Link Building Archives

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if DMOZ is still relevant in 2009? DMOZ is a legendary web directory and has a ton of history. But is it still a critical or what it ever a critical part of your overall SEO or link building strategy?

I don't often see discussions around DMOZ (Open Directory Project) these days. In the past, the SEO forums were more likely to have an active discussion around the value and tips for submitting to DMOZ. Nowadays, I don't see it too much.

So I decided to create a poll and hope to get some responses from you on how important DMOZ is to you, as an SEO. Here is the poll:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread has new conversation on branded links. By that, he means, getting links to your web site for your brand name. For example, if you link to this site with the anchor text Search Engine Roundtable over something like best search blog or something like that. Honestly, I'd take either, but I kind of prefer the Search Engine Roundtable link, because it is the name of this site.

Why do I personally prefer Search Engine Roundtable over best search blog? Well, if someone is reading your site and you write best search blog, they might not click over or look at the URL, so they don't know that the best search blog is the Search Engine Roundtable. But if you write Search Engine Roundtable, that might stick, so I might prefer you write that the Search Engine Roundtable is the best search blog.

Buckworks, the WebmasterWorld moderator, added his advice:

New links from quality sites would help your cause even if the anchor text isn't SEO-perfect.

Be religiously consistent about what URL you ask them to link to:

http://www.example.com/
vs
http://example.com/

NOT

http://www.example.com/index.html or whatever

So, go ahead, link to us as the Search Engine Roundtable, I won't mind.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Ann Smarty at Search Engine Journal has a nice short piece on link building worksheets. These spreadsheets help link builders keep track of their link building efforts.

She links to three worksheets, including:

• Ontolo's worksheet
• Kalena's blog post
• Your SEO Plan

In the comments, two people leave two more tools to help (yes, I bet there are more):

• Raven Tools
• WordStrea

I am a big fan of building custom tools around your business workflow. So if I was a link builder and had a team of link builders, I would build something custom. The tool I would build would track link builders time, where they got the link from, how long it took, how much it cost (time or money or both), was there an exchange, is the link still active (a small crawler) and integrate it into the business management tools. Possibly track the effectiveness of the link by looking at traffic and keyword rankings. So much can be done when you build in automation into your software.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

WebmasterWorld administrator, Tedster, created a thread at WebmasterWorld on the topic of "stingy links." In short, he said he was watching to a presentation by a Microsoft engineer about improving the SALSA algorithm for link structure analysis - and I noticed a very casual comment that "links from authors who are very stingy outlinkers are more informative."

Yea, a "duh" moment for Tedster and possibly others. As Tedster explains, it is not just about the PageRank funneling being worth more, but this may be something a search engine looks at. A site that is less likely to link out, when it does, it must be something worth while.

Like those people stingy with their money. If they do hand over cash for a product or charity, it has to make you think - well, this might be worth the money. Same here with links, those stingy with links, who do eventually link out, must be linking out for good reason.

The idea is not new but it is always nice to discuss concepts so they don't get stale.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I found a fun thread at HighRankings Forums that discusses what he calls "unintentional reciprocal links." What I find funny about that name is that, if you think about it, an unintentional reciprocal link, but definition, is a natural link.

I believe this person is worried that Google or a search engine might classify his site to be in a link scheme if the people who he linked to, links back to him. In many cases, the places we link to, will naturally link back.

How often do I link from here to Search Engine Land and from Search Engine Land back to here? Is that a reciprocal link? How often do I link to other search blogs, that link back to me?

It is just natural to have "unintentional reciprocal links," so don't sweat it.

In the thread, Jill Whalen, owner of High Rankings, added an other point about reciprocal links:

In that case, the original poster is under the false impression that a reciprocal links are penalized. Since they're not, there's nothing to worry about.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forums.

Last night at SMX Advanced Matt Cutts of Google reportedly dropped a bombshell on the SEO community when he said that using the nofollow to PageRank sculpt might not work like you (SEOs) thought. Danny Sullivan explained it well:

If you have $10 in authority to spend on those ten links, and you block 5 of them, the other 5 aren’t going to get $2 each. They’re still getting $1. It’s just that the other $5 you thought you were saving is now going to waste.

In Danny's simplistic example, if you have a PageRank of 10 (I know it doesn't work this way) and you link out to ten pages, each page would get PR1. Now, if you nofollow 5 of those links, then the 5 normal links should get PR2s each. This is not the case, instead they get PR1s and the other PR5 is wasted.

But what really annoys me is that Matt left this out of a video he published days before the conference. Matt in his videos, answered a question about PageRank sculpting. He completely left out these details in that video. Why? I am not sure, but watch the video:

Why leave it out there Matt? Was it reserved for SMX? If so, why not wait on that topic and publish the video with the full explanation later?

In any event, Danny goes on to explain that Google now crawls and indexes links within JavaScript’s “onClick” events. Using JavaScript for links you don't want Google to find, for example, text ads, was a great solution. Now, it Google indexes those links, and that means, you need to slap on the nofollow attribute on those links or possibly be penalized in the future.

As you can imagine, both the nofollow sculpting topic of wasted PageRank and the fact that JavaScript links may now need nofollows added to them, are pretty major. Stuff like this can cause a revolt in the SEO world.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Here is the live blog coverage of the news:

• Duplicate Content Solutions & The Canonical Tag - SMX Advanced Coverage 2009, SEO Gadget
• Duplicate Content Solutions & The Canonical Tag, outspokenmedia.com
• Beyond the Usual Link Building, outspokenmedia.com
• Beyond the usual linkbuilding - SMX Advanced 2009, SEO Gadget
• Live from SMX Advanced: Beyond the Usual Link Building, Search Marketing Sage
• Nofollow Makes News at SMX Advanced, BruceClay.com
• You&A With Matt Cutts, outspokenmedia.com

On Thursday we reported that the backlink data was out of sync in the redesigned webmaster tools. Well, over the weekend, that was fixed.

Googler, Jonathan Simon said in a Google Webmasters Help thread that it is now up to date. Jonathan said:

Check out your site's backlinks data in the new version of Webmaster Tools. We've just finished the process of loading the most recent backlinks data so you should now be able to see all your site's backlinks.

The backlinks data between the new and old versions of Webmaster Tools may not match 100% but the new version's data should be more comprehensive for most sites.

Some people are still having issues, so if you are one of those, join the thread and Jonathan or Sagar can help you.

Forum discussion at Google Webmasters Help.

The other day, Google released a redesigned Webmaster Tools area. Soon after it was released, webmasters began noticing that the linkage data found in the new Webmaster Tools was out of sync with the one found in the old Webmaster Tools version.

Google has confirmed the issue, saying:

You may notice that your backlinks data differs between the new and old versions—this is because we're still filling in data for some sites in the new version. We hope that you'll find the new data more comprehensive once it's 100% filled in.

So for these sites, the issue hopefully will be resolved shortly. No need to panic.

Forum discussion continued at Google Webmasters Help, WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

The topic of link building is a very popular subject here. One recent WebmasterWorld thread asks how can one create a value proposition compelling enough to encourage someone to link to their web site via an email request?

The webmaster said:

Sites just don't link back to you unless they have a reason to....for the most part. I'm wondering what is the best way to approach these types of link request and perhaps an example or two of the language/tone of voice that would be most successful.

Well, maybe sites just sit back and don't link out. But a lot of sites do link out without being asked to. Maybe that is why Consumer Reports did link exchanges, if that was a true story.

In any event, how does one convince someone to link to their web site via email? Hard question, and a lot depends on the quality of your web site. Personally, I delete all link exchange or request emails, but not everyone deletes them. So your website better back up your email request. Don't say you have the best web site on blue widgets and have a web site about green widgets.

There are many tactics people can use to spice up those email requests. Join the discussion on this topic at WebmasterWorld and scan through our many link building articles.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks how long does a link pass link juice after the link was removed from the web page? For example, a web page has a link to your page and then that link is either removed or the page or site goes down, how long will the search engine consider that link a vote of confidence for your page?

I think the obvious answer is as soon as the search crawler notices the link is gone, communicates that to the index and the index updates to correct the link popularity factors for that page. Not every search engine is quick to do that. I know that in the past, Yahoo was incredibly slow to devalue links that were dropped. Google is typically faster.

What do you think?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There are rumors that the incredibly popular magazine and website, Consumer Reports is sending out link exchange requests to webmasters and SEOs.

A WebmasterWorld thread has a Senior Member, MichaelBluejay, saying that he has received, what he considers, deceptive emails from Consumer Reports asking for a link exchange. Let me quote you what he said:

Consumer Reports wrote to me, saying they're "constantly seeking sites that complement our own," how their ultimate goal is to help consumers get expert information, and how my site is an excellent resource for various specific reasons (which was on the mark, they did actually visit it). They then requested a link from a specific page of mine to a specific page of theirs, ending with "Hopefully together we can help users find reliable information on [widgets]."

But a careful reading of their message shows that they didn't actually link to my site, or even say they'd do so if I linked to them -- even though they're supposedly so incredibly impressed by my site and its usefulness to consumers.

So I wrote back and asked, "I'm sorry, where exactly is your link to my site?" They never replied.

The obvious question is why would a large publication like Consumer Reports need to conduct link exchanges? Are they just automatically sending out emails to publishers asking them to link to their site? Why make it sound like they want to give a link back to the publisher, when it doesn't seem like they will end up doing so?

There are a few possibilities that come to mind:

(1) Consumer Reports hired a SEO company and maybe the SEO company feels these emails are important to their SEO campaign?
(2) Another site had a typo in their link exchange email requests and put down Consumer Reports?
(3) This was a joke or made up?

I am not sure but this is indeed interesting. I guess, it can't hurt to remind people that Consumer Reports does have solid information. It is just weird to see link exchange emails from large publications and companies.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I ran a poll a couple weeks ago asking, do you use interns as link builders? The 120 plus responses are in and most of those who responded said yes, they use interns as link builders.

74 of the 120 responses, or 62%, said they do use interns for link building. While, 45 of the 120 responses, or 38%, said they do not use interns for link building. One said that he is considering it.

The main debate is if an intern can be successful in link building. Is there enough time to train and deploy an intern in the art of link building before that intern moves on to the next thing he or she may be doing? The debate is still going on, on this topic. But clearly, most of you are comfortable with using interns for link building.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There is a pretty funny thread for anyone who is somewhat familiar with the SEO industry. A thread at Google Webmasters Help has this SEO who goes on a rant about the nofollow and what have happened to links. In fact, he says that Google should consider all links nofollow by default and require webmasters to add a rel="follow" to links that they deem respectable enough to deserve any link equity.

Here is the webmaster's post:

I'm thinking that I should just adopt a site-wide policy that all links have nofollow. Because of Google's PageRank algorithm, links have become a dirty thing that requires a lot of consideration, a cause for concerns and panic, an object of envy, conflict, fight, bitterness, etc.. Reading this forum is a good indication of the sad state of what "links" have become. And, it's all because of Google's PageRank algorithm. It would be simpler, easier, and healthier if all links had nofollow as a policy. In fact, I wish Google would do the opposite; require people to add rel="follow" only when you want to pass "link juice" to someone else. The truth of the matter is that everyone has to know what PageRank is these days and some degree of SEO, which means that everyone is perfectly aware of what value and power links have. No one is innocent. Everyone treats links like money whether we actually get paid for it or not. Links has become a currency of power. In the old days, when we used to call them "hyperllinks" they were just a mechanism for convenience.

Now how is that for a rant? I kind of agree. I mean, the nofollow link attribute was originally designed to prevent spam in blogs, forums, and any open web form. Now it is used for ads, for managing your internal PageRank and to penalize sites. I am not going to go off on a rant on the nofollow attribute, so I will stop there.

The Google Webmasters Help thread has a lot of discussion around the nofollow attribute. It makes for a fun, pre-weekend read.

Forum discussion at Google Webmasters Help.

The summer is coming up and that means there are plenty of college and high school students looking for a couple months of work. Typically, you can hire these college or high school students at extremely low rates. It is the summer internship possibilities that come up yearly. I do hear that many people in this position are having a tough time finding work, especially paid work - like the rest of the world. But it may be the time for your company to tack on these interns.

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion around using interns for link building. Some believe that if trained well and you have good quality assurance measures in place, putting interns in the position of link builders is a no-brainer. Others believe it would be a waste to hire an intern with no link building experience and have them do link building for you for two months.

Personally, I think it would be a good job for an intern. They surf the web all day, looking at web sites and get paid or college credit, for doing so. But do you agree?

Take our poll:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

We recently wrote about getting PageRank without getting links, it turned out to be a fairly popular thread we covered. In any event, Brett Tabke started a timely post on that at WebmasterWorld.

He named the post, Hot Top 20 Stealth Links and explores the various links you may get that might not appear as the typical link. Here is a list from Brett and others in the thread:

• another site links to your graphics ( img src=http://www.searchengineworld.com/gfx/logo.png )
• a site links to your javascript files
• a site links to your css files?
• rss feeds and other xml feeds that people can link to without notice or referrals necc being generated.
• links in email that some se's can read (yahoo mail, hotmail, Gmail)
• links marked with noindex
• links marked with nofollow
• raw urls within javascript or js comments
• raw urls within css or in css comments
• urls within meta data of graphics and video files
• urls within html comments
• urls within the head section, meta data of a html page, or alternate html entities (alt, name, id, etc)
• links or pages that maybe surfed while visitor has page rank engaged on the toolbar
• the target of a constructed, obfuscated, or encrypted js url (hidden until executed)
• links behind pay walls that Google can spider via webmaster tools
• Domains that have been 301'd with links.
• Links in Flash movies (games, quizzes, etc).
• non href'ed url's. (raw url on page http://www.webmasterworld.com)
• Links in any documents other than web pages e.g. .doc, .pdf, .txt, etc.
• blocking a page in robots.txt should make it blocked from bots, but they still spider it.
• Domain registrations/Whois and DNS data
• Links in form data.
• Links in other Google produced software (gadgets, widgets)
• NonTraditional pages (irc, twitter, UseNet, Yahoo, or Google Groups.
• Links in Flash movies (games, quizzes, etc).
• Links in contextual ads
• Links written on billboards, cars and other outdoor objects with help of Google Map.

The thread is just beginning and there are dozens of ideas already in the thread. So get over to WebmasterWorld and start contributing more.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A week ago, we ran a poll asking when is the best time to send out link requests. We know, we don't recommend bombarding people with link exchange or request emails, but if you had to, when would you do it?

The hundreds of responses are in and it seems like most people suggest sending it on Tuesday mornings. Here is the breakdown in pie charts.

Best day to send link request emails:

Best time to send link request emails:

Not sure if this will help you, but the results are interesting.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

This article was written earlier this week and scheduled to go live April 15th.

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion on the topic of link building. This link building topic is different then the average thread. In this thread, the member asks if there was link building before Google became popular.

The link building market, which is a niche within the niche of SEO, is almost completely driven by the popularity of the Google algorithm - at least these days. Typically, the more, high quality, relevant links you have to your web pages, the higher those web pages rank in Google. It is not that simple anymore, but the premise is still mostly true. Thus, to 'manipulate' or improve your visibility in the Google search results, you had to get many, high quality links from external pages. Thus, the link building industry has been born.

But was there such a thing as "link building" prior to Google becoming popular? The answer is yes. There were a few people in the business of acquiring links on popular web pages, for the sole purpose of online marketing. These link builders purchased or asked for links on sites that had traffic, so that people would click from those popular sites to their sites.

Eric Ward (ericward.com) was one of the first, if not the first, person in the link building business pre-Google. Eric has told his story at many SEM conferences. The most remember part of his history is that he did link building as a way to promote Amazon, in the early days. He said that Amazon offered him shares in the company, but he turned it down - that is his legacy. ;-) Seriously, he was using links to market companies online before Google and he still uses links in the same fashion. He believes that those types of links are the links that mean the most to Google because they worked pre-Google for pre-Google reasons.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This article was written earlier this week and scheduled to go live April 9th.

A few weeks ago, we wrote a story on how e-commerce sites can build links through offering customers a discount on orders, if they link back to the site. It is a neat way to get links but we wanted to poll our audience asking if they felt it was considered link buying.

Since I am technically offline today, I thought it would be a good day to post the results of the survey. The results were pretty much split. Of the 76 responses, 41 or 54% said they felt it was link buying and thus against Google's webmaster guidelines. 33 or 43% said it was not considered link buying and thus not against Google's webmaster guidelines.

I wish we had more responses, because the topic of what is and what is not link buying, is fairly controversial.

Forum discussion continued at HighRankings Forum.

This article was written earlier this week and scheduled to go live April 9th.

The topic of link requests is not new to this site. We covered it many times. Personally, I mark all link exchange or link requests emails as spam - I simply don't play that game. Not that I think it is not something that might be necessary for some link building campaigns, but I am not in that market. That being said, if you were to send out a link request email, when would you do it?

I have set up a poll, that allows you to select multiple days and times. Select all that you feel are the best times to send out a link request email. We will assume sending out link requests on holidays is a bad idea, so I left that out. Please take the poll:

Here are other articles on the topic of link requests:

• The Do's & Don'ts in Link Request Emails
• How Do You Ask for Links?
• Watch Out How You Ask for a Link!
• How You Shouldn't Ask for a Link

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread has interesting discussion around the topic of pages earning Google PageRank with little or no links to those pages.

The discussion was started by a webmaster who asked, how can his page have a PageRank score of four, when Google webmaster tools reports the page has zero links? The obvious answer is that Google is not reporting all the links yet and it is very possible the page has links, but just not being reported yet. But that might not be the full answer.

WebmasterWorld administrator, Tedster, feels that Google gives "mom and pop" sites an artificial PageRank boost, in some cases. Let me quote Tedster:

My assumption is that this unusual PR boost is one of the ways that Google helps "mom and pop" sites compete - something that Matt Cutts made a side comment about on his blog a few years ago. He never said WHAT Google does specifically, only that they do a few things.

It seems like many top names in the thread believe in this "artificial PageRank boost." The question is, what is the artificial part? Is it the score shown, how the score is made up, or how Google sees the page in terms of trust and popularity?

In any event, do you believe in the artificial PageRank boost? Take the poll below:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Danny Sullivan's Analysis: Which URL Shortening Service Should You Use? has an excellent overview of the various URL shortening services available. In Danny's write up, he goes over about 15 different services and rates them based on how they handle the following:

• Redirect
• Tracking
• Client Support
• Domain Chars
• Custom URL
• Sharing
• Path Chars
• Total Chars
• Country
• Service

There is some very good discussion around the piece at Sphinn and in the comments area in the article.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

A HighRankings Forum thread asks how does one distinguish between a good and bad web directory. Web directories are often the first step for many link building campaigns. The obvious directories that come to mind to submit to are dmoz.org and Yahoo's directory. But many people like Best of the Web as well.

The question is, how does an SEO or webmaster know which directories are quality and which are not. This gets more important when you are submitting to niche directories.

Here are just some points, off the top of my head, to look for when evaluating a directory.

• Age of directory
• Is the directory indexed
• Is your listing category in the directory indexed
• Number of links to the directory
• Domain age of directory
• Does directory require a link back
• PageRank of directory's home page
• PageRank of the category of your listing in your directory
• Design of directory
• How large is the directory

Again, these are just the things that came to my mind as I wrote this post. If you have more to add, please do.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion around the topics of building links from foreign web sites, in different languages.

For example, if I run a web site that is in English, focused for US users - what happens if I get some links from sites hosted in Israel, with Hebrew anchor text, linking to my English web site?

The obvious answer is that these types of links are not considered spam or low quality, simply because of the site's origin. If a foreign site is linking to yours out of relevance, then it is fine. If you go ahead and buy thousands of links on foreign publisher web sites, then that might lead to other issues.

In fact, when you want to rank well in localized versions of Google, it is recommended to not only publish a localized version of the site using the country's TLD, but also to acquire links from sites sharing the localized view and on the localized TLD.

Would acquiring "foreign" links to your USA English based site help you rank in both Google USA and Google localized? Maybe but it might not be the optimal way to go about your country specific SEO.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There is an excellent WebmasterWorld on the topic of getting a "second tier link," as opposed to the link you really want. Wheel, the moderator of the forum, posted that it is not always easy or possible to get the .gov, .edu or aged link that all link builders dream about. When you efforts fail, why not go after those that have links from those "golden link" pages?

Wheel explained:

What I'll do is try to get links from second tier sites. Say I want a find a page on a .gov site that has a list of links. I'd like to be on that page, but I can't get a link. What I'll do is look at all the sites that are linked to from that page and try and get a link from them. I'll still get whatever good comes from that .gov link, just diluted and flowed through another site.

They are not the cream of the crop links, but they are still very valuable. The process is pretty simple:

(1) Discover golden link pages
(2) Request links from those pages
(3) Move on
(4) Click on links from the golden link pages
(5) Request links from those new pages
(6) Rinse and Repeat

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

One of the most challenging jobs for e-commerce sites is to get people to link to them. Over the years, we have posted many link building tips but we never posted about this one. Why don't e-commerce sites offer a promotion to customers to get a percentage off their order, if they write a blog post or link to their site.

In fact, I have seen this offered on several sites throughout the year. Personally, I never took advantage of the offer, which honestly surprises me. I blog a heck of a lot, not just on search engines, but on anything, and I never took advantage of the offer. In any event, some sites do this and have been doing it for years.

An excellent HighRankings Forum thread asks if offering this type of discount, in exchange for a link, would be considered link buying and thus against Google's terms of service?

Moderator, Bob Gladstein said that it doesn't make sense to make the offer to everyone and anyone. You don't want links from an electronic store if you site sells shoes. Or do you?

Moderator, Randy said he sees it a lot and when he sees it, he loses respect for that site and will never do business with them again. Wow, strong words, let me quote him:

It's caused me to lose respect and trust for those who offered me such Discount For Link deals. Not only have I never taken any of them up on the deal, as a general rule I never do business with them again. Not because the original thing I ordered wasn't in good condition or that I've had any problem with my original order. But because I've lost respect for them. They're offer has caused me to lose trust and good will that they'd already built with me that caused me to order from them the first time.

Jill Whalen, owner of HighRankings, disagrees with both Bob and Randy, she said "I think it's a great idea."

Honestly, I think the best bet is to write the post after you get the product and then they give you a discount on the next order or give you a credit on your previous purchase. This way you can give an honest review of the product you bought and discuss the customer service and if you liked it or not.

Technically, a discount on a purchase is money and it may be seen as "link buying," but it is a stretch, in my opinion.

Do you think offering a discount in exchange for a link is considered link buying? Take our poll:

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports the Australian communications regulator said you can be fined $11,000 per day for linking to sites that are on their banned list. This is going to begin shortly, even though there is a lot of criticism over the news.

Link building has never been so scary, or has it? ;-)

It seems like this blacklist is a secret and the sites you are not allowed to link to, well - are only known to the regulators. So if you do link to one of these sites, you may not even know it and you may be fined for it. I assume most of the links are illegal sites, such as child pornography and the like, but some may not be that obvious, as watchdog groups claim.

A WebmasterWorld thread has comments on this new regulation.

So lemme get this straight, if your site is hosted in Australia, you are not allowed to link to these 1300+ sites, but they're not going to tell you who they are?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread has tips from senior member wheel on how to get links from .edu pages, even when they might not be .edu pages.

Wheel said that many professors have web sites that might not be on an edu top level domain. Since edu links might not be better than any other TLD, then why not go after any link from any professor's site?

Wheel said:

Searching on things like widget instructors, widget courses, and anything you can think of related to education in your niche is likely to provide a rich list of potential link sources.

For example, if you sell video cameras, why not sure for videography instructor or videography professor and then continue by drilling down on those professor's web sites.

The same goes with college or university students. Find their web pages and send them some beer. Of course, as discussed in the thread, that might be considered a paid link. ;-)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks an interesting question. If you have a space in the nofollow link attribute, does Google consider it the same as having no space? Let me explain.

A standard syntax for the nofollow attribute looks like this: <a href="http://www.site.com/page.html" rel="nofollow">Visit My Page</a>

But what if the programmer added a space between the no and follow, such as: <a href="http://www.site.com/page.html" rel="no follow">Visit My Page</a>

What do you think? Is Google or other search engines treating both the same?

I asked Google's Matt Cutts and John Mueller this question and they told me that currently they don't treat them the same. Currently, a nofollow with a space would pass link value. "The microformat is explicitly defined as rel="nofollow" (). I would not count on other rel-attributes having the same effect, even if they look similar at first glance," John told me.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The other day, we polled our audience, asking should URL shortening services pass link value? We now have 168 responses and I thought I share them with you.

The response was overwhelming yes. 75% of the respondents said, these URL shortening services should pass link value and the search engines should retain that value to the redirect. 25% said they should not pass value.

Here is the pie chart:

The "other" responses included, "dont care," one suggested that they offer a paid option that passes value, while the rest are nofollowed. One even suggested that Google make their own URL shortening service.

Forum discussion continued at Sphinn.

A Sphinn thread has discussion around a "quick" study done to test if URL shortening services like TinyURL and others pass any link value. Clearly, all the time you and I spend on services like Twitter, makes this question something that many SEOs and webmasters want to know.

The study said that these services do not pass link value. Some don't believe the study, some do. I won't be getting into the validity of the study. Do your own tests and prove it to yourself.

I do know that Googlers often say in the Google help forums to use URL shortening services when they don't want to share their specific URL. The reason, I don't think is about passing "link juice," but rather that they can expire the URL shortened version, so it does not return a redirect for that URL, where they can't do the same if they link directly to their web site URL.

That being said, and I know a lot of you spend a ton of time on Twitter and services like it that use URL shortening services. Do you want those services to pass link value? There are two possible ways the services won't pass the link value. Either the service themselves marks the links as nofollow or something like it or search engines decide on their end to not let them pass value.

Should they pass value? Take the poll:

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

I am a paid supporter of WebmasterWorld and to be honest, I don't often use the paid only rooms. But for the thread I am about to discuss, I can tell you, the small fee I paid to have access to this paid area, was well worth it.

Moderator, Martinibuster shared with us a new form of link building that he is finding that is working for him. Now, I won't go through everything he said, because I need to respect the "paid" part of the forum, but I will give you some insight into what Martinibuster's thoughts are.

Relevancy has become more and more important in the area of link building. In the old days, you just wanted links from sites that ranked high. These days, it is less about getting links from pages that rank well and more about getting links from pages that are related to your pages. These relevant links form, what he says, is a link clique. Now, Martinibuster's theory and trick is to control that link clique. How does he do this? Well, I won't say, cause I need to leave some of that in the paid area.

But I can say that this single thread is well worth the money I paid for the year. It is conversations like this thread that make me love doing what I do here, report on the treasures in the forums.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld (paid member access only).

Yesterday, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft announced together a new way to handle internal duplicate content issues with a new "canonical" header tag. Vanessa Fox does an excellent job explaining what it is all about in her piece at Search Engine Land.

So for all duplicate pages, you insert this tag in the header elements of those pages, specifying the main URL. The tag looks like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/true-url.html" />

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have detailed explanations of how they work.

Three main things:

(1) This works only internally, not across domains.
(2) Treat this like you would a 301 redirect, so be careful
(3) Search engines consider this a "hint" and do not have to abide by it (just yet)

Outside of that, there is good recaps on this at Techmeme.

We have a ton of Q&A on this from our live coverage of the Ask the Search Engines panel from SMX West. I am sure your questions are answered in that panel or in the discussions below.

This tag can be confusing, because it is new. But after webmasters begin to understand where, if and how to use it, they are more likely to love it.

JohnMu said in a forum post:

Here are some examples where this could be used: - Web-shops (mutliple URLs depending on how you got to a page) - Sites that work with Session-IDs within the URL - Ad-tracking URLs (eg using AdWords + Analytics) - Affiliate tracking URLs - News sites with multiple URLs per article - Forums with multiple URLs per thread/page (eg "&highlight=", etc)

Plus, Yoast already posted plugins to support this for Wordpress, Magento and Drupal.

Forum discussion Google Webmaster Help, Cre8asite Forums, WebmasterWorld and Sphinn.

Marie Claire wrote at David Harry's blog a technical piece named Hunting for paid links; a technical review. In that piece, he goes through some of the ways a search engine may detect paid links. As many of you know, the topic of buying links has been somewhat controversial over the past couple years. There is no doubt in my mind, that Google has become very clever at detecting these links and devaluing many of them. So, as an SEO, it can hurt for you to read some more technical documents on the topic.

In Marie's post, he goes through various detection mechanisms, he talks about machine learning, discusses some academic papers, and looks at link qualifiers.

There is some very positive discussion around his post at Sphinn. So if you have a theory or two on how Google or other search engines currently or may detect paid links, join that discussion.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

A newish patent application from Yahoo named Identifying excessively reciprocal links among web entities was filed on January 8, 2009. The patent inventors include Priyank Garg and Tim Converse of Yahoo, both well-known search engineers at Yahoo. Of course, we have an excellent and thorough explanation of that patent from Bill Slawski. We also have a write up from David Harry on the patent app.

Here is the abstract:

A method for identifying reciprocal links is provided. At a particular host, the set of hosts which link to the particular host and the set of hosts to which the particular host links are determined. The intersection and union of the two sets of hosts are also determined, and the sizes of the intersection and union are calculated. The concentration of reciprocal links at the particular host is calculated based on the sizes of the intersection and union. A ratio of the intersection size to the union size is used to determine the concentration of reciprocal links. The particular host's rank in a list of ranked search results may be changed as a result of identification of a high concentration of reciprocal links.

So I am not going to repeat the summaries of this patent app, for that, use the links above. There is a lot of discussion around it.

Threads at Sphinn, WebmasterWorld are starting to get their minds 'wet' with debate over the patent application. Of course, it is always important to remember that a patent or patent app does not mean a search engine is actually using the methods in the current algorithms, nor does it mean they are using it exactly like it is written in the patent.

Martinibuster adds a nice point in the Sphinn thread saying:

What's more interesting is the execution of how links are rewarded. Big difference between Yahoo and Google, with Google tending to favor the user experience and Yahoo seeming to focus on keeping spam out to the detriment of the search results.

Let's not forget that Google added the words excessive to their link schemes document a while back.

Forum discussion at Sphinn, WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread reports that folks are noticing that Yahoo Site Explorer has updated the link counts for the tool.

I do not typically track these numbers, but many do. So if you do, definitely take a look and see if you are doing any better.

Here is a screen capture of our most recent Yahoo Site Explorer link count:

The 250,000 value shows all links to seroundtable.com, excluding internal links, but to the entire domain. In contrast to Google Webmaster Tools, which only reports 175,408 links for this domain.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

An article at E-Commerce Times talks about a recently-filed lawsuit against Boston.com, a NYTimes company, that is being sued for its linking practices. According to the article, the simple presence of a link has prompted the suit, but from CenterNetworks, the real reason might be apparent: GateHouse, the company suing the Times, is upset because Boston.com is linking to subpages of the site, thereby causing readers to bypass the significant advertising on GateHouse's home page.

(My commentary: If there were no links there at all, GateHouse still wouldn't see traffic to its homepage. Be happy that you got the link!)

In any event, there is some worry if merely linking will require permission in the future. That would be a pretty silly move.

Then again, I worry that the E-Commerce Times article that WebmasterWorld members referred to isn't accurate since every other article I read on the subject matter is about circumventing the advertising.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Link building is going to happen whether I like it or not, so I better accept the 949394 emails I get per day. A WebmasterWorld thread asks link builders how they ask for links via email. Some tactics include putting the link up first (and thereby then emailing people -- they often will give the reciprocal link) and keeping the email short and brief and personal.

Ask for the link. Don't demand it.

Offer people you link to something valuable in return. For example, wheel suggests that you say something along the lines of "I've got data your visitors may find interesting" or "Here's a unique coupon code."

Since these are email requests, though, can you be reported to Google for spamming someone else? There's no answer to that -- it depends on the recipient.

I should add from my experience that it's unwise to ask big blogs for links. They might have a high PageRank and is extremely relevant for your purposes, but chances are, old posts won't be updated. (And like I said in sentence #1, we get hundreds of link exchange emails a week. That said, most aren't read anymore.)

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Since there's a huge war on paid links, is it true that you should avoid link buying at all costs? That means even using sites like press-release distributor service PRWeb.

Perhaps -- but PRWeb's goals are obviously not in the link building sphere. The goal for PRWeb is promotion of a particular service or website, not for link building. It's uncertain how Google handles links that are generated through PRWeb.

Randy says an important piece of advice for how you should handle this in general:

Truth be known, all link building should be approached from a Promotions/Advertising/Marketing mindset, not an SEO one. Get links that will stand a chance of bringing you real traffic from real qualified people visiting your site.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

Update by Barry: See an older thread on this topic at Search Engine Roundtable Forums where Matt Cutts basically said links from PRweb releases no good.

Senior WebmasterWorld member, Wheel, posted a WebmasterWorld thread explaining how now, the holiday season, is a great time to get quality links. How should you go about it?

Well, people love to give now. It is really the season of giving. So what Wheel did was give his industry niche a tip on how to get a solid free link for their sites. The people in his industry were so happy, they wanted to give back, something in return.

So he politely suggested that they can give him a link to his site, as a thank you. And many of these folks did. So he got several quality, targeted, related, one-way links to his site, for giving advice.

It is true, giving free advice gets links. We do it here several times per day and we get tons of links. So, let's see if it works. If you are happy with what we have done over the past five years, feel free to link to our 5 year birthday post with a thank you.

Happy Holidays!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A couple weeks ago, we ran a poll asking SEOs and link builders where they would prefer their external links show up on a page. Well, the results are in and as expected, most SEOs would like that link in the first paragraph of content on a page.

Here is a breakdown of the hundred or so responses:
:: In First Paragraph of Context said 62 respondents or 63.27%
:: Link On All Pages said 8 respondents or 8.16%
:: Menu said 8 respondents or 8.16%
:: On 5 - 10 Pages said 8 respondents or 8.16%
:: In Last Paragraph of Context said 7 respondents or 7.14%
:: On Links Page said 2 respondents or 2.04%
:: Footer said 1 respondents or 1.02%

Then we had two "other" responses, one saying "any link" at all is great and the other said "content of page."

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

Michael Gray has written a great piece at Search Engine Land on how stories promoted in a social media site have actually translated to higher rankings. He takes a bunch of unpopular domains (e.g. not Forbes, Jalopnik, or other known car sites) and shows how their rankings have improved after the particular stories have been submitted to a site like Digg. Then he looks at the keyword rankings for each of these stories. It becomes obvious that social media is an alternative to link building but that it's imperative to use your keywords that you want for ranking in the Digg submission.

Of course, there are links to be gained, but there's obviously a lot more -- direct sales, awareness, and then some.

So why is it that you haven't tried social media marketing yet?

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A Google Webmaster Help thread asks, can Google read links in Flash files or JavaScript? The simple answer is yes, they can. But it is not that simple.

Some people want to know the answer to this question because they want to know if their content will be indexed or not. Some want the links in those files to be found, while some don't. In fact, years ago, if you did not want a search engine to crawl a link, typically a duplicate content page, you would use JavaScript. Now, you are no longer safe, you must nofollow the link or noindex those duplicate pages or take other action.

The thing is, Google won't always crawl links in JavaScript or Flash either. So if you want your links to be found, be safe and put them in standard html format. But if you don't want your links to be found, putting them in JavaScript or Flash won't guarantee that.

Top contributor, Webado said:

1) don't rely on discovery of text and links in flash or javascript - ensure proper html content and navigation are available as well.

2) don't rely on Google NOT discovering text and links in flash or javascript either if you don't want them to. Ensure robots are clearly disallowed from all such content, otherwise they can be really nosy :)

JohnMu of Google confirmed that post.

As you can see, in this case, your damned if you do and damned if you don't.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

I think I am missing something, but a bunch of well known members at WebmasterWorld are participating in a thread named "Where do you want your link?" The thread asks, where in a specific page's layout, would you optimally want a link?

We have moderators including martinibuster and jdMorgan replying, as well as senior members pageoneresults, wheel, ken_b, adamnichols45 and others participating. Honestly, I think I might be missing something - but i'll play along.

Here is a poll (check all that apply):

To me, the answer seems obvious, but I guess the bulk of the goodies are in the discussion around the question as to "why" for each.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

In our continued coverage of the a WebmasterWorld thread started by senior member CainIV, we learn two more things. These two items are likely obvious to most, but have been confirmed (at least to CainIV) that they are true based on his experiments.

1. Changes to navigation links can have a serious impact on a site's ranking in Google. CainIV said, "there are certainly nav and footer link thresholds that cause a website - even a website into the top 5 - to spin out and down to pages 5 and 6 in ranking."
2. Navigation links are treated differently then links within the content. CainIV said, "Google appears to handle thresholds from links within content different than those within nav or footer sections - this is to say, that content links have a fuzzier 'trust' logic about them, and I could more links to content, faster and more focused on the primary keyword pointed at the root url without the same threshold being crossed."

Like I said and like CainIV said in the thread, this is likely all assumed already but can't hurt to validate it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Google Webmaster Help thread shares a sad story of one person who built up a site on a members.aol.com hosted service. Recently shut down their AOL Hometown, which is the host space for these sites and this person's site is archived locally, but the domain is gone forever.

What can he/she do to get Google and the other search engines to recognize that the old domain is now pointing to the new domain? In this case, not much. Since this person doesn't have the ability or control to set up a 301 redirect from the old domain to the new domain, there is currently no automated way for a search engine to know the domain name has moved.

JohnMu of Google shared the bad news but explained that he/she can go through the process of reaching out to those who use to link to the site and tell them it moved somewhere else. John said:

Alas, once the old hosting is no longer available, there's not much that can be done. Since you cannot redirect from the old URLs to the new ones, the best thing that you can do is to contact the people who have linked to your old site and ask them to change the link to your new one. This might also have a slightly additional effect in that people may promote your content for you after being nodded in your direction again :-).

This is just one more reason not to host on a free hosting service. In addition, it goes well with our early post today on domain names, in where if Google had a way to tell them in Webmaster Tools if a site was moved, maybe via a meta tag verification process, it could have saved these people.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Wiep Knol has written a great link building premier for 2009 and offers 69 strategies. He breaks them into categories: internal link building tactics, easy link building strategies, old school link building strategies, places to submit your URL to, ways to make people write about you, business tactics, and important considerations. An example:

62. Hire an intern. You can let him or her work on a piece of research, which you can in your link building process. Also, don’t forget the website of the University [your] intern is attending.

Additional tactics include working with blog directories, building links from foreign websites, using a sitemap, considering topical linking, joining affiliate programs, offering services in exchange for reviews, and a whole lot of other great tips.

After the 69 tips he's provided (there really are 69), Wiep ends his post with a valuable quote. He says:

[L]ink building is 10% basic SEO knowledge, 20% business thinking, 30% creativity and 40% perseverance. Either way, there’s nothing advanced to it.

That's a good mindset. You do have to work for links, but the end result can be a high return.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

I've been in the "SEO industry" for a long time, relative to the industry. Over time, the industry and the perception both externally and internally, has changed. I guess that happens with all industries, but quicker in more evolving and newer industries, like SEO. A few years back, I doubt many people would consider "link building companies" as being on the side of "black hat" techniques. So when has that shift been declared?

Jim's WeBuildPages company is trying to change their name from a "link building" company to a "internet marketing" company. In Jim's most recent post, he wrote that one of the most visible link building companies has stopped buying links. Yes, a link building company has stopped buying links. Do I believe it? I think so. Of course, a paid link is not always black and white. So, in order for Jim to change the perception of his company, he must of felt, let's take the extreme alternative and say, we no longer buy links. If we no longer buy links, then we must not be a link building company anymore.

If you want to make the argument that link building companies are not on the "black hat" side of things, then fine. But as Jim said in his post, "I don’t want to risk my business’ future by buying links…and if you’re worried about your site’s future, and you’re buying links, you might want to think twice." Google has come out against paid links and artificial links, with penalties. So it is hard to say that today, a link buy is not something more on the dark side of things, even if you don't believe it or I don't believe it.

But why and when did this happen? Clearly a milestone is when Danny posted Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google on October 7, 2007. If that wasn't enough, on November 12th, the first penalties hit sites selling links, including this one. And the penalties continued. So by then, I would think it was clear, link building companies might have shifted over to the dark side.

Before October 7th, 2007 - a link building company, to me and many others - would have been considered white hat. But that has changed, changed with the nofollow attribute in 2005, changed with the October 7th announcement and changed with the real penalties coming down.

Looking back, I just find it interesting it has come to this. We Build Pages, one of the most well known link building companies decides to send out a press release that they are no longer building links. They hire top names in the industry to blog, make widgets, and get social, but do you hear of We Build Pages letting employees go? They can be retraining all their "link ninjas" in the art of getting non-paid links. But how? Link exchanges don't work, three-way links aren't as good, you can't buy links anymore - are you training them in content development. Jim said they are still going to be getting links, but they won't be buying them. It just seems very odd to me.

Some are as skeptical as I am at the Sphinn thread. Don't get me wrong, I really like the folks at We Build Pages, really. But something just doesn't seem right. I hope this transition works for them and it is sad to see it come to this, on some level.

When did it all come to this?

Also read SEO Book and SEOish (SEOish works for Jim).

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

On the Microsoft Office Live Small Business Blog (and even in a second post), Senior Product Manager Skip Chilcott writes that link exchanges are a "popular way to generate more links." Blogger Saad Kamal has a problem with this. Citing several guidelines from Google, Yahoo, and even Microsoft itself, it's apparent that link exchanges to artificially inflate rankings is frowned upon.

But Saad Kamal goes further to say it's black hat SEO. Really? The idea that it's "black hat" might be a stretch; link exchanges themselves are sketchy. Most would consider black hat SEO to be a lot worse than a simple link exchange that thousands of webmasters do daily. I'm sure they'd argue that black hat SEO is a practice that only a fraction of webmasters even knows about and thus employs.

But while being equated with black hat endorsements, Danny Sullivan considers this "embarrassing" because the Microsoft Office Live team doesn't seem to be on the same page as the Microsoft Search team. I guess it's hard when Microsoft's initial project and core goal isn't search whereas a company like Google or Yahoo emerged out of their search services. In the latter case, the idea of search appears to preside over the entire company.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

I often try to stay away from talking about all these heated link debates, but sometimes, the discussion around these debates are so important to our industry, that I find myself having no other choice to write about them. That being said, Text Link Ads launched a new product named InLinks, which is being coined around the web as being extremely hard to detect as a form of link buying. So not are they only a good source of advertising, but one might argue they can be extremely valuable in terms of possibly improving one's ranking in search engines.

So why am I torn about writing about this topic? A few reasons:

1. Link buying is a very controversial topic and people get really heated about discussing it.
2. Patrick Gavin, the face behind the product, is a really nice guy - if you get to know him
3. Google hates, I mean, hates this form of advertising
4. Text Link Ads is not only a long time advertiser of this site, but also a client of my company

So when the news came out, several blogs picked it up and ran with it. The most noted blog to cover it is TechCrunch, who wrote a post and then later updated to include Google's Matt Cutts comment. Matt said, in short, that these types of links are against Google's terms of service and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) does not condone such activity. That is all we needed to start a huge debate on the topic of Google standing up so strongly against this product.

ShoeMoney's Does Google Really Want To Go Down This FTC Route was featured on Sphinn, where Jeremy shows his displeasure with Matt using the FTC claim. Jeremy calls the FTC document just a "suggestion" and then goes on to point fingers at Google's AdSense and AdLinks product as "engaging in some of the most deceptive advertising methods" he has ever seen. Matt replied to Jeremy saying, "the FTC has more than the power of suggestion." Matt then goes on to imply that Google should have no issues finding these links and uprooting them.

Now, you as the SEO or advertiser need to decide for yourself if you want to go this route. Most SEOs I know are very into trial and error.

There is the beginning of discussion at the Sphinn thread, but honestly, most the blogs own the discussion right now.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Link building is a big part of search engine marketing, and as such, there are always questions surrounding the best kind of links. Most would say that highly relevant links from authority sites are the cream of the crop. But when those links are hard to achieve, there are other types of links you could try to get.

.edu and .gov links

In the recent Google Webmaster Chat transcript, there's a snippet about .govs and .edus. Matt Cutts says that there's no PageRank boost from having such links, and it'd be especially unhelpful for you if you get a link from an .edu page that doesn't have any inbound links to it.

So why do people like .gov and .edu links? As martinibuster says, they tend to be in good neighborhoods (versus other sites, for example).

Circular Links

What if your site -- let's call it Site A -- has a link to Site B. Site B links to Site C and Site C links back to Site A. In other words, you're interlinking your many sites (at least in this example). Will this help you in raising search rank?

Depending on the existence of other backlinks (more are preferable), it may help. Therefore, you should aim to get a lot of links from as many properties as you can and not just focus on your three sites. Having these links can also raise (cough) your PR.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld, High Rankings Forum, and Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Everyone wants links. But how do you get them if you are faced with doing things offline -- or rather, if you want to be unconventional and gather links in person, how do you do that?

A WebmasterWorld thread discusses some strategies you may not have thought of. One I did know about: going to industry conferences (ever see my link post?) But you can also give away free information offline (and over the phone) and be available for inquiries. In return, you can ask for a link. Some even resort to fax machines for this request.

Gather whois information and start calling -- sure, it's cold calling, but so is asking for links at times.

Don't be afraid to use the phone. Most of the later generation doesn't value it as much as the electronic communication, but it can be more potent when speaking to a person.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A Google Groups thread discusses a classic SEO challenge, passing link popularity for tracking URLs. Honestly, I cannot sum up the issue better than the original poster:

Our site uses query string variables in our URL's to track traffic and internal vist patterns. As an example our email offers our external ads will use a URL similar to: www.website.com/shop/scarfs.asp?cpn=bbl2345

And then upon entering the website they might click on internal links
like: www.website.com/shop/scarfs.asp?sc=2332

Those Variables have the capability to combine: www.website.com/shop/scarfs.asp?cpn=bbl2345&sc=2332

Over time this has created millions of variables in Google's index.

How can this webmaster keep the tracking capabilities but at the same time, keep the link popularity to the main URL?

With Yahoo, they give you a tool within Site Explorer named Dynamic URL Rewriting. This tool allows you to tell Yahoo that these dynamic URLs really refer back to this main URL. You really do not have to do any coding on your site or server to communicate this to Yahoo. All you do it plug in the information into Yahoo.

With Google, it is not that easy. In Google, you need to make sure you set up your site and server to communicate this to GoogleBot. JohnMu, a Googler explain:

Assuming you want to keep track of those numbers, move them to a cookie and out of the URL. If you can do that, you could 301 redirect from the tagged URL (with the numbers) to a clean URL while setting a cookie on the user's side. In other words, everyone is redirected to the clean URLs and users can still be tracked appropriately. Of course, this involves changing a bit on the server side -- and depending on how much time you have it might be hard to get done anytime soon...

There are other solutions, but they don't work as well as this one.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

At the Web Build Pages blog, Jen writes about how link building is like picking up women. She explains the parallels:

* The opening line is everything -- not much else needs to be said.

* That the right circumstance are also crucial (you need finesse) -- women who are surrounded by friends are harder to get than women who are alone. You need to find the sites that are small and accessible.

* Insecurity helps you go further: By showing that you're not interested, you are piquing interest in the other party. If you let them know that they "forgot" your link, you're exploiting a vulnerability.

* You need to prepare for rejection. Not all sites will give into the request.

And as MikeDammann says, that's why nofollows are like condoms.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

There has always been this myth that Google and other search engines cannot crawl or process more than 100 links on a single web page or document. That truth is that Google and other search engines can and do crawl over 100 links per page.

Yes, the Google Webmaster Guidelines page says keep it under 100 links per page. But the reason behind Google adding that as a guideline is for usability purposes. Typically, a web page with over a 100 links can be extremely cumbersome for your users. So if you keep the number of navigational options to a bear minimum, your user will appreciate it.

Now we have a Googler even telling us the truth on this matter. In a Google Groups thread, Googler, JohnMu, clearly stats Google can handle 100 or more links per page. He said:

Just for the record, we can process more than 100 links per page :-). We do however recommend the limit of 100 because it generally makes sense for users (and search engines).

This probably comes to no surprise to most SEOs and webmasters, but it is good to have this from the horses mouth (so to speak).

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Raise your hand if you're a religious SEO. I'm sure you've faced battles and challenges that were hard to overcome, especially since your site is religious in nature and the traffic and links don't appear to be there -- for now.

Interestingly enough, a webmaster has just built his church-oriented website and is upset that he can't get the traffic for it. I'd argue (and other forum members already did) that traffic is not the goal here -- perhaps the goal is awareness of the existence of the religious establishment.

You created the website for a purpose: to serve the congregation. Promotion, therefore, should be focused within the actual congregation (and not elsewhere). In the event that the church wants to reach out to prospective new members, what options are available?

There are a number of strategies that can be employed to garner those links.

1. Churchgoers who already maintain blogs can write about the church with a link.
2. Consider thinking about other events that have some religious correlation, such as weddings and funerals. When digging into these, consider service providers (florists, photographers, caterers, etc.) Address the concerns about weddings/funerals on your site -- be sure that the site welcomes and addresses those needing to make arrangements for either occasion.
3. Make sure that the URL of the church is highly visible in program materials (and I'd say signage too outside the church's physical location). Put the URL in your answering machine messages.
4. Document church events from the perspective of your congregation. For example, a bake sale can be posted with a video on YouTube (with the URL embedded on the bottom or at the end, of course).
5. Ask charities that your church participates in to add a link to your site.
6. Get your pastor to blog.
7. Build a directory of local churches so that out-of-towners can find you.
8. If the church is affiliated with Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, create a home on the web for these guys.
9. Find niche authority sites in the church atmosphere.
10. Get links from other churches in the area.
11. Get links from location authorities, such as media and government.
12. Get links from local non-for-profits such as local entities that use your premises for events.

What would you add to this list?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

What would you prefer:

* A pretty website that has no content
* An ugly website that has a lot of content

If you were building links, which kind of site would you prefer to link to? In a WebmasterWorld discussion, it seems that appearances may not matter. A "nice clean" look may be fine, though.

Some disagree and believe that aesthetically pleasing sites are likely to be linked more than other sites. Most people do not feel that this sentiment is appropriate -- the content is really the most important thing for link-building, according to many webmasters. Of course, it depends on the niche, but people want informative content. Think about Wikipedia, for example. Is it "pretty?" Nope -- it's clean and neat -- but it has a lot of content that many people are looking for.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

This post was pre-written and scheduled for publication on October 21.

What would you prefer:

* A pretty website that has no content
* An ugly website that has a lot of content

If you were building links, which kind of site would you prefer to link to? In a WebmasterWorld discussion, it seems that appearances may not matter. A "nice clean" look may be fine, though.

Some disagree and believe that aesthetically pleasing sites are likely to be linked more than other sites. Most people do not feel that this sentiment is appropriate -- the content is really the most important thing for link-building, according to many webmasters. Of course, it depends on the niche, but people want informative content. Think about Wikipedia, for example. Is it "pretty?" Nope -- it's clean and neat -- but it has a lot of content that many people are looking for.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

We all know about Google's latest change to the webmaster guidelines, where they removed directories as a good source of links. Having seen that, SEOs and webmasters ask themselves, if seeking links from directories is worth it anymore.

A WebmasterWorld thread has a large discussion around the topic. Old time memeber, pageoneresults, said:

Personally? I feel it is a waste of your time to do something like this. 750 directories? Did you see that Google recently removed the suggestion of submitting to directories from their guidelines? Ya, that is how much they despise these things now. There are probably a million directories. 99.5% of them were built solely for this purpose that we are discussing and are typically of little to no value. It is the same thing as submitting to 100,000 search engines. Probably the same group of people too. ;)

But I still personally believe that some directories have value. Can I name which ones they are? Not really because I don't think it is Yahoo or ODP or so on. I think it depends on the section you are in and the quality of that section. Of course, I believe Yahoo is top-notch in the directory space, but the value is way down from what it was years ago, in my opinion.

In any event, this is going to be a hot topic for the next few months. Join the discussion.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread shows how a webmaster is sad that his competitor out ranks him. This webmaster is upset because he feels his competitor is outranking him due to the number of complaints his competitor has. Since he has so many complaints, he is getting many links from people pointing to his site, complaining about him. The links are helping the site rank higher and thus get more complaints, which leads to more links.

Here is the webmaster's complaint:

One of my competitors has apparently scammed lots of people. So webmasters and forum participants post things like "Beware of X Y Z. They took my money and I never heard from them again!" Where X Y Z is a very lucrative keyword. X Y Z's site sucks really bad, and it has practically no value for that keyword, but they are still ranked #2.

In fact, by having those anchors and being ranked so high, they get to scam more people!

Clearly, there can be other factors this webmaster is missing. But there is no doubt, that honest reviews, good or bad, can lead to good quality links. Even if the review is bad, it would be hard for Google to say - hmmm, this is a bad review, I'll rank the site lower. In fact, Google tends to like negative reviews high - or at least, those are the type of sites that get a lot of attention from me.

I wish I had more time to delve into this thread but it does make for a good discussion.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Last night, Google update their Webmaster Guidelines to remove a single line that reads:

Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

In fact, I was able to pull up the old version of the page in the Google cache.

As you can imagine, this has set an early spark of flames through the SEO/SEM community. We have very early discussions on this topic at Google Groups, Sphinn (thanks Beu) and Search Engine Watch Forums.

In the Google Groups thread, Google's JohnMu explains why Google removed that line. Let me quote John:

I wouldn't necessarily assume that we're devaluing Yahoo's links, I just think it's not one of the things we really need to recommend. If people think that a directory is going to bring them lots of visitors (I had a visitor from the DMOZ once), then it's obviously fine to get listed there. It's not something that people have to do though :-).

Honestly, John's remark scares me. I have seen this before - or similar statements. In my opinion, this will lead to Google taking stands against many more directories - more than they have ever done in the past. How do I know? I don't, but as Google Blogoscoped reported last night, Google dropped their own link to their own directory. We know Google has gone after directories in the past. Will they ever go after ODP (dmoz) or Yahoo? I am not sure, but will they go after some other popular ones? Maybe.

To be fair, John does ask for feedback:

What do you think - does it make sense? :-) What else should we change / add / remove?

Where will this lead? That is my concern. Should I be concerned?

Forum discussion at Google Groups, Sphinn and Search Engine Watch Forums.

When your business plan calls for a strict e-commerce site, you may be in a rut when it comes to building links. One WebmasterWorld forum member says that his service is superior to his competitors at half the price -- but yet doesn't have the links to validate that claim.

So what can he do? Well, he could ask his customers to give him a link back (if they are webmasters). This is echoed by another store owner who says that his store gets links because people are buying the product and are writing good things about the company. You can incentivize this also -- if someone writes something and links back to you proving something has been written, offer them a discount.

Another strategy would be to have some creativity. Think about Will it Blend? and how BlendTec was able to capture the blender search share. Here's a good quote related to this:

Basically you're looking for ways to make an "unremarkable" e-commerce store "remarkable". People love pretty charts, videos, and LOLCats.

Or, as other forum members suggest, they can just buy links. But even sites with trust are getting caught by Google nowadays, I think. I'm going to say again that yes, I speak from experience.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

This post was written earlier and scheduled for publication on September 30, 2008.

A WebmasterWorld discussion (paid subscription required) touches upon the fear of penalties with too many inbound links. As many people realize that original content and original research really does help garner those inbound links, sites that provide exhaustive information can really get a lot of inbound links in a short period of time. The webmaster in question is seeing about 100 links a day. Could that raise a red flag and mess with rankings?

Most people agree that it's a matter of time until Google sees this behavior and filters out the site for the abnormal activity, especially since it's not a high profile site. Age and trust of domains are important for the Google algorithm and penalties, according to forum members.

Last week, we blogged about a patent that explains this whole phenomenon. Too many inbound links is perceived as spamming the search engines.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld (paid subscription required).

WebmasterWorld administrator, Tedster, posted a thread at WebmasterWorld discussing an updated Google patent named Information retrieval based on historical data. This is one of the more popular Google documents over the years, where much of the Sandbox theories came from.

In any event, Tedster pulled out several abstracts that are new in this document. I will highlight only two that I find would be very valuable to our readers.

(1) How does Google know when a site has changed enough where they should drop all the past trust and link popularity associated with that site?

...if the content of a document changes such that it differs significantly from the anchor text associated with its back links, then the domain associated with the document may have changed significantly (completely) from a previous incarnation. This may occur when a domain expires and a different party purchases the domain... All links and/or anchor text prior to that date may then be ignored or discounted.

So it is not just about changing the domain name registration information. That is why many folks who buy sites, try to keep the same style and category of content on that domain.

(2) We heard it before, "Don't get links too quickly" because it seems unnatural. Well, here it is on paper:

The dates that links appear can also be used to detect "spam," where owners of documents or their colleagues create links to their own document for the purpose of boosting the score assigned by a search engine. A typical, "legitimate" document attracts back links slowly.

A large spike in the quantity of back links may signal a topical phenomenon (e.g., the CDC web site may develop many links quickly after an outbreak, such as SARS), or signal attempts to spam a search engine (to obtain a higher ranking and, thus, better placement in search results) by exchanging links, purchasing links, or gaining links from documents without editorial discretion on making links.

Yes, for most sites, you don't get 50,000 links overnight. But for some sites, it is possible for several reasons. So how does Google determine which sites naturally received these links so quickly? Well, if I understand this correctly, they look to see how quickly those links go away and the "dynamic-ness of the links." Here are those explanations from the document:

According to a further implementation, the analysis may depend on the date that links disappear. The disappearance of many links can mean that the document to which these links point is stale (e.g., no longer being updated or has been superseded by another document). For example, search engine 125 may monitor the date at which one or more links to a document disappear, the number of links that disappear in a given window of time, or some other time-varying decrease in the number of links (or links/updates to the documents containing such links) to a document to identify documents that may be considered stale. Once a document has been determined to be stale, the links contained in that document may be discounted or ignored by search engine 125 when determining scores for documents pointed to by the links.

According to another implementation, the analysis may depend, not only on the age of the links to a document, but also on the dynamic-ness of the links. As such, search engine 125 may weight documents that have a different featured link each day, despite having a very fresh link, differently (e.g., lower) than documents that are consistently updated and consistently link to a given target document. In one exemplary implementation, search engine 125 may generate a score for a document based on the scores of the documents with links to the document for all versions of the documents within a window of time. Another version of this may factor a discount/decay into the integration based on the major update times of the document.

Tedster goes a bit deeper into signs of the old supplemental index, which I did not go into over here.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Buy links, trade links, sell links, request links, links, links, links - what does an SEO or webmaster do? You can't live without them, you can't live with them. A WebmasterWorld thread has a fun thread that somewhat sums up the "conundrum" SEOs and webmasters are in, when it comes to building link popularity.

Here is the post that sums it up for many SEOs:

We're paying an SEO firm some big bucks. They have recommended that we buy links to our website from directories including Yahoo!, BestoftheWeb, Family Friendly Sites, Gimpsy, Business.com, GoGuides and several others. They also mention in their report that paid links are frowned upon by Google. Yet they still think it will help our rankings a lot.

I've been under the impression for some time that Google will actually penalize a website, and even remove it from results if you pay for links -- due to intentionaly manipulation of their search results.

It all seems a bit odd. I mean what do you do? Anyone who is performing any sort of SEO is surely attempting to manipulate Google search engine results. So if they frown upon paid links they should frown upon all SEO (after all time is money essentially).

It seems odd that Google would ban a site for paying for links, yet they don't ban sites that perform any other SEO tactics, that are performed purely for the sake of improving rankings (artificially manipulating SERPs).

My boss is asking whether it's safe to buy these links. I'm pretty sure Yahoo! is safe and a few of the others on the list. But what makes one paid link safe and another not, excluding a no-follow?

And don't say it's because they refiew your site -- only a total idiot would pay $300 for someone to review their site. We're blatantly only interested in the link. And we only want that to improve our rankings right?

As senior member, Wheel, said, "You've completely encapsulated the conundrum we're all in."

Can't place blame anywhere. Google wants sites that have earned trust naturally. Webmasters want their sites to be trusted quickly.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Ever ask someone to add a link to your site as part of some link building strategy? Most people have encountered link building requests every so often in this sphere. Have you ever asked? Have you had success? Wiep Knol has explained why most link requests fail.

The end result? It depends on who, what, when, where, and why. For the "who," you want to be identifiable and more transparent than the person named Kelly who has a standard email address. Use your company URL, a portfolio link, etc.

The "what" comes down to whether or not you really care to provide some useful information. If you are providing the desired anchor text, you will likely be ignored. Give a summary and let the webmaster you pitched figure out what he or she wants to do with it.

Wiep also speaks about the other 3 W's -- when, where, and why. It definitely should give you some good tips on how you can request those links.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

On a Cre8asite Forums thread, a forum member is looking for the ideal link building strategy. If you had to choose one kind of quality link, which would you go for: a relevant site with a high PR but not so many indexed pages, or a site that has a low PR but many indexed pages?

That's not an easy question to answer. If you had to choose one, more people are compelled to agree that the site with more indexed pages will perform better, even though the PR is low. Of course, PR is a metric that many people still feel should be ignored, however. But perhaps you shouldn't only look at the links -- people may consider you to be a competitor if they are a high PR site. Using that logic, you may want to go with the other types of links as well.

As Ammon John points out, this is a "situational decision." You need to evaluate your goals to see which tactic and link methodology you want to take first.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

As forum moderators with years of experience behind them can attest to, there are a lot of spammers on the interwebs. As Roger Montti of WebmasterWorld says, there are three different types of spammers from noticeable ones to the not-so-noticeable spammers. Here's his breakdown:

1. Users who bulk-spam forums for links. Their links are usually poor quality and they simply have no idea how to market themselves or their sites.

2. Amateur spammers who try to "spread the love" about their site and write related forum posts about their somewhat-related-but-not-really blog.

3. Users who think it's acceptable to post links that only point to their own blog posts about a newsworthy topic. Sometimes that content is good, so those posts may not necessarily be removed.

You know what they say, though -- you need to network in order to be noticed. New bloggers assume that it's safe to start commenting about their site on every single forum post so that the word spreads. (Instead, I'd argue that you should write interesting content FIRST with a signature for your site on forums that allow such a thing.) After all, it's a lot easier to detect self-promotion. On a personal note, I had a guy comment on a blog post with his "amazing" video on Twitter, complete with made-up testimonials. I sternly told him that it's not allowed, and he responded to me saying that "you act as if I'm selling something." (He was selling something: his content -- himself.) The point of forums is to participate in a community and not to abuse the audience and assume that it's acceptable to shove content down their throats that they may not necessarily have an interest in.

It's an interesting discussion and one that you may have your own thoughts on.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread reports that Yahoo Site Explorer has done a major update to their linkage data reports. Most webmasters are reporting huge drops in the number of links reported today versus the days before.

The linkage drops are reported as high as losing over 5,000 links. Others saw a drop of about 1,000 links and so on.

It is possible it is a temporary reporting glitch, but some are actually speculating that Yahoo is no longer showing links that are not counted, either nofollowed or simply not counted, in the linkage reports anymore. Right now, it is too soon to know for sure. But if anything changes or if more reports come in, I will do a follow up post.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: Just wanted to add that we reported similar issues in March, where my link count then was 271,196 inlinks, but in October I had 216,880 inlinks, and now I have 247,183.

Back in the day when reciprocal linking was useful, some webmasters were trigger happy and aimed to link to everything that would link back, even if there was no relevancy from site to site. Over the past few years, many of those reciprocal links were not as reciprocal as they used to be, as other webmasters became savvier and realized there was likely no value in these links.

With this being the case, a webmaster has looked into his links and noted that it's probably about time that he should revamp his "directory" of links. Should he dump everyone (especially the irrelevant links) or just a few select individuals who aren't linking back and aren't relevant either?

Forum members at WebmasterWorld suggest to keep only the relevant links (and pages that actually exist) and inform all webmasters that these links are to be dropped. Additionally, you don't need to necessarily aim for a 100% reciprocal link ratio. Instead, it should be "somewhere between 30-80% [reciprocal link ratio] which shows the search engines you are linking for your end user and not necessarily for reciprocation."

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

You and I see it all the time, webmasters or link builders emailing link exchange offers or posting comments or threads with link exchange offers. But a link builder had the audacity, to post a public link exchange offer in not just a Google Group but in the the official "Google Webmaster Help" group, for all Googler's to see.

What is kind of funny, is that a Google responded, mocking the offer. Google Webmaster Trends Analysts, Evan, said:

Our homepage has a fairly high PR and is based in the US, but sadly we do not have any travel-related pages one link away. If you want, you can submit a business proposal to Google here: http://www.google.com/support/contact/bin/request.py?bdpg=1

When you have the chance, you should read up about link schemes in our webmaster guidelines: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66356

Cheerios and Fiber One,
Evan

I find that to be funny, maybe because it is really early and I am really tired.

Forum discussion at Google Group.

Michael Gray writes an interesting post about that teaching advanced link building and PageRank will never die. In the article, he explains that everyone who learns about optimization techniques are at different levels; some are more advanced and may consider topics to be basic. Now what happens if you recommend link building tactics from an "authoritative" site? By whose metric? If you apply this to authority as determined by "PageRank," Michael has a problem with this. Google's toolbar PR is simply used for "entertainment" purposes, as he says quite eloquently:

Since google has admitted that they will adjust/manipulate page rank of sites they believe are selling links, and those adjustments will trickle down/out, page rank is really just for entertainment purposes.

Therefore, Michael explains that establishing authority must occur by looking at the other available metrics together.

His post is discussed on Sphinn where Michael is forced to justify that PageRank is used now because " people need the ability to explain/understand things quickly, especially those who aren't entrenched in the field." And for that, PageRank is the current metric that delivers.

But some people have a problem with Michael's suggestion that one should refer to authoritative sites. Instead, the emphasis should be on relevant sites, be them authoritative or not. However, one points out that "relevance is a red herring," especially if the links to "relevant" pages are pornographic or questionable in nature.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A week or so ago, I wrote a piece named Are Links From Blogs As Valuable These Days? In short, some SEOs are now against buying or obtaining links from most blogs. They feel that Google may be devaluing the once golden, blog link (yes, I am generalizing). So I decided to run a poll to see how our readers perceive links from blogs.

The results are in and we have 141 responses from SEOs and webmasters. 90 or 64% of the respondents said they like links from blogs. 41 or 29% of the respondents said they do not like links from blogs. While the remainder, 10 people or 7% of the respondents said it depends on the blog.

Here is the break down:
:: Yes said 90 respondents or 64%
:: No said 41 respondents or 29%
:: Depends said 10 respondents or 7%

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

In May I ran an informal poll asking Would You Buy a Link With a NoFollow Attribute? In short, a nofollow attribute is an HTML attribute you add to a hyperlink that tells the search engines that you do not vouch for this link. Most search engines will not count that link as a vote for the site it is linking to.

I was actually surprised by the results. They were split down the middle.

Of the 177 responses, 50% or 89 people said they would buy a link with a nofollow attribute. While 45% or 80 people said they would not. 5% or 8 people said, it depends.

Here is the break down:
:: Yes said 89 respondents or 50%
:: No said 80 respondents or 45%
:: Other said 8 respondents or 5%

Forum discussion continued at DigitalPoint Forums .

Recently, I have been hearing a lot of buzz on the topic of links from blogs. Some are suggesting that blog links don't have the 'oomph' they once had. Now, I suspect when these people are classifying "blogs," they mean a standard personal blog and not an industry niche blog or news site. But you never know.

There is a thread at WebmasterWorld discussing the pros and cons of blog links. Many blogs link out freely, as the web should. But one webmaster says that blogs give out links way too easily. Obviously, that sounds like a generalization to me.

WebmasterWorld moderator, martinibuster, looks at it this way:

Producing something definitive, original, or authoritative is (blog)link worthy. What's spammy about that?

Looked at from that direction, blogs are one of the last places you can obtain an honest link. It generally holds true to the original web excitement over hyperlinks where a document is studded with references to other documents illuminating the current text you are consuming. It's from this original conception of the what the web could be that PageRank was conceived from.

What are blogs linking to and what can you produce to fit that general trend?

So, what are your thoughts, here is a poll:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Shimon Sandler wrote a controversial post about the options available to sites who cannot actually make code changes to optimize their site. He explains that you can build links, and that's perfectly legitimate as it's called "off site optimization."

The question is: does that really help "optimize" the site at all? If the website was poorly coded, will those links really help? Probably not.

Sphinn forum member JohnHGohde notes that this is not SEO at all:

The most positive comment that I can come up with is that link building is called SEM, rather than SEO.

In other words, SEO (search engine optimization) is about optimizing the site, but SEM (search engine marketing) includes all the other factors, like link building.

Further, if you're only going to optimize based on links, you're probably Google bombing. This reminds me of when the SEO community tried to rank Stephen Colbert as the Greatest Living American Dude. That's not the way you're supposed to do it, according to forum members. Further, it can be really difficult to rank at all with a poor quality site; Jill Whalen calls it an "uphill battle."

Other people believe that you can still optimize your site with link building, but that if you do that, you're not doing the complete job. Hugo Guzman says the following:

The proof is in the pudding. It's been done countless times (link-building without site-side). That said, not optimizing site-side elements is definitely an incomplete approach to SEO.

Like I said, Shimon's post was really controversial -- but there are a lot of great comments.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Would linking to your landing pages be bad for your organic rankings? This is the question posed on Cre8asite Forums, where a webmaster wonders the benefits of possibly linking to a completely different type of page (in terms of layout, etc.)

The answer: probably not. EGOL mentions that "they would probably be filtered from the search results." But if they are unique pages, that may not be the case.

Moderator iamlost says something else, though: why would you want to link to your landing pages? The point of having such pages is so that you can track your incoming traffic from PPC. If you interlink them on your web page, the metrics will be off. This is a thought that is echoed by forum administrator sanity.

Make your life easier by isolating your landing pages from the rest of your site. It's a way in from your ads only, not a way out (from your site).

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

There is a newish WebmasterWorld thread that is just getting started on the topic of tips on outsourcing link building to India, South America or other countries outside of your local region.

Here are the initial tips this SEO learned and wanted to share:

• Do not pay in advance...
• Sign a contract
• Try to have exclusivity for your niche
• Force your SEO to not ask links to your competitors
• Give them a real email from your domain name
• When possible, don't outsource.

Do you have tips? Let's add them to the WebmasterWorld thread.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Recently I have been reading and hearing a lot of webmasters complain about a huge drop in their Google traffic. There are just too many threads to reference, so I thought I reference one valuable post by JohnMu of Google.

John said in response to why a site lost virtually all of their traffic, in a Google Groups thread:

Looking at your site, it might be that one issue could be that links pointing to parts of your site are not valued in the same way that they used to be.

This is a guy who has exhausted looking at coding issues, all on-page SEO issues, crawling issues, indexing issues and so on. Google then came in to tell him, you know all those links you have - well, they may be the cause for your site not being ranked well in the Google search engine.

The question you get from such a response from Google is two fold:

(1) Is this a link penalty? If the webmaster can somehow drop those links, will you see an immediate recovery in rank?

(2) Are the links just devalued? If so, then if the links don't count, should the webmaster just focus on getting better quality links and not worry about those "bad" links?

We know Google has said time and time again that links can't hurt you but most SEO's don't believe it.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Earlier this year, we discussed the possibility of page sculpting or siloing where you point your link juice to the more important pages and nofollow the less important pages. A month after the original post came out, we looked into the possible penalties for controlling that link juice.

The issue is being revisited again on WebmasterWorld. Why do people nofollow their unimportant pages? As stated in the previous paragraph and as reiterated by Tedster, it's so that the "target URL cannot play a part in circulating PageRank for the site."

But some forum members, likely accidentally, suggest that adding a meta tag for "noindex, nofollow" might be sufficient. As Tedster explains, those pages will still get PageRank, so it's not the same as applying rel="nofollow" to a link. Lord Magestic seconds this sentiment:

nofollow in META and tag have 2 very different purposes - the first one is to actually prevent bots from following those links (ie crawling), where as the second does not hold such prohibitions and used to reduce value of backlinks for PR-like calculations.

Of course, if someone else links externally to these internal pages, you might be out of luck, but the question, after all, was about controlling internal link juice.

You can also remove the Sitelinks through the Google Webmaster Tools, as another forum member suggests. But the downside to doing it that way is that you can't suggest a link replacement. Once you remove a link, it's deleted. So exercise this with caution.

The interesting forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

The incredibly popular NewsDay.com was at a PageRank of five recently, and Google specifically confirmed that NewsDay received this PageRank penalty due to "selling links that pass PageRank." But when I look at the Google Toolbar now at www.newsday.com, it shows a PageRank of 8, not a PageRank of 5.

On June 8th, the webmaster reported the PageRank penalty in a thread at Google Groups, on June 9th in the afternoon, a Googler spotted the thread and replied:

Thanks for your post. I'm glad you're posting here in the Webmaster Help Group, because the discussions here help educate webmasters around the globe. I just checked over newsday.com and compared it to the most recent version of newsday.com that was indexed by Archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/20070829225145/http://www.newsday.com/

Scrolling near the bottom of what your site used to look like, I see the following "Featured Links": Mesothelioma Lawyer Lung Cancer Personal Injury Law Firm Buy Mets Tickets Buy Yankees Tickets Wicked Tickets Hamptons Travel

Please remember that participating in link schemes intended to manipulate search engine rankings, including buying or selling links that pass PageRank, is a violation of our Webmaster Guidelines, and may impact your site's standing in Google: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66356

If you believe your site was at one point in violation of the Webmaster Guidelines, and you have since made changes to your site so that it fits within the guidelines, you can request reconsideration of your site by following the steps here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35843

But now, the site is back at a PageRank of 8.

In any event, I do not believe that Google typically has called out major sites for this in the past. I know this is known as a valid reason for Google to downgrade a site's PageRank (just look at ours). But it is always interesting to see the discussion around a major news site, like NewsDay.com.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread asks whether SEOs perform their link building inhouse or if they outsource the link building efforts. Only two people answered the poll but both said they do it in-house.

It's no surprise, really, since we covered this issue over a year ago and it's best to keep the link-building efforts in-house. Many companies (not all, of course) don't build the best links. It's up to you to find the most ideal links for your company's website. Quality is significant.

On that note, we don't want to shy you away from this question, but do you build your links internally or do you focus on people outside your organization to build them for you? As AussieWebmaster points out in the Search Engine Watch forums thread, if you're short-staffed, outsourcing may be the right way to go.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Google's sitelinks, which we have covered extensively are the little links you see under a search result in Google, typically between 4 and 8 sub-links. Here is a picture of our Sitelinks:

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion about the importance of Sitelinks. Here are the key points:

• Sitelinks do not directly influence your search rankings
• Sitelinks can be removed but not changed via Webmaster Tools
• Sitelinks appear to be constructed based on your site architecture, as Google understands it
• Sitelinks can strongly influence your click-through rate on your search result listing
• Sitelinks, when removed, can be gone as long as a year or more

Those are some of the key points I pulled from that thread. Getting deeper into the ranking component. Although removing a Sitelink should not impact your search rankings, you need to understand that Google gives you your Sitelinks based on how they understand your site. So if you see a Sitelink that doesn't make sense, then maybe you need to think about your site navigation.

The WebmasterWorld talks in general terms, but this webmaster also posted a thread at Google Groups, which has specifics. In this case, the webmaster had "Fiber Optic Lights" as his Sitelink, but then Google changed it to "Optic Lights." The change happened around June 26th and he noticed a big drop in search traffic for "Fiber Optic Lights" but a spike in traffic for "Optic Lights." This clearly implies that Sitelinks are somewhat important, but yet - you need to understand that the Sitelink represents what Google understands about your site. Removing a Sitelink won't necessarily change the way Google sees your site.

In fact, in the Google Groups, Googler, Jonathan Simon said, "we don't take action on Sitelinks feedback for a specific site." He said that in the context of having a Sitelink changed, but it also may prove to be evidence of the above.

In summary, Sitelinks do not have a direct impact on rankings. They may increase your click-through rate on your search results. They do have a reverse affect, i.e. because Google feels you deserve a sitelink for a particular phrase, Google clearly thinks that page is relevant for that phrase, so you may rank well for that phrase - but that is the chicken before the egg scenario. :)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Google Groups.

The small folk wonder how the bigger brands succeed at their link building efforts. In a big corporation, it would take jumping through a lot of hoops to get the correct managers to sign off on link building approval, especially as they may want to verify that every site that they link build upon is kosher.

But do big brands really do link building? Not so much. They are already known so well within the sphere that their links usually come naturally. However, if they really wanted to engage in building other links, it's suggested that they participate in some viral marketing campaigns and linkbait.

If, though, you wanted to look at the effectiveness of existing inbound links, you can contact webmasters and have them point their links to the best possible spots. Some may honor such a request.

Once you're that big, you may not have to worry about "link building," per se, but other strategies, according to nethy:

I suppose you could say that past a certain point its more a matter of being aware of links, how they work & the value they do or do not bring. When opportunities come up, maximise them.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

I really enjoy threads that get into the details of such small details, which in reality, can have a huge impact on your SEO efforts. The topic is which anchor text counts, the first found on the page, all found on the page or some found on the page. We covered the topic twice in the past:

• Does The First Anchor Text Link Only Count in Google?
• SEO Debate Over 1st Anchor Text is What Matters to Google

In short, if you have two identical links found on the same page. The first link uses anchor text A and the second link uses anchor text B, some are of the opinion that only the first link's anchor text (anchor text A) will be used by Google.

Branko, aka the SEO Scientist (who I have great respect for), rebunked the topic, claiming that based on his tests, Google does in fact only use the first anchor text for that link on a page.

His study can be summarized by these illustrations. In short he tested placing a pair of anchor text pointing to the same URL, but using different anchor text, on the same page. An by flipping the position of the anchor texts, it also flipped how Google ranked that page that was being linked to. Here are those illustrations:

So, is this rebunked? :) How about Branko's nofollow theory. I.e slapping on the nofollow seems to have no effect on the above. Is that a time thing as Michael VanDeMar said or not?

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Rae Hoffman wrote a post at Search Engine Land about the opportunities you have if one of the links you have points to a 404. You can create a relevant 301 redirect, a user-friendly 404 page, or a custom non-404 error page that catches broken links. Rae goes through the various pros and cons of each strategy in a very useful and informative post.

It's really important for you to reclaim those broken links. Vanessa Fox comments on the Sphinn discussion that you can check your 404s using Google Webmaster Tools. Internal links can be fixed, but you should contact the people behind the external links if you can.

An important note is to avoid getting those 404 pages indexed as Vanessa and Rae agree:

One problem with redirecting all requests that would ordinarily return a 404 response with a 301 to a 200 is that search engine bots will think all non-existent pages are real pages and lots of badness can happen because of that. As Rae notes, your 404 pages will get indexed.

Therefore, you may want to be careful when implementing these strategies.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Let's face it. Link building is all the hype in the search sphere. Google loves good kosher links. People like good relevant links. Whether or not there's a debate about paid links or links to bad neighborhoods, links are simply awesome when applied right.

So what are the right ways to apply those links? A WebmasterWorld member wants to know.

There are a number of tactics that can be employed to build natural links (and perhaps a few unnatural ones). They are: press releases, social bookmarking, blog posts, article submissions, forum posting, getting relevant links from .edus and library websites, posting original research (as per Matt Cutts), and creating good content that people will naturally link to.

This is definitely some good advice for the link building newbie.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Google has been updating the link reports in Webmaster Tools more frequently, so I stopped reporting them. But Google also removed the download this table feature from those reports back in February of this year. It was at that time, I was no longer easily able to provide you a report of my top links as reported in Webmaster Tools.

First, here is a screen shot showing the "download this table" is finally back in the reports. I am not sure when Google added it back, but I know it was missing for months and months:

Now that it is back, I can share with you my top pages based on the number of links pointing to them, according to Google Webmaster Tools. So here they are:

I did not include major index pages, such as the home page, archives, and so on, just articles. I have noticed more of the "index" pages to be closer to the top of the report, then in the past. Meaning, more of my informational pages (not articles) have more links then in the past. In addition, I noticed that many of my top pages from the past were no longer top this time around. This seems to imply that those links dropped off the planet and no longer count as much. But I am not sure if that is correct. In fact, I tried to write about that theory in my write up named The Life Time Value of Links Based on Google Webmaster Central from April of last year, but it was very hard to prove - so it is still a theory that I and many others believe in for numerous reasons that I won't get into here.

For the past updates see:

• Google Webmaster Tools Link Update More Frequent?
• October 2007 Google Linkage Data
• September 2007 Google Linkage Data
• August 2007 Google Linkage Data
• July 2007 Google Linkage Data
• June 2007 Google Linkage Data
• April 2007 Google Linkage Data
• March 2007 Google Linkage Data
• February 2007 Google Linkage Data

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if it is normal to see a downgrade in rankings soon after conducting a link building campaign. In other words, a webmaster builds links to a site that ranks average. The next few days, the webmaster notices a drop in his rankings for the site. Is that something typical, only to see it go back up even higher the next few days?

The answer is no. It is not typical to see a site first decline in rankings when conducting link building.

WebmasterWorld administrator, tedster said:

The effect of good new links can grow over time, but an immediate drop in ranking is not something I've ever noticed.

He is supported by WebmasterWorld's link building moderator, martinibuster, who said:

I agree, a boost in ranking is normal. Not unusual subsequent to a temporary boost to experience a drop to a few places higher than you were before, and maybe even some bouncing afterward for awhile until it settles. A total drop in rankings sounds abnormal.

What can be the cause of this webmaster's recent drop in rankings? Very hard to say, being that there are a ton of variables in play. But maybe the type of links this webmaster obtained were not so "trusted" as they might have appeared at first glance?

Time to find a new link building company? Maybe.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

WebmasterWorld moderator martinibuster shares some valuable link building tips in what he calls the "Link Theme Pyramid." In his post, he gives his opinions on some link building techniques that have worked for him.

Roger says that anchor text should match the page it's linking to (where the page should contain the anchor text somewhere). He adds that hubs should be more than pages of links and that perhaps your home page should not be the most relevant page. This is something Jim Boykin preaches. Finally, Roger says that you should aim to focus on the long tail.

In the thread, forum members mention that some webmasters demand a link to the home page, not to a specifically targeted inner page. While that's all well and good, the problem is that it won't help your link building efforts. That's the point I believe Roger was trying to convey. Some webmasters say that the problem with linking to inner pages is that they may break over time (and I suppose it's harder to check if the page is gone). My recommendation here is a 301 redirect.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

There is no doubt that Most SEOs Believe Competitors Can Hurt Your Google Rankings specifically with using link building tactics. But when the topic was raised recently at a Google Groups thread, Googler, JohnMu, pretty much denied it.

Let me quote you John's post:

In theory, I can imagine that there might be some borderline situations where that would be possible, however in all the time I have spend diagnosing website issues I have not once run into a situation like that. Also, I know that if a situation like that were to come to our attention, it would be resolved very quickly.

When very technical people say the phrase, "in theory," it typically means its not really possible. It typically means that the chances of the event occurring is slim to none. At least, my experience around programmers all day taught me that.

John flat out said that he has never seen a situation where a competitor driving bad links to a site has hurt the site, ever. Now, John has been with Google for about a year now and during that time, I suspect he reviewed about a site per day. That is a lot of sites and not to see any of those sites impacted by a competitor sending harmful links to it, is a bit shocking to me.

Of course, John might be saying that the harmful links were not from the competitor. Or he might have perceived them as not being from the competitor. In addition, these sites may have have other technical issues that were against Google's TOS. Hard for me to tell you what John has seen or hasn't seen - even harder for me to tell you what John is thinking.

But if you read through the thread in detail, you will see some things that might be hard to explain. In the case of the thread, it seems like John is hinting that the site in question has several on-page issues that need to be addressed. But the webmaster, as are several webmasters not associated with the site, seem to believe what many other SEOs believe - that Competitors Can Hurt Your Google Rankings.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

In a very interesting interview, Eric Enge spoke with Matt Cutts on link building. What's good link building? In many cases, Matt thinks that the best links are those that are original research and provide value to readers in the form of a Firefox extension (that's somewhat related to the website). Matt also discourages against too much reciprocal links (but it's natural to have a bit). He also discusses affiliate programs, widget bait, SocialSpark (and says that they're doing a good job), and other link building topics.

It's an informative interview that deserves a full read. While some people believe it's common sense, many people have found that it's entirely valuable.

And original research really does pay off.

That little tidbit alone is one of the best, if not the best, way to get 'white hat' links. Combine it with an aggressive link building campaign to maximize your results, but the 'original research' concept of link building works like crazy.

I've found that the best articles include a lot of original research. It looks like I'm not alone.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn and WebmasterWorld.

Search Engine Journal writer Ann Smarty talks about how exploration of competitors' backlinks can give you an idea of your competition's link building strategy and help you with keyword research among other things. She provides some tools for how to do this. The details are in the Search Engine Journal post, but the tools outlined are:

1. BacklinkWatch
2. Smart Backlinks
3. Analyze Backlinks
4. Link Diagnosis

What's your favorite link analysis tool?

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A couple months ago we reported on an SEOMoz post that was debated at Sphinn on the topic of which anchor text counts? Is it only the first anchor text on the page linking to a specific URL or is it all the anchor texts that are linking to that specific URL count.

Let me explain. Let's say I first link to my Big Blue Pineapple Chair with the anchor text Big Blue Pineapple Chair and then the second time I link to that exact URL, I use the anchor text Small Red Cantaloupe Chair, would Google count the second link? Hmm, so far, it doesn't seem that way - but that was not a full or thorough test.

A new Sphinn discussion revolves around a post named Debunked: Only The 1st Anchor Text Counts With Google. The discussion basically agrees that the this theory was not debunked and requires more testing. There are several SEOs currently testing the first-anchor text theory and I will keep you posted on those findings as they come out.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Search Engine Journal's Loren Baker reminds us that if we're building links, the basic rules of SEO should not be overlooked or forgotten. Even if you have hundreds of thousands of links, SEO basics are critical to achieve better rankings. Some of these include adding keywords to your copy, avoiding duplicate pages, adding unnecessary code, integrating text in images (and not using alt text), and more.

Link building itself is fine. SEO is still important for search engines, and both should be practiced together.

Most Sphinn members are in agreement about the article, but one points out that some sites may rank very well even if they don't incorporate basic SEO. He believes that it's more important to focus on relevant anchor text instead of unoptimized anchor text.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A WebmasterWorld member was desperate for improved rankings, so he bought links. As a result, his rankings tanked and he was wondering if there's a better way to buy build links.

Really, if you're trying to buy links, the recommendation is to avoid using brokers. Go directly to webmasters and ask them if they can place a link on the site where it appears naturally (not in the navigation, for example). Additionally, go for quality over quantity. As pageoneresults says, "[t]en (10) high quality links will typically trump a hundred (100) low quality links."

The best ways to build links is slowly and methodically, he adds. You don't want to add a bunch of inbound links immediately because it can raise red flags.

On a related note, Jim Boykin suggests that you build links by focusing on the right text by having the right content on targeted pages. Don't necessarily link to your homepage; build links to the appropriate internal pages instead.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and Sphinn.

A Google Groups thread has a very interesting discussion that is almost complete. The discussion takes you through the life cycle of a 301 redirect. Site owner moved from domain.com to domain.info, on a domain name sale, but wanted to retain his links, so set up a 301 redirect from .com to .info for a certain period of time.

Besides for the thread covering a ton of details that are critical to such a move, I wanted to highlight one point made by Googler, JohnMu. John said that you should not use "the robots.txt to block crawling while you have a 301 redirect enabled for the domain. By blocking crawling, you're effectively blocking the search engines from recognizing the redirect properly."

I wonder how many people do that because I never would have thought people do.

Besides for that, there is some discussion on how long the 301 should be in place before handing over the old domain to someone else. If you 301 the results for 3 weeks and then hand the old domain over to the new owner, if that owner drops the 301, will Google return the old links back to the old domain or keep them at the new domain? Some suggest keeping the 301 live for at least 6 months.

There are many tips in the thread for such a process including collecting as much linkage data you can from the previous domain. You can collect linkage data via Yahoo Site Explorer, Google Webmaster Tools, your web analytics, your own database scripts and more. This way you can go back to those sites and ask them to update your link to the new domain.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread asks members if they would consider buying a link that has a nofollow attribute appended to it. For those who don't know what the nofollow attribute is a snippet of code added to the html of the link, so a search engine can easily detect if they should follow the link (in terms of link popularity and even actually following the link physically). It looks something like this:

<a href="http://www.site.com/page.html" rel="nofollow">Visit My Page</a>

In any event, the thread asks if you would buy such a link. I know people do, cause some of my advertisers buy them from me. But would you buy such a link? I know it depends, depends on if the link is on a high trafficked site, or in a prime location, and so on. But let's pretend the link is on a site like this or a site like Search Engine Land, would you buy a link from those types of sites, if it was nofollowed?

Here is the poll (try not to use the "other" option):

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Many blogs are abuzz with the news about a recent fake piece of linkbait that ended up capturing the eyes and ears of many big traditional news outlets and bringing the originating story thousands of backlinks. After the community went up in arms about the "snakeoil" tactics of this piece of bait, Nick Wilsdon and Barry at Search Engine Land talk about the ramifications of the action, especially with how Matt Cutts is responding to it from a Google perspective. In a Sphinn thread (that is REALLY long; you have been warned), Matt says:

My quick take is that Google’s webmaster guidelines allow for cases such as this:

“Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It’s not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn’t included on this page, Google approves of it.”

There’s not much more deceptive or misleading than a fake story without any disclosure that the story is hoax.

Numerous forum members at Sphinn are disappointed in the approach taken here, especially since it was fake and deceptive. Others think it's unfair for Google to assert control over web content. Yet others understand that Google wants to link to the most trusted and relevant website, so they're going to obviously take action. I'd argue that the piece of linkbait in question is the most relevant piece of the pie here and should rank #1 for the query.

The question is: what would happen if nobody admitted that the linkbait was fake and everyone assumed it was true? Even if people contest the motives of this particular piece of linkbait, it was confirmed as fake, but do you really think that every piece of linkbait out there is legitimate?

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn and Sphinn

I didn't know that being electrocuted by solar panels was even possible, but apparently it is. Solar Dave made a really cute video about how it all went down:

The idea behind the video, as Dave explains, was to illustrate that Google is starting to see that linkbait isn't all white hat and that there may be more "shades of gray" than assumed possible before (I guess anything can turn into black hat SEO if you think about it).

In the case of this piece of "linkbait," a few forum members were taken aback by hearing that Matt Cutts died :( I can hear that. What would we do without Matt's sunshine in our lives?

Is this viral marketing? It could be within the community who knows who Matt is. But most people don't, so it's mostly just linkbait among those who know Matt.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn

Matt Cutts wrote a blog post yesterday about how Google is noticing reciprocal link exchange requests and how the sender of the particular email tried to circumvent Google's "filters" by including a request for a link exchange within in image (so that Google couldn't "read" it). Since people are quick to report such infractions to Google, they know about it.

On that note, how do you compete with those who buy links in bulk? WebmasterWorld members attempt to tackle this question. Some typically avoid taking upon clients who are working in competitive industries unless there is money to be spent. Others look for relevant link exchange options (provided that the webmaster who is asked to give a link actually is receptive to providing the link).

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn and WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion about how one should handle inter-linking a network of sites. You said interlinking a network of sites! In some cases, it make sense to link a property of sites to each other.

For example, IAC, which owns Ask.com, also owns TicketMaster.com. If you scroll to the bottom of the site, you can see many of the other internet properties IAC owns. That includes Expedia, Lending Tree, Hotels.com, Hotwire and many more:

Is this wrong? Often not. It depends on your intent. But as SEOs are more concern about their intent being misconstrued by the search engines. So they often might take steps to keep the links but some how show to search engines, you don't have to count these links when looking at the link popularity component. You can do this easily by slapping on a nofollow attribute. But some SEOs don't want to add nofollows for several reasons.

WebmasterWorld administrator, Tedster, says, he uses iFrames for this situation. Tedster then explains why and what he uses iFrames for:

I use iframed urls for sets of "customer service" utility links, for example. That helps to sculpt PageRank without joining the "Cult of the Nofollow" ;)

I also commonly use iframes for large chunks of boilerplate text, such as legal disclaimers. I prefer having some indexable text, rather than using an image file and iframes have served quite well.

Got to love Tedster's "Cult of the Nofollow". In any event, this is the first thread I have seen a while on using an iFrame for this purpose.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A High Rankings Forum member talks about how he has a variety of sites that are all networked on the same server with the same owner. They're not related topically, but there are some subpages where adding links may be of value to search engines and visitors. Would it be bad to link to pages in the same link network? Are there any risks?

It depends, actually. If you're trying to hide the relationship between sites, as one says, it's deceptive and could be dangerous. On the other hand, if you're being open about the relationship and linking where appropriate, it should be fine.

Another option is to add "our link network" to the footer of the site to bring other people to your other pages. It's not as topical, but it may drive traffic. However, that may not necessarily be the kind of traffic or links you're aiming for, so that is totally up to you.

The forum discussion that ensues is informative, so take a read at High Rankings Forum.

A WebmasterWorld member wants confirmation if getting multiple links would cause a penalty in the SERPs. He notes that very popular sites which rank on the first page of Google have a lot of links, including those from "shady" places. Why, then, can't he do the same thing on his smaller site?

Some forum members believe that the age and authority of site matter in this case. Some sites just always get inbound links. Others don't unless something is up.

A new site that gets like 20 links per day, then all of a sudden gets 2000 in one day, well then there's tom foolery going on there and the penalty gets slapped. Once that penalty is slapped, over time it will go away.

So be careful when you build your links, because you can find a dent in your rankings, but as forum members note, the rankings will generally improve.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A Google Groups thread has a long discussion on how Google defines what a link farm is or is not. I have decided to isolate a Googler's comment, because who can best define what Google feels a link farm is, better then a Google employee?

JohnMu, a Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, posted twice in the thread. The second time he offered additional advice on how he would define a link farm. He said:

A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself "would I be doing this (linking there) if search engines didn't exist?"

Another way of looking at it is to think about where and how you will be linking: Do you feel fine with linking to that site with a highlighted link in your main content or would you rather have the link in 5pt gray on white in the footer? Do you want your visitors to see and use it or is it just for the search engines?

John also links to the Google link schemes page which has the official line on bad linking. Now, of course there is gray area and that is where John's post above comes into play. Even with that, people still may be confused. Well, if it feels wrong - then it might be.

John admits, even him being a Googler, it is still "hard for [him] to provide a definition of what Google sees as that."

If you need more clarification or have specific questions, you can join the Google Groups thread and hopefully be aided in the right direction.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

As the link building strategy becomes more and more difficult (at least by some), people are seeking out alternatives to the standard two-way linking practice. In a WebmasterWorld thread, a member is looking at a triangular link strategy which wouldn't be directly reciprocal but he's hoping that he'll still benefit.

Would you do it? If you're looking for reciprocal links, three-way linking isn't much better. Furthermore, if the goal is to outwit Google, Google knows (a lot).

Ask yourself why you're even engaging in 3-way linking. Is it to help you or is it to help your audience? Again, you need to consider what your users want first.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A newish term, named SEOicide, caught my attention via a WebmasterWorld thread. The thread discusses how an SEO has the opportunity to buy 70,000 links from a PR7 site for a great price. He asks if it he should do it.

Most everyone says, don't - you are setting yourself up for a penalty. In fact, words like SEOicide are being used to describe what you would do to yourself. But others are not convinced, they say, if the site will drive traffic to your site, then do it.

I would buy, if the direct traffic from those links brings you a profit. Otherwise it sounds very questionable a I would not sign any long term agreement/contract.

Anyway, back to the term SEOicide. I did some searching and it appears the Jane Copland of SEOmoz used the term on February 21st of this year in a comment on a blog post. So WebmasterWorld was not the first place it was used in writing.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Over at WebmasterWorld, users are discussing the potential value of a link from social bookmarking site StumbleUpon. Is it worth trying to submit to or is it completely not worth the effort?

Well, it depends on the content. Is it "worthy of being stumbled?" That's something that you must seek out. Of course, if you choose to take the plunge, the right person might come along and StumbleUpon your page and then blog about it, which can be an incredibly valuable link building experience.

Just a word of caution though: don't use social networks to be overly self-promotional. As one person mentioned in the thread, he was banned for submitting his own content. As a heavy StumbleUpon user myself, there's absolutely nothing wrong with submitting your own content but you must be sure to avoid being self-promotional. In other words, don't only submit your own stuff; mix it with other content as well.

[Note: StumbleUpon links are nofollowed, so from a search engine perspective, it doesn't help much.]

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Googler, JohnMu, has some basic linking advice in a Google Groups thread. In short, John explains that logic behind who you should or should not link to. I'll quote John:

In general, if you can provide relevant links for users of your site, feel free to link to them. That's how the web works :-), even if those links partially come from sites that you also own or work on.

That said, if those links are not relevant to the site, it's generally safe to say that they will not provide any significant value to your users, even if the sites you're linking to happen to be owned, made or run by the same owner. If you own or have made a group of fairly unrelated sites, it might be best to keep them on a portfolio page.

In general, thinking about where and how you would link to these sites will provide a good guideline. Would you want to keep this link visible in your main content? Or would you prefer to keep it in 5pt light-grey on white text on the bottom of your pages?

Did we learn anything new from this? Not most of you, but for our new readers or those searching for "advice on linking out," this article may come in handy.

If you have more questions, join the thread at Google Groups.

Note: This article was written last week and scheduled to be published automatically on Monday, April 21st.

A High Rankings Forum thread is a perfect example of how people can misinterpret SEO terms. In this particular case, because a site has lost its rankings, an individual is looking to build a "link farm."

Well, sort of. A "link farm," he says, is how he builds reciprocal yet relevant links. (A real "link farm" is frowned upon by Google.)

If you ask me, that doesn't sound like a link farm. But there's a problem within this industry that can cause serious penalties (without any idea why) if you're not understanding the proper SEO terms.

My guess is that in this particular member's case, he lost rankings because his boss misinterpreted another SEO tactic yet again. It's very important to understand these terms clearly. If in doubt, ask a forum member for help.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

Some link builders spend a significant time just trying to build up some sort of rapport with other webmasters. Eventually, they may feel that the pool is drying out. With so many link requests nowadays, you can't blame but feel helpless since everyone seems to be getting numerous link swap requests daily.

Where else can you go to build those valuable links? Perhaps your scope is too narrow. There are millions of sites on the internet, so look at related sites, local sites, un-related industries that still have some sort of relationship to the topic, how-to sites, blogs, history sites, and more. There really should be no shortage.

And truthfully, if you're feeling limited, perhaps you're also looking for "high authority" sites. Look into sites that may not be as authoritative but still show some promise.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

I was doing my forum research this morning and I spotted a HighRankings Forum thread with the title "Link Unbuilding." I love it! The new link building, for some, is link unbuilding!

Here is the SEO's concern and this concern is pretty common in the SEO circles:

Over the past few days Google has been reporting a phenomenal increase in the number of links to my index page. While there are a few genunine new links, the majority come from a single site - in Japanese and hosted in Japan which seems to be causing Google to believe that it has over a 1000 new links to my site every day.

The site seems genunine enough so I am assuming that this is the result of a glitch whatever forum management software they are using. Given that I cannot translate the site using Google the option of politely writing and asking them to stop is out of the question. I assume that Google is smart enough but I am wondering if it could penalize me for flooding it with spurious external links in this way although I have no control over what is going on. Any ideas?

I find it funny that this is a concern - because as Google has said in the past, most of the time, you cannot control who links to you. It is only an issue when your linkage patterns look to be very very spammy and unnatural. But this doesn't stop a concern that is spreading through our space - that links can and do harm your site. It has happened and is becoming more and more of an issue very day.

Confusion is probably the biggest issue, as we demonstrated in this poll. In fact, one of the most requested new features SEOs want in Google Webmaster Tools is a way to label links that they don't want. Will it happen - I would bet on it, before the end of this year.

In any event, a thread like this is now not uncommon these days and expect to see a lot more of them.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

Face it. Sometimes you can exchange links for free, and other times, you just have to buy a link. But is there a minimum toolbar PageRank number that you should go by before buying that link?

Obviously, this isn't a black and white question. Consider the content of the site. Two of the key questions you should ask yourself are "Is it relevant?" and "Can it deliver traffic?"

But beyond that, there's more that can be had if you consider buying that link now. A site that is PR0 can go nowhere but up. If you believe the site has potential, buy the link now and then just wait until the PageRank increases. You'll benefit from getting the early start.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

On February 20th, I asked our readers if they thought a listing in the Open Directory Project would have a major impact on a site's Google ranking. The response was split down the middle.

We only had 58 responses, which is very low for a typical Search Engine Roundtable poll, but the results were really down the middle.

As you can see, 47% said that a link from ODP does not have a major impact on your Google rankings. While 45% said a link from ODP will have a major impact on your Google rankings. Of course, the question is not clear cut and there can be "it depends," answers.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

Should you save wads of cash to buy link building software that contacts hundreds (or thousands) of webmasters for you to give you some links? Wiep Knol says no. In his recent blog post, he explains why link building software isn't the way to go and gives nine reasons why.

The biggest reason, at least from what I encounter on my day to day emails, is that link building requests like these are far from personal. Wiep also provides other reasons: it's bad for your image, it's easy to copy, it results in an unnatural link profile, and you'll miss the links you want, among others.

It takes considerable effort to build quality links. Buying a $200 piece of software won't do it for you. Research, commitment, and time investment are critical. Software won't give you the results of hard labor. It takes time and energy to make it to the top.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A WebmasterWorld member has been applying regular search engine optimization and link building techniques and is noticing that the traffic hasn't improved as substantially in the latter months of the campaign as it did initially. Is this something normal?

Actually, in many ways, it is. The first few months are typically a lot easier than the later months. Tedster mentions that sometimes it takes links time to reach their full power and cites Google's "Historical and Age Data" patent.

There's no reason to give up, though. It's time to focus your energy on building links from high quality relevant sites. Focus your energy on building good content to attract such links.

Forum members also believe that it may not necessarily be link building that can be holding you back. It could be that your competition is ahead of its game. One suspects that it may even be the work of a human editor. What you can do, though, is take the recommendations and be aggressive in your link building efforts. Then see if you move up.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

In Search Engine Land's weekly column about link building, Eric Ward tackles a question about link building best practices. Is there such a thing?

Guess what? The answer is no.

He explains:

The problem with link building best practices is that if you ask ten link builders to agree on a set of best practices, each of them will be right, and each of them will be wrong, myself included.

What works for one link builder may not work for another link builder and vice versa. There's just no "standard" for link building. It comes down to the site's goals -- if they're looking to monetize, if they're looking for traffic, if they're looking for conversions, etc.

But since folks at Sphinn were looking for more, Eric has started a new column on his blog called Link Building Best Practices.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Adam Audette wrote a brilliant piece on the fundamentals of link building on his blog, and he's right on the money. His core message is that links reflect value, so your linking strategy should focus on finding that valuable link and seeking out the appropriate neighborhoods for gathering such links. The higher the quality of the link, the better it is for you.

I'd summarize the entire post, but it really deserves its own read, your social media bookmarking, and your links too. Seriously. Adam did a great job. He divides his post into how link building has evolved, the components of a quality link, the importance of link neighborhoods, where to begin, and how to perform strategic link building.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A WebmasterWorld member asks how to find local directories for link building purposes.

One member suggests that you search with "directory + [your local area]" on Google or Yahoo to find some really targeted local directories.

There are also some great paid directories including Best of the Web's regional directory and Yahoo's regional directory, both of which are subscription-based models.

How do you find quality link directories?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A month ago I wrote, Google's Matt Cutts Replies to -60 Penalty Thread at Google where I summarize how Matt said some links are hurting a particular site.

At that point, I decided to poll our readers and see if they feel that most of the "minus" X related threads and penalties are back link related or something else. Most believe the penalties are related to one's back links.

Here is the break down:

• 47% said Yes (50 responses)
• 28% said No Idea (30 responses)
• 25% said No (26 responses)

My personal feeling is that many of those perceived penalties have to do with the links to the site. Just a hunch.

Forum discussion continued at Google Groups.

Anyone who knows the Google Web Spam team well, knows that they all have a huge distaste for link manipulation. In my opinion, it is more than just a distance for some of the web spam team members, specifically Matt Cutts.

Matt Cutts, a great guy, Google engineer since January 2000, has a strong, deep, gut wrenching distaste for link manipulation, in my opinion. Where do I get this opinion from? I don't think from our conversations but from watching Matt write and communicate with webmasters on link issues since early 2003.

Let me pull out one recent post by Matt Cutts that demonstrates it. A Sphinn thread, Matt writes:

Todd, what about a query like [symptoms of a heart attack]? The searcher wants accurate results ASAP, and might not have enough time or patience to research the subject thoroughly. We think about searches like this and issues like this all the time, which is why Google may come across as humorless when we talk about some linking issues.

I thought Eric made a pretty compelling argument. When you search, you don't want a search engine that is "fooled" by lower-quality links. And if you're trying to compete for search rankings fairly, you don't want a site that takes short cuts to do better than your site. That's why it's so helpful to have great content first and foremost and then promote that content well as opposed to just building links to low-quality content.

Just read that. Do people search for such things? I would think so. I don't think heart attacks are sudden always and I hear many people get them without knowing, they just feel discomfort. So Matt takes this stuff beyond seriously, but sometimes, I feel, personally. Imagine, spending eight plus years working at a company to build out a search experience that provides as much help to the searcher as possible. Now, imagine you have people come in and try to manipulate that? In my opinion, it would take a strong man to not take that somewhat personally. Of course, Googlers can't take it personally, but in some cases - it can be hard not to.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

A DigitalPoint Forums has reports from dozens of webmasters that their link counts in the tool are way down.

Some users are reporting as much as of an 80-percent reduction in the number of links Yahoo Site Explorer is finding for their sites.

Lost about 75% on all sites today.

Ya! This was a huge drop though..not the usual slight fluctuation. i lost like 12k links.

I don't track my links on a frequent basis for this site, but I was able to dig up a past link count that I posted here back in October 2007 where I found I had 216,880 inlinks reported. Today, Yahoo Site Explorer reports I have 271,196 inlinks. So I don't see any reductions and I also checked some tools that might have been tracking this for me on an automated basis and I see no reduction.

(1) Either this site was not impacted or
(2) This was a temporary bug that is now fixed.

Are your Yahoo inlinks report down drastically?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

SEOmoz posted results from a study he did where he concluded that only the first anchor text on a page is counted by Google as the anchor text for that link.

For example, let's say you have a two links to the same URL on the same page. The first link on that page uses the anchor text [Big Blue Pineapple Chair] but the second anchor text uses [Small Red Cantaloupe Chair]. Which one will Google count as the true anchor text to be associated to that page? According to Rand's study, it is the first, i.e. [Big Blue Pineapple Chair] and not the [Small Red Cantaloupe Chair].

The Sphinn thread on the topic actually says this study was first conducted by the SmackDown blog (here is the Sphinn thread for that post). Smackdown explains that you may want to rethink linking your logo to your home page if this is the case. I am not sure about that, unless you use some weird code that interprets the image tag as an anchor tag.

It makes sense why Google or any other search engine might pick the first use of anchor text for a page on the page. I personally did not validate the studies but it is important to point out, nevertheless.

There is also a debate about nofollowing those links and what type of impact that may have on those links.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

The Google Webmaster Tools "external links" report is buggy over the weekend. The tool is not showing any backlinks anymore for, I believe, any site.

For example, here are the non-existent backlinks for the Search Engine Roundtable:

There are dozens of reports from webmasters worrying if Google banned them or not. Threads at DigitalPoint Forums and Google Groups both have concerned webmasters discussion the issue.

The issue started Sunday morning or early afternoon and is still an issue at the time I write this. Hopefully it will be fixed shortly.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and Google Groups.

Now Fixed: At about 3pm (EST), it has now been fixed. JohnMu, a Google Webmaster Trends Analysts posted below and I confirmed it is now fixed.

Ann Smarty poses an interesting question on Search Engine Journal. As blogs are communities, it's useful to comment and leave your thoughts. But what if you add your link to the comment? Is it spam?

There are numerous tools that can check to see whether the comment is spammy and it depends on your blog installation (MovableType versus WordPress versus any other platform). But Annie notices that search engines are smart enough to factor in whether the comments are spam and also check for relevancy, comment content length, similar content on other blogs, blacklist terms, and other elements to determine whether it's spam or not. She concludes that if you add relevancy and ensure that you don't violate these rules, you're not spamming at all and you're adding value instead.

In the Sphinn forum discussion, bloggers acknowledge that it's important to put all comments through moderation (if you care about your blog). Apparently, some people actually do rank well after spamming blogs with their comments. If your blog is your baby, don't let those comments through.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Three recent link building articles have appeared on Sphinn that are worthwhile for link builders. I'll walk through each of them and explain why they are important.

In Squeezing the [Link] Juice out of Low Hanging Fruit, Bob Massa talks about how hard work pays off. He emphasizes many points but stresses that you should carefully select quality directories to submit to and submit properly. This way, you don't have to pay for links.

Matt Cutts wrote a post with SEO advice on links in 2005 and published it on the 11th. He suggests that you should become a resource, provide an ongoing service, be valuable, and keep your product open. Quality content breeds links naturally. If you think about it, has much really changed?

Another post is Loren Baker's explosive organic and paid link building tips. In this post, Loren says that you should aim for relevancy, selective anchor text, and says that you should not be concerned about nofollow. Sometimes, he acknowledges that you may have to pay for those links and you may want to take advantage of new sites to build your links on. It doesn't hurt and they will eventually age.

Do you have anything to add? Forum discussion continues at Sphinn (Bob Massa), Sphinn (Matt Cutts), and Sphinn (Loren Baker).

When a webmaster was looking at his site data in Google Webmaster Tools, he noticed that one of the "Pages with external links" was linking to his IP address and not his site. He's pretty baffled about why that would be the case. He has no way of reconciling this as far as he's investigated, and it looks like it may not even be possible from what Tedster says.

This kind of thing can happen when some inept webmaster links to you using your ip address - I once had this happen with a link from a major newspaper! Ionly discovered the source through the server log referers - not through a link report from any search engine. Apparently Webmaster Tools got this crossed up in your case, however it happened that they found the ip address.

That sucks. A lot. It especially sucks if they decide to use your IP address when you're on shared hosting and the link never shows up to the reader. It's a poor user experience all around and nobody really benefits. Please consider to use a real URL and not an IP when you link to people. Thank you on behalf of all competent webmasters and users.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

The results are in, and SEOs voted on which link they would prefer.

65% of SEOs said they would prefer an old and aged link over a fresh and new link. 35% said they want the newer fresh links over the older links.

We polled our readers back in late January and with 113 responses today, I think the verdict is in. At least we have a overwhelming majority opting one way as opposed to being undecided.

Our last poll results showed SEO's cant agree on the value of an image link, but I think, for the most part, SEOs can agree on this question.

Continued forum discussion at SitePoint Forums.

I honestly wanted to avoid this topic, but due to the amount of attention on this topic right now, it is our duty to let the non-forum activists know about the controversy.

Shari Thurow authored an article on Search Engine Land named You'd Be Wise To "NoFollow" This Dubious SEO Advice. In short, Shari said worry more about your site architecture then using the nofollow attribute to funnel your PageRank, sculpt your PageRank, or silo your site for search engines. Shari is of the opinion that a quality site does not have to worry about it, while others, including Stephan Spencer's Search Engine Land article named Sculpting Your PageRank For Maximum SEO Impact says it works.

Honestly, there is no doubt in my mind that using the nofollow attribute or even JavaScript or a robots.txt file to manage your PageRank and link popularity flow works. It is nothing new and has been done for ages, just not with the nofollow, since the nofollow is relatively new. Do I do it? No. Why? Cause I focus more on other things, which I think is Shari's point. Would I benefit from doing it? Probably.

Michael Gray's Why There’s Nothing Wrong With Sculpting Your Pagerank takes issue with picking on those who do sculpt PageRank. He says there is nothing wrong with it at a macro level. It all depends in my opinion.

At SMX West a buddy showed me his site and asked me what more he can do. This site was absolutely optimized to the T. Pages that didn't have much content were nofollowed via the link and noindexed on the page level. The detail he put into his site was truly amazing. It all depends on priorities and resources. I say, if you got the time, why not sculpt. Google is not handing out penalties to those who use the nofollow and in the Linking Q&A panel, Matt Cutts was asked:

Q: PageRank sculpting/siloing: should we do that? Matt: In general, worry more about the high quality of your site. After you've taken care of it, then think about sculpting. Put your best pages on top - your best selling products should be linked from your homepage. The nofollow and metatags essentially do the same kind of thing. Google is against abusive manipulation.

So why not, if you have exhausted everything else you could have done on your site.

In any event, the discussion is incredibly heated at Sphinn, so enjoy.

Pole Position Marketing did an excellent writeup on some link building secrets from 12 link building type people, including Rand Fishkin, Hamlet Batista, Jim Boykin, Debra Mastaler, Bob Gladstein, and Michael Gray and published the findings in a 24 page PDF.

Here's part of one tip (you'll have to read the PDF to get the rest of the tips):

Not all links are created equal. We know that some links help more than others in getting high search engine rankings. For some time now, link builders have primarily relied on Google’s toolbar PageRank as a good measure of the quality of a link. Higher PageRank values were ostensibly better than lower ones. Unfortunately, Google has played so much with the PageRank values it displays that it has become increasingly less useful.

Forum members are finding this information incredibly useful and actionable, so take a read.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A WebmasterWorld thread touches on a simple topic, the topic of link pages. Many sites have them, a page that contains links to link partners. Some of these pages are labeled "resources," some are labelled "partners," some are "directory," and some even "links."

The characteristics of the page look a lot like the ones you find for a search on resources page in Google. They have tons of links on them, sometimes they are organized by category, sometimes alphabetically and sometimes not organized at all.

It is the location most old school link exchangers use to place links back to those they exchange links with.

Why might these pages not work?

I like how WebmasterWorld moderator, minnapple, put it, so I will quote:

The main problem with link pages is that everyone links out of them, but no one links to them.

Many "links" pages are not even included in google's indexed because of lack of internal link support of the main site.

And if they are included, they don't look natural. What page links out to a hundred different places and doesn't have a similar count of links coming in? These pages.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld member is in a bit of trouble because he feels that there are no relevant sites for his ecommerce shop. Obviously, since search engines like relevant links, this is a bit of a challenge for those who can't possibly have relevant sites.

There are numerous reactions to this comment. First of all, the WWW is so vast that it's hardly believable that there are no relevant sites. And if there aren't, it's probably not a very competitive area either, is it?

One forum member adds that link profile is more important than the context of the sites linking to you. Another advises to widen the scope of links you're looking for.

Many are too nervous to get links from irrelevant sites. They believe that it substantially helps their rankings.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Mid January I asked An image link is worth what percentage less than a text link? The question was probably not clear enough and I honestly don't blame the respondents. It is a hard question to answer, because there are so many variables that can impact such an answer.

But I thought I share with you the 171 responses to-date:

All over the board as you can tell. Here is the detailed breakdown:

• 24 respondents (14%) said an image link is "100% - Equal to Text Link"
• 8 respondents (5%) said an image link is "90% the value of a text link"
• 16 respondents (9%) said an image link is "80% the value of a text link"
• 25 respondents (15%) said an image link is "70% the value of a text link"
• 16 respondents (9%) said an image link is "60% the value of a text link"
• 33 respondents (19%) said an image link is "50% the value of a text link"
• 19 respondents (11%) said an image link is "40% the value of a text link"
• 10 respondents(6%) said an image link is "30% the value of a text link"
• 9 respondents (5%) said an image link is "20% the value of a text link"
• 5 respondents (3%) said an image link is "10% the value of a text link"
• 6 respondents (4%) said an image link is worth "0% the value of a text link"

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

We reported several days ago that Google hasn't updated their external link counts and data in Google Webmaster Tools since early January. Webmasters and SEOs began to complain so Googlers began looking into it.

We now have reports via Google Groups that webmasters are seeing an update to their link counts in Webmaster Tools.

I would share our most popular pages according to Google but in early February Google removed the download table option and we now just have "download all external links." Of course, I can get to this data but I am at SMX and have limited time to mess around in Excel right now.

It would save me a lot of time and I am sure other SEOs and Webmasters a lot of time if Google put that option back.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Taking you back to the -60 thread I blogged about earlier. The thread is at Google Groups and it shows us a little of something that may be obvious but should be spoken about.

Once you are penalized in Google or probably any other search engine for that matter, it is extremely hard to get back in. While you may be able to get away with bad links linking to your site before getting penalized, but once your site is penalized those bad links can keep you out of the index. So yes, bad links can hurt your site - even if there are just a few.

John Web aka JLH Design has an interesting post in that thread that expresses this concern. Let me quote you the part of his post that talks about this and you can read in its entirety over here.

I'm hoping that this doesn't cause a storm of people now worried about some shady seo linking to them in a spammy way to hurt their rankings. From what I gather from this thread is that once a site has been flagged and penalized that all of the details including on site and off site factors get looked at very closely, much closer than before. Remember that Google has a copy of every page on the web that they've crawled and can quickly pull up any relationships between them. So if on 10/16/07 thirty seven links start appearing with the anchor text "Dining Room Furniture" to a product page on sites that don't monitor their commenter's links, they'll be able to notice it. On it's own this may be ignored as it is generally accepted that external sites cannot hurt your ranking (though that has been removed from Googles documentation) but when coupled with other signals it may add up to something. I would imagine that it also has to be weighed as fraction of the whole of the links. In other words, if a site has 36,000 links to it and 34,000 links are from theme sponsorships, 1,000 are from keyword rich blog comments, 500 are from web directories, and only 10 are from actual sites giving out an editorial link that would be a pretty good sign that someone was trying to improve their ranking by external methods. If 99% of the links are questionable, then it may give them cause to not only devalue them but devalue the site as a whole as well. It's like the interlinking of commonly owned sites problem, or domain farming as its often called. For legitimate sites like Google, youtube, and blogger, some interlinking is possible, but only because if you look at the millions of links they have, only a very small percentage are from their own properites. Where it gets a site into trouble is when the majority of its links are from a common individual that a ranking penalty would make sense. I'm only guessing here and have absolutely no inside knowledge, just trying to talk it out.

All this is derived from Google reps continually insisting that this one site that is penalized remove all the bad links pointing to his site. Once you have bad links and your site is penalized, will Google use those links against you until they are all cleaned up or can you get back in?

What happened to the feeling that bad links can't hurt you too bad? Is this fair? Can this be used to hurt your competitors?

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

A Google Groups thread on the -60 penalty at Google (there are so many of these now, -6, -10, -250, etc) now has several responses from Matt Cutts of Google.

Matt replies specifically to the nature of the posters site and not specifically to the nature of what a minus sixty penalty is. But the lack of not addressing the -60 specifically, can these minus whatever be associated with Matt's response to this user?

Matt tells the user that his backlinks look "unusual" and asks if he has been collecting links in an unusual manner. Here is Matt's post:

ShyBoy, have you been collecting backlinks in any unusual ways? It looks like you may have, and I would pay special attention to that. For example, if you had been attempting to get PageRank via paid links on various templates, then when that PageRank stops flowing (e.g. if Google improves its detection in various ways), the fact that you have less PageRank can also mean that a site won't rank as well.

If that applies to you, my advice would be to pay special attention to that issue, in addition to the other good advice you've already gotten.

Matt tells him to go to those links and fix them by removing them and then submit a reconsideration request with Google. Matt even points him in the right direction of finding those links and hopefully addressing them.

Now, some may think that most or all minus whatever penalties are associated with bad links. Some might not. What do you think? Do you think most minus X penalties are associated with one's backlinks? Take our poll:

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

I have been hearing reports from friends in the industry that the external link reports at Google Webmaster Tools have not been updated for an unusually long time. I personally stop tracking those updates back in November 2007. We now have a Google Groups thread that shows complaints about the report not being updated and Google taking notice. Googler, Susan Moskwa said:

Thanks for the reports, folks; we're taking a look at it.

Supposedly, an update has not happened since the beginning of January.

So you would think people would jump to Yahoo's Site Explorer tool to get more up to date link reports. But we have been seeing recent reports of stability issues with the Yahoo link tool. Over the course of the end of last week, we have reports of the tool going up and down sporadically. A WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums thread have reports as early as February 21st. Sometimes the tool is completely offline, sometimes the link reports are not coming back when requested. Must be really annoying for some SEOs not to have either reporting tool.

Forum discussion WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

As expected, Yahoo's Flickr has finally added the nofollow attribute on links generated by the owner of the photo. We have covered how you can use Flickr in your SEO and traffic building strategy but some of that has been taken away now.

Don't get me wrong, you can still generate a lot of traffic from Flickr. Flickr images tend to rank surprisingly well in Google and other search engines. So if you have an attractive link to your content, from that image, you can still get nice traffic. But the links themselves should not count anymore in terms of any search engine popularity.

By Yahoo adding the nofollow attribute to those links, most search engines will not count the link as credit towards your site's popularity score. So all that is now out the window. This does not come to a shock to many of us because this has been the pattern of all popular user generated sites. What is next?

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

We've asked this a lot, but it happens to be a question that concerns a lot of webmasters. A webmaster specifically notices that he's been unable to get links now but it was a lot easier back in 2004 and believes it may be because of the search engines penalizing him.

Google Webmaster Central rep JohnMu chimes in to say that it depends how valuable the reciprocal link is.

I think the not-so-simple answer to this question is "would you do that if search engines didn't exist?"

If you link to a site and they decide to link back to you (perhaps even for an unrelated reason), those links may be providing value to your visitors and they may well be important to your site. However, just "exchanging links" for the sake of exchanging links (or even just as an attempt to influence search engines) is likely not to be that important to your visitors and for your site in general.

If you're doing it to manipulate the search rankings, it's not a good idea. If it's because value is being provided, by all means, go for it.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.