for a long time? If so, it is more likely to be around for a while yet.
3. How are the commercializing their business? Assuming they are selling editorial reviews, is AdSense plastered all over the place too? If it is, they are most likely not a serious player.
4. Are there lots of unrelated links on pages that look like purchased text links? If so, it’s a sure clue that someone will turn them in eventually.
5. Related to the prior two points, anything that makes the site look spammy is a clue that they are not a serious player.
6. Does their backlink profile includes lots of purchased links?
7. If they publish other content on the categories they cover, is it pretty cheesy or truly authoritative?
8. Do most of the categories they offer appear to have a significant number of listings in them?
9. And, of course, do they have a clear published editorial policy that makes it clear that you are paying for a review?

Examples of Good Directories

Of course, I should emphasize that based on our examination, these directories appear to be of good quality and likely to last over the long haul, but there is no guarantee.

Example 1: Itrain Online. This has a PR 6 home page, and its topic is computer and Internet training resources for development and social change. Here are some key thing we like about this directory:

1. The site has a strong editorial policy.
2. There is no fee, so money does not bias the acceptance of listings.
3. Advertising on the site is minimal, and the advertising is clearly labeled.

Even though the depth of listings is not always that deep, the overall design and structure of the directory is so clean that it seems likely to be OK. Here is a quick look at the home page of the site:

Example 2: New Zealand Tourism Online. The home page is a PR 6, and the listing pages are PR 4. Here are some key observations about the directory:

1. The site is advertising supported
2. Listings are not paid for, but are editorially selected
3. Listing quantity per category is high

The ad revenue for the site depends on the quality of their listings, which creates a big disincentive to let any bad sites in. Here is a quick screen shot of the site:

Example 3: The Internet TESL Journal. This site has a PR7 home page. The content is highly academic in nature, and features the best new educational ideas direct from practitioners. The home page looks like this:

Here are a few key points about the site:

1. There is no overt link back to the author’s site. This site does not pass PageRank, but read on.
2. Articles do contain the author’s email address.
3. You can cite references in your articles.

Getting on this site is about reaching influencers. You can gain exposure to an audience of educators. You will only value this if you are in the education business in some fashion, but if you are, you may attract the attention of some interesting people by getting your article posted here. You can also leverage getting posted here in marketing the value of your site to others (it’s an endorsement).
Bad Directory Examples

I am not going to list URLs for the risky directories, as the purpose of this post is not to out anybody in particular.

Example 1: It’s a PR7 site with a PR7 directory home page. The overall content is authoritative in nature, so this is good. The PageRank is also great. However, there is no clearly published editorial policy on the site. A deeper look at the site, and it looks a lot like the policy really is pay your money, and you are in.

It’s quite possible that this site currently does pass link juice. However, over the longer term it seems likely that the ability of this directory to pass link juice will get pulled.

Example 2: This one is a PR4 site that has PR4 links pages. There is a little bit of AdSense advertising up top, but not in an overwhelming fashion. Unfortunately, the links go through a redirect, so they may not pass PageRank. However, there are lots of unrelated links on pages at the bottom, which clearly are ads. Those ads do pass link juice.
Pay Per Post

Why don’t these links count? The short answer is that it has already been proven guilty. Pay per post services were marketed as a way to get link juice, which did not help. But the bigger issue is that the basic test of paying money to get an editorial review, which might not result in a link, is not met by these types of services.

Pay per post services pay you for providing the link, and as a result, the link is treated like any other purchased link.

Source : SEOmoz

<!– @page { size: 21cm 29.7cm; margin: 2cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } –>Establishing quality backlinks to your site is an very important part of SEO. In other terms when a site links to yours the software at the Googleplex thinks your site must be important, and this improves your site’s ranking. Yes, I know its complicated but reading my blog you can have an idea on how to build your links..

Chasing one way links is time-consuming and really hard work. Think about it, other site owners are all busy trying to get one way links to their own sites, why would they link to you?

The answer is to create content on your site others will want to link to. Easier said than done I agree but get it right and the links will come and if you are lucky from some decent sites too. Think about what you can offer that others can’t.

ow a days i had seen many webmasters getting slapped by Google for Paid Links, Paid Post, Buying Links and Exchanging Links to increase there PageRank (PR).The point must be clear that best links are not paid, or exchanged.

Well here I’m telling you some simple points which might be helpful in getting good PR… so here are the points below:

1. Don’t buy or sell sitewide links for serps.
2. Don’t look for high PR links from the beginning - I will recommend to start your new site link building with PR 0-1 and slowly move up according to increase in your rankings.
3. Control your link building speed. Building 5-10 links a day is fine.
4. Avoid link-farms, links to gambling, pills, etc.
5. Link from a relevant website is fantastic.
6. Make links look natural.
7. Different anchor text, while building links will be useful.
8. Don’t do reciprocal link exchange.

Important: Lol … have a look at the below reply …. i saw at one of the webmasters forum when a guy asked similar question How to get good PageRank ? … the guy replied:

Ok. Here you go. Its a secret. never tell anyone!
Search and find Good PR site which has the "Top Commentator" plugin enabled.
Make it a habit to post comments there regularly. Once you enter their Top Commentator list, You get their PR Juice Transfered to your domain.
Another secret,
Search and Find Good PR sites which has "You comment, I follow" / DoFollow feature enabled. Make it a habit again to comment there.

Always remember this will be considered SPAM !! Instead of getting good PR you will loose your PR… .

If you are serious about blogging, you probably shouldn’t use Blogger to operate your MAIN blog.  Why?  Because Wordpress is better - more options, more plug ins, more control.  If you want to make your blog/site big… you need to be hosted on your own server and not use someone else’s free service.  What I recommend is to use Blogger to drive some early links to your *HOSTED ON YOUR SERVER* Wordpress blog.

Simply put - Blogger is good to throw up a bunch of content and see what sticks. (If you can automate it, even better.)

I use some Auto Blogger Poster software thingy and it works great. I build a Blogger blog or 2 or 3 or 4 and link it to my MAIN site or blog (same difference). That little baby takes an RSS feed and automatically updates my Blogger blogs with a little content 3 or so times a day depending on the niche. They don’t get a ton of traffic, but each little RSS blurb does get some.  Plus I just installed the thing a couple months ago and starting to see a little more traffic roll in every day from my efforts… (not to mention the backlinks)

Link popularity has been the main technique for search engine marketers for at least the last few years. Some marketers have become so obsessed with link popularity that they have resorted to automated techniques to help them acquire one-way links. Some examples of link spam methods that are still being exploited are:

Guest books - In a woebegone era people placed simple scripts on their websites, with the hopes of getting feedback from their visitors. A great number of these scripts are still in existence. A web spammer will identify a guest book because of its’ footprint. Millions of these guest books have been abandoned and are not monitored by their owners. For this reason, automated guest book spamming has been rampant. An interesting thing about Guest book spam: some of them can even be spammed too death. Since many of these are old CGI scripts, they can’t handle the volume of spam messages, and end up crashing. At that point the Guest book will live on until the domain owner removes it.

Blogs - blogs became even more popular than guest books. they’ve been installed by the millions and abandoned at 90% rate. Blog software prior to 2005 had a default setting which allowed comments to be published without prior approval. It also allowed live html, so these blogs are out there still begging to be spammed and many are each day. What ends up happening is they get so many outgoing links that the page becomes a massive size, and at some point the page may even have trouble loading.

Forums - a frequent victim of web spam. Since almost all forums allow users to submit material without pre-moderation, web-spammers will attempt to post to them. The good news about Forums is that are usually not abandoned like Blogs or Guest books, and usually someone will come along and clean up the mess. This isn’t always true, but it does happen quite a bit.

Any form on the internet that allows html is vulnerable to web spam attack. Without some sort of moderation it’s impossible to ensure that malevolent html will not be inserted. if you don’t pre-moderate the form, make sure you receive email notifications whenever the form is submitted. If you don’t at least check the form often, it’s inevitable that you’ll be spammed by one of the numerous bots on spam duty.

Search engines introduced the rel no follow tag in order to deal with the rising tide of link spam. All popular blog software comes with the no follow in place, so the main risk of Web spam is to legacy blogs installed prior to 2005. No follow essentially tells the search engine that the link is untrusted. In essence it says this link was entered by a person other than the website owner, so treat it with a grain of salt. Forum software makers have also been quick to add no follow to their core technology. The fact of the introduction of nofollow gives great insight into how much trouble search engines were having with the enormous load of link spam. Basically they threw their hands up and admitted defeat. Nofollow has had an enormous impact on Web spam, but there are still an awful lot of blogs and forums out there that haven’t been patched.

Link spam appeals to certain web marketers for obvious reasons. It’s a scalable and free solution to building link popularity. Web marketers who automate the process can quickly vary their anchor text between ‘runs’. This will give them a wide variety of links from a broad spectrum of websites located on diverse IP addresses. This is normally a sure-fire recipe for success for virtually any website. By simulating the link popularity of a popular website, the link spammer is able to fool the search engines into assigning it higher rankings. The manipulation of link popularity has become a major issue to all of the search engines. Each will offer more and more attempts at reducing this threat, but unless search engine rankings are based only on on-page variables, it will always exist.

Rishabh Sood

Have you been reading about link building but don’t know where to start? Are you an experienced SEO specialist using the same methods you’ve always used? Read on to find out how new linking rules will affect the future of your website.

One way links work for search positioning. There’s no doubt about it. But, have you considered that what works today may not work in the future? One exciting aspect about search engines is that nobody really knows everything. That leaves room for webmasters who are willing to research, test, and put into practice the best search engine optimization techniques.

These are New five rules for one way linking can help steer you in the right direction.

Rule #1: You have to be proactive. Google considers a high quality link something you have to earn. You earn these links by partnering with sites. In order for a partnership to work, you have to develop a relationship. I think more webmasters are open to establishing vital community relationships. It takes trust and a lot of patience for these relationships builds. Focus on what you can do for someone else.

Rule #2: Keep an open mind. High PageRank still lingers in most webmasters’ minds. But, by concentrating on high PageRank sites, we miss out on other linking opportunites. Most of us understand that PageRank doesn’t happen overnight. That’s why it’s important to seek out lower PR, high quality sites. The advantage is that these webmasters are more open to establishing partnerships.

Rule #3: Site age is a big factor. I’ve put together my owning ranking system for evaluating a site’s link “worthiness”. One big factor is site age. Any site that has been around since the late 1990s is going to have a higher “score”. These sites have weathered search engine updates, bad economies, and bad press. All else being equal, I tend to lean towards site age as the determining factor for a potential link partner.

Rule #4: Stop worrying about what you can’t contol. I get questions all the time from people wanting to know if they can re-design their sites, or link to other sites, or change hosting companies. They want to know if these activities will ruin their search engine rankings. My response is always the same: do what’s best for you and your customers. Don’t NOT do something because you’re worried it will ruin your SEO work. If you have a solid customer base, your search engine rankings won’t be as crucial. The viral aspect of the web is extremely underestimated. Search traffic is only one source of traffic.

Rule #5: Can you be trusted?. Having a solid client list, establishing relationships with other webmasters, provding great customer service. These activites are all based on trust. Can you be trusted to follow through? If you are trustworthy, your link building will be trustworthy. If you’re in it for the short term, like all spammers, then you can’t be trusted.

The web is wide open for those webmasters who are willing to develop relationships for the long run. In the future, one way links will be graded on trust. So, you need to ask yourself, am I trustworthy? It’s give and take. Are you willing to give before you can take?

Rishabh Sood

The aim of a reciprocal linking strategy is usually twofold: First to attract visitors from the linking partner to your own site and, secondly, to improve your page ranking with the search engines. A higher page ranking, especially with Google, indicates more relevance when inquiries are made on a given keyword. Relevance encourages the search engines to send free, targeted traffic to your website.

Important Considerations

1. Build online relationships. Exchanging links with other relevant websites is a great way to start building partnerships with other website owners and may open the door for future joint venture requests.

2. Build your link popularity. Most search engines view sites that have many links to them as being important. So, the more sites that link to your site, the higher your site might rank. But again, make sure that all reciprocal links are relevant to your site or the search engines will penalize you.

3. Avoid exchanging links with sites that have a huge link directory. If your site is listed on page 43 in your category of another site’s link directory, few people will ever see your link. Although a link will be generated to your site for the search engines, you will not receive much traffic from the link exchange. Try to exchange links with sites where your link will be displayed on the first, or at the most, the second page of another site’s link directory.

4. Don’t exchange links with everybody that asks. What advantage is there in exchanging links with a site that sells wedding favors when your site is about dog training? Anyone that visits the wedding favor site will be looking for information concerning weddings, not dog training, and very few will click on your link regardless of how high the page rank is for the wedding site. The key here is to exchange links only with sites that are relevant to your site or to your keywords.

5. The main goal of any linking strategy is to get more traffic to a website. Reciprocal linking can work for or against you in this matter depending on the site that you exchange links with. If you exchange links with sites that receive a lot of traffic, some of that traffic may be diverted to your site. On the other hand, if you exchange links with a low traffic site, you may divert some of your traffic to the other site without seeing a similar return. The solution is to exchange reciprocal links with a site with a page rank no lower than one level below yours and to try to exchange links with many sites with a higher page rank. Ideally, you would seek to exchange links with sites that have at least a PR 4.

How To Set Up A Link Page

The optimum way to set up a link page is to enter all links manually. Yes, it is time consuming but when you are starting out, this is the best way to do it.

You would first need to set up a page on your website just for your link categories. You can call this page anything you like such as Links, My Partners, Link Partners, My Link Partners, etc. Set up this page with the major categories and subcategories that are relevant to your site. Then, set up a page for each subcategory that will contain the actual links. Test to be sure that whenever anyone clicks on a subcategory that they are taken to the appropriate link page.

Prepare a short 3 - 5 line ad about your website or your product and include the URL to your website. This should be in HTML code for easy uploading. Each linking company has their own procedure, but generally, each time you ask to exchange links, you’ll need to copy and paste the other website’s HTML code onto your link page under the correct category and subcategory. You will then need to upload the updated page to your website.

Once this is done, let the other website know on which of your pages they can find their link. If the other website owner approves the link exchange, they should add your link to their link page and inform you on exactly what page you can find it.

Check to make sure that your link has been added to their site. If they have not added your link, you have the option of contacting the website owner as to why or of removing their link from your site.

Mention reciprocal linking on any internet marketing forum and you will be sure to get a barrage of heated replies. There is a continual debate about the advantages and disadvantages involved in reciprocal linking and both sides make convincing statements.

If you do decide to get involved in reciprocal linking, join only well established link exchanges that allow you to approve or disapprove the link. Avoid link farms or link exchanges that will automatically exchange your link with their entire database regardless of the relevancy to your website.