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13
Dec
Directory Submissions
When it comes to link building you may have noticed that directory links do very little in the way of getting your website ranked. Google has become very good at spotting and ignoring the majority of internet directories. Both time and money are lost on mass directory submission.
I would focus on a few submissions to quality and relevant niche directories but that would be about as far as I would go.
Reciprocal Linking
If you’ve been messing with reciprocal linking then you know that the value of a reciprocal link is about as low as you can go. And to make it worst Google’s Webmaster Guidelines say they look for and penalize excessive reciprocal linking.
Oh…and let’s not forget that other webmasters will abuse your trust in a second.
Article sites
There are some really good article sites out there and you can get a link from relevant content on an “authority” domain. Articles can also be “spun” to generate variations of the same article for mass article submission.
However it is time consuming to write them, and does require some skill to construct an effective article. You also need to do some keyword research and weave the keyword into the article naturally.
Blog Commenting
The links obtained from leaving comments on blogs are of very low value. And there is an art to getting the links approved.
Link Buying
Link buying is against Google’s TOS, and can get you removed from the index for a year or more if you caught.
Social Sites
Most social sites do not allow anyone to see your links unless you are logged in, which makes the links useless and those that do show the links use “nofollow” to deter people from placing links.
To make link building more fun we have to build links in a natural way so it does not appear to Google that we are trying to manipulate the system.
No-Follow Links
I am going to go against what seems to be the common wisdom and say that I think having nofollow links pointing to your website is a good thing.
In the past, Google has seemed to be interested in promoting sites that have a variety of links from a variety of sources, I believe that it’s because those sites appear to be more legitimately popular and helpful.
If we have nothing but do-follow links, the site will look suspicious, almost like we doing off-site SEO to the site.
Google does not like search engine optimization people.
Someone doing search engine optimization would get nothing but do-follow links and that could very well set off a red flag in Google.
With that and some data from someone that is doing some testing with ranking a site using nothing but no-follow links, I feel comfortable in saying, I don’t mind having a couple no-follow links.
I’ll even go so far as to say that the disadvantage (in my opinion) is in not having any no-follow links. I read somewhere that 10% of the links online now carry the nofollow attribute.
IP Addresses
Something else to keep in mind is that Google discounts links coming from the same IP address.
Link Velocity
When a new site goes live the website owner will sometimes go crazy building links. They build links using press releases, forums, article sites, directories and so on for about the first month, and then they stop.
This sets off some red flags with Google and can get your site penalized. Extreme growth and fall patterns will lead to your sites rankings dropping. This is the sandbox affect we hear so much about.
PageRank
The little green tool bar does not matter. When you run across someone obsessed with their PR, you’ve found someone that does not have a clue what they are doing.
Deep Linking
Deep linking is very important and makes a sites link profile look more natural. Deep linking is getting links from outside sources pointing at our internal pages. Having internal pages that don’t rank for anything makes those pages pretty much useless.
The way we bring those pages into play is by getting links pointing at them and in turn the whole site flows better. And most natural links will point at internal pages anyway.
.edu & .gov
I am not going to argue this point I know a lot of the SEO people swear that .edu & .gov links count more than a normal link. I’ve seen no proof of this and here is what Matt Cutts had to say about it.
“Typically, our policy is: a link is a link, is a link; wherever that link’s worth is, that is the worth that we give it. Some people ask about links from DMOZ, links from .edu or links from .gov, and they say: “Isn’t there some sort of boost? Isn’t a link better if it comes from a .edu?” The short answer is: no, it is not. It is just .edu links tend to have higher PageRank, because more people link to .edu’s or .gov’s.”
I want to end this article by saying one thing. Don’t point all your links at your home page.
Not only does it not look natural but it causes your home page to carry the whole site. By having links pointing at internal pages the site looks more natural and the internal pages help to boost the ranking of all the other pages in the site.
They work together making the site stronger.
I’ve got a blog I’ve been playing with and trying to get to rank for a certain keyword. The blog has done really well and ranks in the top ten for most every post we make within minutes. Of course we try to focus on long tail keywords however; we do go after the competitive keywords from time to time and can hold our own there as well.