Link Building

Positive Link Spikes

2008-07-29T12:04:00.000-07:00

Positive link spikes can deliver both immediate benefits and benefits that may take some months to fully realise. Over time search engines build historical data regarding certain aspects of your site. One such aspect is the rate that the site acquires fresh links.
An uncharacteristic surge in the the rate that the site acquires fresh links is easy for search engines to spot. One reason may be that you have employed the services of an SEO and they are working on a link campaign. Another may be that your site contains content that is relevant to a topical news story such as Avian Flu.

If it is the later, your site will be showing a similar link growth to other related sites which could identify specific pages on your site as hot topics. Hot topics are usually accompanied with an increase in searches as well as an increase in linking which differentiates this from the SEO efforts which will revolve around the increase in links alone. Link spikes associated to topical events will see pages rank very quickly because search engines want to reflect current topical results.

An uncharacteristic increase in links not associated to a hot topic or topical events will still yield benefits but it can take three or four moths for the benefit to be fully realised. This is because search engines treat uncharacteristic link spikes as suspect. In an attempt to verify the validity of these links they need to be aged, the longer they stay in place the more credibility they will receive and the greater the benefit passed over.

Negative Link Spikes: Negative link spikes occur when links are lost at an uncharacteristic rate. This can indicate that the content of the target page is stale, outdated or no longer relevant. When negative link spikes occur rankings will tumble.

Run Site Links

2008-07-29T12:03:00.001-07:00

Run Of Site Links (ROS): ROS, as the name suggests, is a link from every page of a site pointing to a page or pages on the target site. This technique worked well for some time; however the emergence of sites selling ROS links purely to increase PageRank forced the search engines to react against this technique which contravened their terms and conditions.

In Google’s mind there is nothing wrong with buying links for advertisement and to build traffic. In-fact their own AdWords system does exactly that. In 2005 Google introduced the NOFOLLOW tag that stopped search engines following a link and therefore culling the PageRank and ranking benefits associated to links that used the tag. This allowed webmasters to purchase ROS links for advertising and traffic in a way that did not contravene their Terms and Conditions.

Links From Forum Signatures and Guest Books: It was once common practice to visit forums or guest books and make posts that included a link back to your own site. For a while some benefit could be gained but again search engines reacted by devaluing this type of link. This was one of the first forms of ‘link spam’, as search engines put it, to be devalued. Surprisingly some webmasters still persist in this technique.

The next two items on the above list , Positive link spikes and Negative link spikes refer to temporal effects. These effects are based on historical data accumulated over time.

Reciprocal Links

2008-07-29T12:01:00.001-07:00

Exchanging links with related sites was, until recently, one of the most effective techniques in raising search engine visibility. However search engines could see that their results could be gamed by webmasters who actively participated in link exchange schemes. The opinion of the search engines was that this lowered the quality of their results by returning optimized pages rather than relevant pages. Search engines adapted their algorithms to spot and devalue reciprocal link schemes.

Anchor Text: The concept of linking is best described as a voting system where the link is a vote for a particular page and the anchor text is the context of the vote. If editorial control was being exercised links would vary in context, i.e. there would be variants of anchor text based on a common theme. A well written authoritative page about SEO might attract links that say ‘search engine optimisation’, ‘search engine placement’, ‘SEO company’, ‘UK placement firm’ etc. When every link to a page uses the exact same anchor text, it looks unnatural and reeks of manipulation. Therefore the idea is to build links in a way that appears to be natural.

Link Exchange

2008-07-29T11:59:00.001-07:00

Link building is without doubt the most effective aspect of search engine optimization. It is also the most abused. Google has gone some way to counteract sites that were being promoted via unnatural link profiles. Run of site links and reciprocal links have now very little effect: while they will not harm the target site neither will they deliver the benefits to rankings that they once did.

Search engines now pick up unnatural patterns within the link profile of a site. Here are a few traits that could cause an unwanted blip on the search engine radar.

1. Every link being reciprocated
2. All links with the same anchor text
3. Run of site links
4. Links from forum signatures
5. Links from guest books
6. Positive link spikes
7. Negative link spikes

Search engines constantly evolve to deliver the most relevant results to the user and in doing so devalue links that are deemed to be exploiting their ranking algorithms. Search engines rely heavily on links to decide relevancy, so much in-fact that is possible to get pages to rank for terms that do not appear anywhere on the page (the most famous example being the top results on Google.com for the search ‘miserable failure’).

The first five items in the above list indicate the abandonment of editorial control. That is to say that these kinds of links are not generally edited by the webmaster of the site on which they appear. They therefore stand in stark contrast to ‘organic’ links which we can assume the webmaster to have added purposefully because of their perceived relevancy to the content of their site.

Authority Group

2008-07-29T08:37:00.000-07:00

Creating an article that links to a target and an authority and posting it on a third party site has allowed us to create a direct edge between the article and the target and also an indirect edge between the authority and the target.

In the final section of this course we will be developing this linking structure further and show how to get the maximum benefit by ensuring that authority groups are connected to the site structure in the most effective manner.

You may have noticed that we have not mentioned Page Rank in our description of authority grouping. Page Rank plays an important role in Google’s ranking algorithm; however, Page Rank on its own is a value that is query independent otherwise PR10 pages would rank first for every search regardless whether the page was related to the query or not.

Many webmasters and SEO’s are link to increase Page Rank through multiplicity of links and relevancy through anchor text but ignore linking for authority. This technique will increase rankings for low to moderately competitive terms quite easily but as terms become more competitive this strategy becomes difficult to maintain because of the number of links required achieving and maintaining positions. Creating authority groups will lessen the dependence on numbers somewhat by utilizing the benefits of indirect edges to increase the level of authority delivered by links.

Authority Group Linking

2008-07-29T08:36:00.000-07:00

Normally articles are written with the sole purpose of creating one way links from the article to the target page. This can be adapted to drive extra relevance to the target by including a link out from the article to an authority page. In the diagram bellow document A links out to documents B and C. As discussed above this implies a relationship between A and B as well as A and C.

Page A links to B and C
IF A is related to B and A is related to C the then there is likely a relationship between B and C. This is how search engines build communities without the requirement for direct links between pages. It becomes clearer when the indirect edges are included.

Page A links to B and C showing indirect edges between B and C.
The image above now shows the indirect edges between B and C. By substituting A, B and C with the actual documents we will uncover what is known as authority grouping.

Triangulated Linking

2008-07-29T08:35:00.000-07:00

Link Potency
The idea of link potency takes into consideration page relevance, document relevance, edges, and anchor text. The least potent link would be a reciprocal link from an unrelated page, which forms part of an unrelated document (site) with unrelated anchor text. The most potent link would be a one way link from a related page, which forms part of a related document using targeted relevant anchor text.

By analysing anchor text and edges, search engines can build a map of the Internet which identifies hubs, authorities and communities. A hub site has many outgoing links to related sites. An authority has many links in from related sites. Links obtained from related authority sites that use relevant anchor text will meet all the requirements for high link potency, however these links are the hardest to acquire.

Like people web pages are judged by the company they keep. By analysing direct and indirect edges, search engines can discover communities. If your web pages are associated with trusted authority sites within the same community, rankings will benefit. If they are usociated with untrusted sites (link farms etc.) rankings will suffer.

Using what we have learned above, it is possible to link to pages in a fashion that brings you closer to these communities. Here is an example on how to do this that utilises article submission and indirect edges.

Double Direct Edge

2008-07-29T08:33:00.000-07:00

In a recent patent filed by Google they say a document could be one page within a site or, in some instances, the concept of document could encompass the entire site. This has ramifications for sites that have a link profile that is made up primarily from reciprocal links which can be easily spotted by analyzing edges between documents. A site that has few indirect edges is showing an unnatural link profile and search engine rankings will suffer.
Webmasters and SEO’s are slowly switching on to this problem and have misguidedly started triangulated linking, unfortunately this linking strategy is also easily detected by search engines through the analysis of edges.

Advanced Linking Techniques

2008-07-29T08:32:00.000-07:00

Direct Edge and Indirect Edge

When documents link to each other they create what is known in Information Retrieval (IR) as ‘edges’. Edges can be either direct or indirect. A direct edge is created when one document links to another i.e. if document A links to document B there is a direct edge from A to B. What this means in real terms is that there is a strong possibility that document B is related to page A.

Illustration 1: Direct Edge
Conversely although there is no direct link from B back to A there is also a strong possibility that document B is related in some way to document A. This creates an indirect edge between document B and A.

Illustration 2: Indirect Edge and Direct Edge
An indirect edge cannot exist between documents if a direct edge is created. If document B links back to document A establishing reciprocal links between A and B the indirect edge between B and A is replaced with a direct edge.

Cross Link Page Rank

2008-07-29T08:08:00.001-07:00

The effect on PageRank, which is a Google concept, is more debatable. If you refer to the examples in the PageRank section you will see that the effect of adding a link to an external page boosts the PageRank of that page but dilutes PageRank available to the rest of the site.

Figure 1: PageRank on cross linked site
Figure 1 is a very simple example of the effect of adding an external link.
Assuming the Google toolbar is reliable (it can go a while before being updated) each PR value is worth around 8 times the previous level. Thus a link from a PR 5 page is worth 64 times that from a PR3 page. At the same time you need to divide the number of outbound-links on the page to gauge the PageRank benefit to your site.
Link Campaigns and Reciprocal Link Management Tools

Running a successful link exchange campaign takes a lot of time and organization. There are a number of free and commercial link management tools that help to manage your reciprocal links automatically. The most common features include:
•users initiated link requests
•Administration features to check and approve the request, this may include showing the ranking of the user's page etc.
•monitoring the inbound-link with automated removal of sneaky linkers
•generation of customized search engine friendly link pages
•requesting reciprocal links from webmasters
•customized email templates
The higher end tools can be especially useful for SEOers who are managing a number of link building campaigns.

Link Baiting

2008-07-29T07:55:00.001-07:00

Link baiting relates to pages that have a high potential to attract organic links. Again, we are referring to quality content, or at least content that is in some ways fresh, exciting, informative, authoritative, topical, or even humorous, and enough to ‘hook’ users or ‘lure’ them into linking to that content.

This strategy can be a bit hit and miss, as you are relying on people to pick up on and link to your content. Although there are no guarantees that they will do so, there are some principles that should increase your chances of sites linking to you.
Topical industry related content, for example, is likely to encourage links, particularly if you have access to new information. Humorous content can also be effective as sites tend to pick up on material that they find funny, and you can often gain further exposure through ‘indirect’ email marketing as people email content to friends. Other strategies include writing information pages that collate available information on a subject and make it meaningful for a specific audience, or writing controversial material aimed at dismissing individuals or overturning entrenched ideas. By using a combination of these strategies you can improve the link profile of your site while making it looks ‘natural’ to the search engine.

Press Releases

2008-07-29T07:54:00.001-07:00

Creating press releases has increasingly been recognized as an effective link building strategy and can be a useful way of developing links for your site.
This can work when the site on which the release is printed allows you to add links to your article. Many sites on the Internet offer this benefit. You also have the potential to pick up additional links from third party sites that reprint the article.

The downside of this strategy is that it can be time consuming. Even if your real motive is simply to gain links, you will have to write ‘legitimate’ copy, i.e. good factual content that the user will find informative, rather than superficial copy written around your link and targeted key phrases. Only high quality releases are likely to gain the desired exposure or even get published in the first place.

Article Submissions

2008-07-29T07:53:00.000-07:00

The link benefits from article submissions come in two stages. Firstly, you get the benefit from the links from the submission sites themselves. Secondly, webmasters who are looking for content use article submission sites as a dip-in resource and will republish articles on their own site, providing a second tier of links. Another benefit associated to article submission is that it can identify the author as an expert in their field.

If you still feel that you do not have the ability to write articles, Design Insite can research and write articles on your behalf. Article submissions are free but time consuming so you can outsource this work to article submission specialists.

Directory Listings

2008-07-29T07:51:00.000-07:00

There are literally thousand of directories on the web, some better than others, some more relevant than others. www.directoryarchives.com is a directory of directories and provides a good starting point if you wish to manually submit to Article Submission: Again there are thousands of sites on the web that allow article submissions. Many people are wary of writing articles because they feel their standard of writing may be inadequate. Your article will not be viewed as a literary work by readers but rather as a source of information.

Link Spikes

2008-07-29T07:50:00.000-07:00

Negative Link Spikes: Negative link spikes occur when links are lost at an uncharacteristic rate. This can indicate that the content of the target page is stale, outdated or no longer relevant. When negative link spikes occur rankings will tumble.
Link building has become more difficult over the last year or so as search engines evolve to remove the effects of link spam from their results but there are still ethical techniques that can be used to build the link profile of your site:

1. Directory listings
2. Article submission
3. Press Releases
4. Link baiting

Yahoo

2008-07-29T07:41:00.000-07:00

Yahoo! began life in a campus trailer. David Filo and Jerry Yang, grad-students in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University started their guide in February 1994 to keep track of interesting sites on the Internet. Soon their list was so long it had to be divided into categories then sub-categories. The Yahoo! directory was born. Originally known by the catchy name of 'Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web', it was later changed to Yahoo after a trawl through a dictionary. Yahoo's were a brutish tribe in Jonathan Swift's tales of Gulliver's Travels. Yahoo! is said to be an acronym for 'Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle'.

Yahoo! was seeing a million hits by the fall of 1994 and began to attract commercial interest. In March 1995 the business was incorporated and received $2million investment from Sequoia Capital. Yahoo! got in on the first wave of the dot.com craze, launching its IPO in April 1996. Yahoo! shares opened at $13 and lifted to $33 on the day.

Figure 1: Yahoo's Highs and Lows
By the height of the dot.com boom Yahoo! was trading at over $120 a share. Boosted by online advertising revenues and the craze for Portals, then the next big thing. The tech-stock crash hit Yahoo's advertising revenues hard. By 2002 shares could be had for IPO prices.

As part of its portal strategy Yahoo! initially licensed Inktomi's search technology until replacing it in June 2000 with Google. In the summer of 2002 Yahoo! chose to merely extend its contract with Google rather than renew it. The company was worried that Google was encroaching onto its turf at a Portal with the launch of new services such as News. From the end of 2002 Yahoo! began to acquire a number of interesting search engine technologies through the takeover of competitors including Inktomi and Overture (which already owned FAST, Altavista and AlltheWeb). Perhaps more importantly, Overture provided Yahoo! with its patented context targeted adverting technology.

These developments culminated with Yahoo! dropping Google in February 2004 and switching to its own Overture/Inktomi search engine. Clients of Google's context sensitive advertising technology (Adwords) saw no change as Yahoo! already used Overture for this service. Inktomi also supply results to Microsoft (MSN) Search. Estimates now give Yahoo! around 40% of the search engine traffic but this looks to be temporary as Microsoft is developing its own search engine technology. Currently in trials this will form an integrated part of Microsoft's Longhorn operating system scheduled for release in 2006.

The Overture patent also provided Yahoo! with a windfall in the form of 2.7 million Google shares prior to Google's IPO. Overture had sued Google for infringing on its patent for the auctioning of context sensitive advertising.

Yahoo! claims over 200 million visitors per month and features 25 international sites in 13 languages but faces strong competition from Google and Microsoft. Yahoo!has recently bought Oddpost and Stata Labs which it hopes will help it compete in what is seen as the next big thing: desktop search.

Page Rank Value

2007-04-27T03:28:00.000-07:00

SEO is the development of making website changes in order to ranking higher in the listings of search engine keyword search results. SEO monitor use the right words on website and get lots of relevant sites to link and use the right words in those links then have lots of content on particular site and add more regularly then the website achieving a high rank naturally.

Page Rank is estimated separately for each web page and is determined by mention of other pages referring to it. Page Rank is a kind of honorable. In the case of Page Rank, it is the possible frequency of visits to a page. Page Rank does not give accurate information about referring pages, but it allows to rapidly and without difficulty get a feel for the sites popularity level and to follow trends that may result from SEO work.

Page Rank 4 and 5 is characteristic for most sites with normal popularity. PR 6 indicates a very popular site while Page Rank 7 is almost out of the way for a regular webmaster. Congratulate able if manage to achieve it. Page Rank 8, 9, 10 can only be achieved by the sites of great companies.

SEO is an online marketing approach too. SEO is best a part of Promoting a site in search engines and keyword related marketing can be counted for 85 to 95 percentage of largely web traffic. Raising the density of keywords on site is one of the best and simplest ways to amplify chance of site's visibility in the search engine results. Search engine promotion for that matter, is a way of a business strategy. Search engine marketing as a larger umbrella under which search engine optimization fits. It is possible that numerous who alert mainly on SEO in the past are incorporating more and more marketing ideas into their hard work, including public relations policy and accomplishment, online display media trade, web site modify SEO, web trends data analysis, E-mail campaigns, and business blog consulting making SEO firms more like an ad agency.

Business Perception facilitates to identify not just what technologies are in place today but more emphasizing where to they are headline. The web pages, which may be in place 3 months at the base of line when pages to conclude are entirely cataloged. Higher details of this analysis, they will submit to a keyword as a language that characteristic web surfer will input in the search box when finding for particular information about a product.

Highly developed technologies are always there to determine, understand and calculate from head and end of the search business. Search Engines accumulate details about a site that is ranked according to the automated criteria that the programmers decide upon known as an algorithm.

Algorithm is the regulation which determines how a web page will rank the search outcome pages of a search engine. A web site is shaped mainly for search engine ranking purpose that consists almost completely of a long list of dissimilar links. These types of pages are punished by approximately all search engines. An additional fundamental thing for search engines is the effect of sand box for listed sites. Sandbox is purportedly used by one large search engine as an experimentation stage for new sites. Achieving a high PR is kept throughout this time.

Zero Page Rank

2007-04-24T20:22:00.000-07:00

Webmasters using the Google toolbar will sometimes see that they have pages that have a Page Rank of zero (PR 0). This can cause much consternation, especially where the page has inbound-links with good PageRank and where the page itself previously had good PageRank. It is even worse when it is the home page of the website.

It generally takes a couple of crawls and some good inbound-links before a page acquires enough ranking to show on the toolbar. Toolbar PageRank can also be erratic and updates infrequent. The real PageRank may have changed a number of times before this gets reflected in the Toolbar's 0 to 10 scale.

A site that had a good PageRank that then suddenly dropped to zero may indicate that it has been banned by Google for using black-hat optimization techniques. PR0 bans manifest themselves in different ways. Sometimes the PageRank from the home and most of the internal pages vanishes immediately, sometimes the PageRank drops from the home page and the ban slowly ripples through the site over a couple of updates.
The main techniques that have caused PR0 punishments are Link Farming, Jump or Doorway Pages, Hidden Content and Link Spamming through Blogs and Guestbooks. It seems that PR0 punishments are used so that the pages actually remain in the index rather than being removed entirely as happens to the most serious offenders. It is possible to recover from a ban by removing the offending optimizations and then contacting Google but this is far from guaranteed.

Some SEOers advise against cross-linking with sites that have a PR0 on the grounds that the contagion may spread to your pages. A PR0 backlink will not be worth much, except perhaps for some good anchor text although even this will have limited value from a PR0 page. Secondly the site may have a PR0 due to the aforementioned Google filters designed to detect black-hat SEO techniques and your linked site may get banned too. Unless your domain name is disposable and you already wear a black hat don't link with any site that appears to be using these techniques to influence Google site rankings even if they still have good PR. Of course this doesn't apply to new sites with good content and with a long term potential to grow its PageRank.
Finally pages that are deep within a site may never acquire enough PageRank to show on the toolbar. This may be remedied by restructuring the internal links or adding a site map.

Dirty Tricks of the Cross Linkers

2007-04-24T20:08:00.000-07:00

Many webmasters know that outbound-links dilute their site's PageRank. A lot of folks are so obsessed with Google's Toolbar and its PageRank display that they will do anything to avoid giving their 'PageRank' away while at the same time trying to build their own high PageRank inbound-links. As we discussed on the PageRank section, dilution is a real effect but PageRank is also a less important part of the overall Google ranking process than it was.

Some webmasters disguise their outbound-links with Javascript. These look and work okay to someone checking the page. The assumption is that search engines don't read Javascript so they don't transfer PageRank or anchor text weighting.
Keywords

Another trick is to re-route outbound-links via a page that has no PageRank. This is done by placing the re-routing script in a directory protected by a robots.txt file. There are some good reasons to do this, such as protecting comments from blog-spam. Google does this with outbound links from its weblog site:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=URL
The zero PageRank url script takes the target URL as a parameter and redirects the user to the page:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http://www.abcseo.com/
The robots.txt instructs search engine robots not to index the contents of the directory containing the script. Variations on this theme are to
• Directly protect any links page with robots.txt
• Place links on pages with HTML Frame elements
• Use an orphaned page with no inbound-links.
Some webmasters are more worried about losing traffic than PageRank transfer and disguise the actual links using a single-pixel image or invisible text. These links show up when you look for backlinks in the search engine but are invisible to users. Of course the easiest trick is simply to 'forget' to put up your inbound-link or to remove it a short time later. These tactics rely on link partners assuming people are honest and not checking their inbound-links.

Cross Linking and Link Exchanges

2007-04-24T19:44:00.000-07:00

Cross Linking and Link Exchanges
Cross Linking is a popular technique designed to build traffic and increase PageRank. It relies on two websites agreeing to point an outbound-link to the other site. Many website owners spend a great deal of time exchanging links in this way and it is certainly a good way of initially getting yourself indexed by search engines and, if done correctly, getting some good anchor text.

Be careful about unsolicited emails, these can be quite friendly and chatty saying how they have found your site and you are the ideal link partner for them. Check their site out, if they are complementary to your content it may well be worth setting up reciprocal links with them. The key is equability, the web site should offer you something, a strongly themed and relevant link page, good anchor text or PageRank.

Beware of professionals who want a link from your highly ranked page and will try to give little in return by using some down and dirty trickery, more of this later. Don't link to link farms. As a general rule don't link to sites with no relevance to your own and make sure their link page is actually indexed by the search engines (check the Google and Yahoo! caches). As search engines improve their algorithms relevance and links to and from authority sites will increase in importance. You should examine the proposed link-page and home page of the site. If they have zero-page rank is this due to a ban by the search engine or is the site brand new and not yet indexed? Never link to a banned site.

Finding potential link partners is not too difficult. Go to one of the major search engines and look for sites that match your target keywords or check the link partners of your competitors (use the link: operator in Yahoo!). Most of your direct competitors will probably not want to link with you (if they do then so much the better) so from the remainder see if they have good PageRank and a links page. You can now write to the webmasters of these sites asking for a reciprocal link (if there is no email address try webmaster@domain or info@domain). You'll want to write a standard letter telling them about your site and why you think you complement each other. Some people even place an outbound URL before contacting the site. In any case give the URL of your links page or the page where you propose placing the link. Remember that anchor text carries weight with the major search engines so give them the exact phrase you would like in your link. Some webmasters may refuse to link to you because you have a low or even zero PageRank as reported by the Google toolbar, don't be discouraged, point out the benefits of keyword rich anchor text from a relevant page.