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| Elephant Links – and How to Deal with Them Posted: 30 Aug 2011 11:59 PM PDT
The only problem is that removing those links may wind up hurting people's feelings which is more damaging than what their links are doing to you. Is there anything you can do to keep the Google spiders from crawling your site and seeing these unwelcome links? In the past, we have spent some time covering information regarding what sites to link to, what backlinks will be worth the most, and how to avoid links that will hurt your site. But what if you jumped into link building the wrong way when you first set up your site, and you have some links that are sitting there like an elephant in the room no one wants to talk about doing anything about? There is good news, you are not really stuck with those links forever. You don't have to hurt anyone's feelings or make enemies by deleting those links which are not helping you. You can easily direct search engine spiders to discount links, pages and even whole directories if need be and it's very simple to do. 'Disallow', 'no-index' and 'no-follow' are useful tools to keep bad or unwanted links and/or junk pages from hurting your site so much. Eventually you will have to clean house thoroughly, but if you are short on man-hours, here is a temporary quick fix. Add a 'no-follow' attribute to 'bad' links and 'disallow' spiders to access those awful pages. You can add a no-follow to a link simply by adding it to the HTML like this: You can put a page disallow in your root folder added to the robots.txt file. User-agent: * Disallow: /bad-page/keep/out.html You should also very specifically link to each page for the highest relevance. Categorize your links carefully and matching them to the best pages in your site will help strengthen your website from within. It is no secret that you need strong internal site architecture to compete in a consumer satisfaction driven environment! As for the reciprocal links from family and friends, consider a 'Friends of (your sitename)' page, and have the less relevant links listed there. They are still mentioned so it's not like they are totally being abandoned, but you also are not lagging behind by featuring them. You can no-follow each link, or simply disallow the whole page if that makes more sense. This also lends a little extra 'testimonial' style to your site for visitors as well; it's like seeing your 'followers' . |
| Link Selling – Dark Shades of Gray Posted: 29 Aug 2011 06:30 PM PDT
The world of SEO is a dangerous place most know only a tiny bit about! As the old saying goes, sometimes a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. You cannot read a few blog posts, mostly understand the basics and then go to work on your website in the manner a professional would. The mistakes that can be made in this situation are both numerous and potentially lethal to the health of your site. This is particularly true in the world of link exchanges. In general, the more relevant inbound links a website has, the better the site ranking will be. As often happens when people have a less than full understanding of a concept, some people twisted this knowledge by leaving out the all important word 'relevant.' While the link-exchange industry has boomed, not all have boomed by the book. Link exchanges are not as simple or straightforward as they appear on the surface. There are many details that must be fulfilled for a link to be of value. A link is in many ways a nod of approval between websites. When you link your site to another website, search engines count it as a recommendation of that site by you. You are vouching for that site to be a quality site. Page rank, which is calculated from a complicated algorithm, boils down to the simple concept of high is good. If you spend a lot of time on your website adding pages and pages of unique keyword rich content, keep updating frequently, and over time get other high-page-rank sites link to you, then Google is going to rate your site higher as far as PageRank is concerned. You will probably rank well for SERPs as well assuming you have done your keyword targeting correctly. What does it take to get high PageRank? * Make sure that the site you are linking to has good content that will add value to your own visitors' experiences. When a visitor follows a link off of your page, they should not land on a bogus website. If a recommendation by your site leads people to trust your opinion, then they will come back to you! Link building is a job that should only be started if you understand the ramifications of it and correctly utilize and understand the tools that are available to you and make sure that your decisions are based on data. Even if you think you haven't done anything wrong, you can be accused of link spamming if you are not careful. Watch out for unscrupulous link directories and sites that operate with little or no oversight. Use the techniques outlined above to make sure that you're posting to relevant sites/directories/ articles/ blogs or wherever you choose to submit your content and links. Linking software creators claim that you can get thousands of back links with the press of a button or for only "$89″. The only way to get good quality back links is to do the research yourself and hand-submit every single link. Otherwise you are basically torpedoing your own site and the work you put into it. Rather than doing that, use an SEO firm that does the work manually and gives you a list of where your links are coming from and the PR of each site so that you know everything is operating above board. |
Are you in a situation where you notice that your site is filled with links you would rather not have but can't really get rid of? Remember back when you were first setting up your site and begged everyone for links? You set up your site, hit up all of your friends and family members for links, and now those non-relevant, off topic, zero PageRank links from blogs and little personal sites are dragging you down an endless spiral.
Selling links is getting into a very gray and shady territory, and by entering that world you can sink yourself very quickly by following black hat tactics!| You are subscribed to email updates from Submitedge Blog - Search Engine Optimization Blog - SEO To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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Sometimes, with hard work and plenty of sweat equity, you finally manage to fight and claw your way up to the top of the SERPs. As you stand back and proudly gaze upon your hard work your smile disappears when you see an upstart with an apparently absent conscience has undone it all. What do you do when some website owner decides to play dirty and ruins the time, energy and sometimes even money that you have invested?
Does it feel like you never have the time to write your own content? Do you have worries about doing something wrong? Are you confused about linking even after reading enough guides to make your spin? if so, you are far from being alone. While a vast number of entrepreneurs think that doing your own SEO is almost mandatory, the truth is you are often better off outsourcing it to SEO professionals. Lets look at the reasons to hire a reputable firm to help you get your site off of the ground.
Cloaking is one of the more common SEO black hat techniques that you may run across. There are still some SEO professionals using this technique to optimize their websites or those of their client. Unlike the many other SEO techniques available, cloaking is not all that evident to the users if at all – even to those who have a general idea of how it all works. Because of that, you need to make sure that when you hire a SEO company, they are not engaging in any black hat techniques which includes cloaking when they optimize your website.
