Monday, February 7, 2011

How Google rates the Links and Link Building?

We learned from Google’s patent application last year that Google was changing how they rate links. This didn’t get nearly the attention that I think it deserves and it’s important so I am going to recap the info again now.

Not every link is weighted or valued the same. Google is weighting them based on how likely a “reasonable surfer” would be to click on that link.

To try to figure this out, Google is looking at 2 things:

• link visibility (placement and appearance)

• link relevance

So, no more small text links in footers, no more links buried in comment spam, no more link exchanges where your link sites on a link page with a bunch of others. You need quality links that stand out and are likely to get the click. (Hear that link spammers, no need to keep emailing to ask for link exchanges!)

Linking methods that are no longer effective:

• Forum posting and blog commenting. (Still do it to add value to a conversation and help people but don’t count on link juice from it)

• Social bookmarking. It’s still a helpful resource so use it to be helpful but don’t count on link juice from this.

• Bulk directory submission. This has been a bad idea for a while but it’s worth repeating.

• Bulk link exchange. Bad idea and could result in penalties or being banned from the engines.

Linking methods that are effective:

• Guest blogging. Great way to get exposure for yourself and get a high quality link back to your site.

• Link baiting. This means just putting great content out there that acts as bait and people can’t resist linking to it. The content has to be really good and it really needs to be spread around.

• Press releases. With some effort and some luck, you can get a quality link from big media.

• Social Media. As I mentioned earlier in this article, you can attract links via Twitter (and Facebook).

• Article Syndication. A great way to spread your content (but it has to be good)

Prachar is the owner of IndSEO, A Indian based search engine marketing firm offering a variety of SEO related services including reputation management, social media marketing, email marketing, website conversion metrics and mobile phone application development. Please contact prachar@ymail.com to learn more





Sunday, February 6, 2011

Matt Cutts on Gadgets, Google, and SEO

Algorithm change launched


I just wanted to give a quick update on one thing I mentioned in my search engine spam post.

My post mentioned that “we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.” That change was approved at our weekly quality launch meeting last Thursday and launched earlier this week.

This was a pretty targeted launch: slightly over 2% of queries change in some way, but less than half a percent of search results change enough that someone might really notice. The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.

Thanks to Jeff Atwood and the team at Stack Overflow for providing feedback to Google about this issue. I mentioned the update over on Hacker News too, because folks on that site had been discussing specific queries too.

Thanks to http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/algorithm-change-launched/