Search Engine Optimization Content that Missy Ward Likes

All links are not created equal. Effective link building is an art, and whoever tells you different either doesn’t know better or is trying to sell you something. Here are the ten commandments of link building.

1. Thou shalt not blog comment spam - This is one of the most annoying forms of link building that most bloggers come across every day. The irrelevant, pointless and duplicate comments that akismet filters from our blogs every day. Besides the fact that most blogs use rel=nofollow in their comment section, which render the SEO value of these links useless, it also damages brands and breaks trust in the community. There’s nothing wrong with leaving meaningful and useful comments on relevant posts, but don’t post for the sake of getting a link. Contribute value to the conversation.
2. Thou shalt not article market – This one is a little tricky. Article marketing on its own isn’t a bad thing per se, but the way marketers have abused this system over the years has left a lasting impact on how Google values links within articles on sites such as ezinearticles. If you’re going to spend time on writing and spinning flimsy articles, why not spend that time on writing a guest post for popular blogs?
3. Thou shalt not create thousands of forum profiles – Automated forum profile creation tools like xrumer are very popular in the blackhat community, and there are even sites online that provide this as a monthly service. The problem here is the same as blog comment spam; You create a large number of irrelevant links to your site. Not only will Google detect a sudden spike in back links which will raise a red flag, a lot of the links you’re getting will be from “bad neighbourhoods” (sites and topics most webmasters dont wan’t their sites associated with) Again, slightly tricky because Google can hardly punish a site for getting loads of bad links, because a competitor might simply build bad links to your site. It’s very likely that Google ignores these links completely. So why spend your money on xrumer licenses, server resources, and monthly spam plans? Use it to buy stumbles or legit banner advertising instead.
4. Thou shalt not social bookmark everywhere – Again, relevancy is a key component when it comes to link building. If you buy a “500 social bookmarks” deal from someone for $25, you just lost $25. Keep in mind that the easier a link is to get, the less value it holds for Google. Instead, try to become a power-user on a select few social networks. If you manage to play the social bookmarking game right, you’ll actually hit front pages on the networks. The main reason would not be for instant traffic, but for the additional links that your content will get from the exposure.
5. Thou shalt not submit to every directory – Directories are a dime a dozen, and 99% of them hold no SEO value. Once again, the easier it is to get a link, the less value it will haver for Google. Try to find relevant directories, and stick with them
6. Thou shalt not worship pagerank – Pagerank isn’t dead. Every webmaster forum you go to will have a link sales section, and prices are largely influenced by the pagerank a link will pass. Have you ever noticed in the search results, when you look for something random, the top ten results are NEVER ordered by pagerank? Results #1-9 might have a PR of 0, while result #10 has a PR of 7. Seek relevancy, not pagerank.
7. Thou shalt not email spam for reciprocal links – “Hi, can I get a link from your links page if I give you a link from my links page?” – There’s nothing wrong with a reciprocal link, as long as it’s from a relevant site. It might not be as powerful as a one-way link, but they can’t be completely disregarded. What you shouldn’t do though is run automated scripts that scrape the Internet for keywords and send automated emails to the website owners. You’d be surprised how quickly you and your domain end up on a spam blacklist.
8. Thou shalt not use link farms – Owning hundreds of blogs is one way you can quickly build links to your site(s). The problem is that it is very likely that you’re leaving footprints from that network for Google to find, and they can undo all your hard work with one slap. Sure, you can go through all the trouble of buying hundreds of domains, getting them all hosted on separate c-block ip addresses, scraping and spinning “original” content for them. I have one word for you. Panda (Even John can’t kill this panda!) Instead, use all that time and money to build one amazing site that can attract links by merit.
9. Thou shalt not use the same anchor text all the time – Getting over 25% (or even less) the same anchor text links just doesn’t look natural. Especially with longtail keywords over 3 or 4 words. If you ask ten people to write ten sentences with ten links to a page about SEO advice, tips, tricks, and tutorials – chances are you’ll end up with ten different links (e.g SEO advice, SEO tips, tricks for SEO, tutorials on SEO, etc). Best practice is to mix it up within a relevant, unique sentence or pargraph every time. This is very hard to accomplish with automated scripts, so just do the old fashioned by-hand method. Works every time.
10. Thou shalt not forget about deep links – Your homepage doesn’t have to be your most important page. Let’s say you have an e-commerce site, and you want people to find your products in Google, you’re better off getting a deep link to the most relevant page for a keyword term, instead of the homepage (which is most likely to be generic and less relevant). That way you’re not only helping Google to decide what exactly your site is about, you’re also pushing the relevant sales page up for visitors, who don’t have to go looking for the products on the front page. Less clicks = better user experience for your clients.

Although there are many more things I could talk about in this post, I think this sums up nicely the basics of bad link building. Some of the methods might seem like winners, but in the long run, none of them are sustainable for any business model. Google is constantly evolving to crush anything that’s not considered natural and useful.

This guest post was written by Bob Jones, an SEO strategist at an SEO Company

ia johnchow.com

By Curtis Stevens on July 2010

SEOmoz has mentioned it before in their link building videos that badges and widgets are a great way to get links, but can they really help you get to the top for very competitive terms?  I believe so and have some proof to demonstrate it.  Most badges I have seen are some type of image that is hyperlinked to the owner’s web site.  I’m sure everyone would agree that there is some value in image links, but probably not a whole lot.  The big question is how can you turn this into a phenomenal ranking boosting tool?  It’s easy and I will show you how one company has been successful at it for a couple of years now.  This article may create a lot of discussion, but the numbers speak for themselves.

A normal badge would look something like this:

The company I am using in my example is called Authorize.net.  They are an Internet gateway service used by online stores for credit card processing.  What they have done is created a badge merchants can place on their web site showing their customers that they are a valid merchant.  The badge is called a verification seal.  The difference in what they have done is they added a text link below their badge.  I’m sure a lot of merchants are smart enough to remove this promotional code when they download it, but many do not.  According to Open Site Explorer, over 10,000 root domain names have not done so.

Their badge looks like this, which “online payments” is a hyperlink pointing to their home page and the badge itself is pointing to a page that verifies the merchant:

They say the best kind of links are in the content and Google is great at determining this while giving very little value to links of this nature.  This may be very true, but it is definitely working for this group.  If anything, you should consider implementing it if you can make it work for you.  If you are thinking this may only work temporarily, let me say this.  Authorize.net did not have great rankings 3 or 4 yrs ago.  I started watching them implement this and over time their rankings started to climb.  A year or two ago they moved to the top on a few very competitive keywords and haven’t dropped since.

Lets look at the numbers shall we?

Click to Enlarge

Obviously this doesn’t work for every web site due to the inherited requirements, such as having a badge people want to link to.  However, the ones that can take advantage of this could really exploit it.  Even SEOmoz could do something like this as well with their badges.  There may be a question of professionalism for some, but definitely a nice topic to debate on.  Please share your thoughts.

Curtis Stevens is the founder of Gotmerchant.com, a credit card processing service provider.  They help merchants accept credit cards or switch processors if they’re not happy with their current provider.  They also specialize in a few unique products such as the Casio cash register or a wireless credit card machine.

photo credit: Foto Blog SMR

When search engines return web pages in search results in response to a query, most people assume that the pages being show are the ones that a search engine has decided are the “best” pages in response to their search terms. But what does the word “best” mean in that context? The search engines attempt to show pages that are both relevant to the query (and the intent of a searcher), and are popular.

Google’s PageRank algorithm is a popularity algorithm based upon a citation analysis approach to finding pages, or as Google Founder Larry Page noted in Improved Text Searching in Hypertext Systems (pdf):

The intuition is that if your query matches tens of thousands of documents, you would be happier looking at documents that many people thought to mention in their web pages, or that people who had important pages mentioned at least a few times.

 

There are other ways of measuring popularity that the search engines may be using as well, such as the number of times that a document has been read, or the number of times that it might have been linked to or mentioned or shared on a social network, or selected when shown in a set of search results. A couple of Microsoft patent applications filed this month question the wisdom of using popularity as a way of ranking pages, and tell us that:

The popularity of a particular document, however, does not necessarily indicate that the document is relevant to the search query, or that the document is associated with sources that are considered reliable with respect to the subject matter of the document.

For example, let’s say that you’re looking for the best information that you can find about how gravity works around a black hole. It’s possible that the best information you could find might be found in a scientific journal that specializes in the behavior of black holes. The articles at that journal may even be written by some of the world’s foremost experts on Astronomy for a very scientifically literate audience. Chances are if you performed a search at Google or Yahoo or Bing for that topic that, even if that particular journal was open to the public and freely accessible via search engines, that instead of the journal showing up near the top of search results, instead you would see much more mainstream pages written for a much wider audience.

Those mainstream articles likely have many more links pointing to them than the journal written for scientists. They likely have highly popular pages linking to them from news sources, from government agencies like NASA, and from other more mainstream sites that report about science. While pages that are popular can often be useful and informative pages, they may not be the most authoritative pages that could be shown in response to a query.

Author Authority Ranking

The Microsoft patents describe a system for scoring pages based upon an author’s authority, and for reranking search results based upon those authority scores.

We’re told in the patents that the term “authority” refers to the following characteristics about an author or source of information as might be associated with that author or source in response to a particular topic:

• Trustworthiness
• Reliability
• Knowledgeability
• Respect

In a few ways, this authority ranking approach reminded me of a recent Microsoft about determining the credibility of resources on the Web that I wrote about in How a Search Engine Might Visualize and Rerank Web Pages Based Upon Credibility. The focus of that paper was upon assessing the credibility of websites rather than particular authors however.

Determining whether an author might be authoritative on a topic could be determined by looking at data associated with the author, such as:

• Educational degrees held by the source
• Where those degrees were obtained
• Citations of the source in scholarly or technical works
• Number of publications associated with a source
• Number of social network connections and/or followers
• Whether or not the source is employed by and/or graduated from a well respected and/or highly cited institution
• Social networking information such as a number of posts relating to the source and/or a particular topic addressed by the source
• Number of patents held by the source
• Number of links to content associated with the source
• Number of articles citing work associated with the source
• Ratings and Reviews associated with the source

Content and specific sites from specific sources might be determined to be authoritative about specific topics, and if a query that someone searches for may also be associated with that topic, then pages from that source might be boosted in search results based upon that perceived authority.

Here’s a screenshot of a table from the second patent filing that shows authority scores and some potential influences on those scores:

The patent applications are:

Authority Ranking
Invented by Susan T. Dumais, Stefan David Weitz, Alexander George Gounares, David James Gemmell and Paul Yiu
Assigned to Microsoft Corporation
US Patent Application 20110246484
Published October 6, 2011
Filed: April 1, 2010

Abstract

Concepts and technologies are described herein for authority ranking for real time and social search. An authority index configured to store data relating to sources is generated. Data relating to the sources, including an authority value, are generated and stored at the authority index. The authority value may be defined as a function of source, topic, and point of view (“POV”), as well as other data, if desired, and may be determined based upon one or more ranking functions.

The ranking functions are determined, and data corresponding to the ranking functions is obtained. Each of the ranking functions may be weighted according to a weighting function, a confidence value or interval, one or more time functions, and/or other methods. The obtained authority value may be used for affecting ranking of search results or for other purposes.

Dynamic Reranking of Search Results Based upon Source Authority
Invented by Stefan David Weitz, Alexander George Gounares, and Patrick A. Kinsel
Assigned to Microsoft
US Patent Application 20110246456
Published October 6, 2011
Filed: April 1, 2010

Abstract

Concepts and technologies are described herein for dynamically reranking search results based upon source authority. A search query is received and analyzed. One or more topics are identified in the search query. An authority index is searched to identify authoritative sources for content relating to the identified topic(s). Promoted results corresponding to content generated by the authoritative sources relating to the identified topics are obtained.

The promoted results can be presented to an entity requesting the search, or injected into search results. Contribution dimensions associated with the promoted results can be determined, and filters based upon the contribution dimensions can be generated and used by an entity to dynamically manipulate the search results.

The patents describe in more detail how they would look at contributions by and interactions between a source (a person, an organization, a business, etc.) and others at places like Facebook and Twitter, at ratings and reviews for that source. They discuss learning about relationships between individuals and websites, businesses, educational institutions, and more.

Data about a “source” might be identified explicitly through author bylines (sound a little like Google’s authorship markup approach?), through places they might be explicitly tied to in some way such as institutions or publications or domain names.

The patent filings point to other types of data that might be collected and associated with a source as well, such as:

• Gender of a source
• Country of origin associated with the source
• Language associated with the source, entities and/or other sources related to the source
• Type of content associated with the source
• Ranking or rating data
• Descriptions of content associated with the source
• Number of words in the content
• Version number associated with the content
• Copyright date of the content

Pages that are promoted within search results might be presented separately from more conventional search results, or they may be injected within those results.

Conclusion

In many ways, Microsoft’s approach towards providing an authority score for authors or sources sound like what Google is trying to do with their authorship markup, though we haven’t been given much in the way of details by Google about how and why some authors’ pages or microblog posts might be ranked in search results. We have been given some hints though, that I’ve written about in places like the following posts:

• After Authorship Markup, Will Google Give Us Author Badges Too?
• Early Google Circles and the Google Social Site You Might Not Know About
• How Google Might Rank User Generated Web Content in Google + and Other Social Networks

Will we see a similar approach from Microsoft that might involve authorship markup, or that may take more advantage of the relationship between Bing and Facebook, or both?

One question that I have is whether the approach to authority ranking described in the Microsoft patent applications is useful. Are degrees and numbers of patents granted or papers published useful signs of authority? Are there sometimes more authoritative sources who have degrees from less well known educational institutions? Numbers of links on other pages, and numbers of followers in social networks still seem to be important under this approach.

But the patent also looks at the kinds of interactions that authors might have with others, and other information that isn’t tied to popularity as well.

 

You are here: Eric Nagel > How To & Tips > Feeding the Google Panda Keyword-Rich Subdomains

There’s been talk lately that the Google Panda loves keyword-rich subdomains, so I decided to test this on my coupon website.

Aside from a WordPress blog, the pages on the coupon website are all driven from a coupon database. I use a system I wrote myself, although you can just as easily use a service like For Me to Coupon.

The merchant pages on the site look like this:
clubcouponcode.com/Flirty-Aprons-m925.php

The “m925″ part in the filename tells my system this is merchant 925 in the database. If you change that ID, you’ll be shown another merchant’s coupons instead (and the URL will be corrected).

Previously, the full URL was www.clubcouponcode.com/Flirty-Aprons-m925.php, but I wanted to feed the Google Panda by putting the merchant name in the subdomain. Of course, adding all of those DNS entries wasn’t an option, and adding all of those ServerAliases in apache wasn’t an option, either. After all, there are nearly 3,000 merchants in the database. So to get over this hurdle, I’m using wildcard DNS.

The first step is to add an A-record to your zone file, such as:

A        *        184.72.255.56

Of course, you want to point this to your server, not mine.

Then, you need to add the ServerAlias to the apache configuration. I’m using Plesk, so I create a vhost.conf file in /var/www/vhosts/clubcouponcode.com/conf which contains:

ServerAlias *.clubcouponcode.com

Now, you can go to anysubdomainyouwant.clubcouponcode.com and the site will come up.

The next step is to automatically redirect the pages to their new, keyword-friendly subdomain URLs. Here’s how I’m checking to make sure the user is on the right page, and redirecting if not:

$cURIActual = 'http://' . $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] . $_SERVER['REDIRECT_URL'];
$cURIExpected = 'http://' . strtolower(simplify($rsMerchantData['cName'], true)) . '.clubcouponcode.com/' . simplify($rsMerchantData['cName']) . '-m' . $rsMerchantData['nMerchantID'] . '.php';

if ($cURIActual != $cURIExpected) {
        header("Location:  $cURIExpected", TRUE, 301);
        exit();
} // ends if ($cURIActual != $cURIExpected)

Here’s the simplify function:

function simplify($cString, $bNoDashes = false) {
        $cString = str_replace("'", '', $cString);
        $cString = preg_replace("/[^A-Za-z0-9]/", "-", $cString);
        $cString = str_replace('--', '-', $cString);
        $cString = str_replace('--', '-', $cString);
        $cString = str_replace('--', '-', $cString);
        $cString = str_replace('--', '-', $cString);
        $cString = preg_replace("/\-$/", "", $cString);
        if ($bNoDashes) {
                return str_replace('-', '', $cString);
        } // ends if ($bNoDashes)
        else {
                return $cString;
        } // ends else from if ($bNoDashes)
} // ends function urlfriendly($cString)

Hopefully you can follow the PHP coding.

So if you have a large database-driven site, you can use wildcard DNS to create the appearance of many, many subdomains. Just be sure to put checks in place, so you don’t have thousands of copies of the page across all of the subdomains.

Tagged as: dns, Google, Panda, PHP