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| Posted: 01 Jul 2005 05:49 | ||
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The Link Exchange - SEO Newsletter
Issue #1 Table of Contents =================== 1) Welcome 2) Google Reveals Ranking Algorithm 3) Automating Link Exchanges with LinkMachine 4) Avoiding Being Cheated By NoFollow 1) Welcome ------------------------------------------------- Welcome to the first issue of The Link Exchange SEO newsletter! I'm David Baker, the editor here at The Link Exchange. During my four years of doing search engine optimization (SEO) work, a lot of people have written in with questions about what works and what doesn't. I'm putting together this newsletter to share what I've learned along the way, and I hope to learn from your experiences as well. If you've received this first issue in your e-mail, it shows that you're already aware of the most important aspect of search engine optimization - increasing the number of incoming links pointing to your site. I'm not psychic - I know this because we're sending this newsletter out to every webmaster who's added a link to The Link Exchange Directory. In this issue we'll start off by talking about a few new developments that affect any webmaster who exchanges links (which is just about every webmaster interested in high search engine ranking). First we'll look at what Google has recently revealed about its ranking algorithm. Then I'll tell you about the most indispensible SEO tool I've found. Finally, we'll take a look at the new "NoFollow" attribute and how to avoid being cheated by it. I think you'll find this issue packed with useful information. Enjoy! Wishing you success, David 2) Google Reveals Ranking Algorithm ------------------------------------------------- Google is still the most popular search engine by a long shot, so having your site rank on the first page of Google's search results is the holy grail of SEO. But Google has always been tight lipped about what it takes to rank well; and with good reason, they don't want their search engine to be taken over by an endless number of 'spam sites', sites with lots of ads and little useful content. This secrecy has left webmasters to speculate about how best to optimize our sites for Google. Until now. Google has recently filed patent application 20050071741, which describes the inner workings of the search ranking system in more details than they've ever let out before. Here are some of the key points to be gleaned from this document: ?a) Quality, quantity, and anchor text of links are what matter the most. The more links pointing to your site, and the higher the PageRank of the pages they come from, the better. Also very important is the anchor text (the clickable text) of these links. If you want to rank well for a particular search query, make sure that the keywords in that query are found in the anchor text of many of the links pointing to your site. ?b) Diversity of anchor text is important. If all of the links pointing to your site use the same anchor text, Google will consider this 'anchor spam' and rank the site lower. Vary the anchor text around your top five or ten keywords. ?c) The contraversial Google "sandbox" is for real after all. A brand new site is simply not allowed to rank well for very competitive keywords for a period of time after it first goes online. How long a site remains in this "sandbox" depends on the popularity of the keywords it is competing for, but it can last anywhere from 3 months to a full year. ?d) Acquire new links gradually over time. If a new site suddenly gains many incoming links all at once, Google sees this as artificial and does not attribute as much value to these links as it would had they been added more slowly. ?e) Google cares about the subject matter of the sites linking to your site. A link to your site will count for more if it is from a site about the same topic as yours. This means that it's important to exchange links with other relevant sites, rather than with just any old site that's willing to put up a link. ?f) Link exchange remains a very useful SEO technique. Link exchanges are best made gradually over time, with web sites that are related in topic to your own, and using diverse anchor text in the links to your site. ?g) Google tracks the click through rate (CTR) of each link in its search results, so it's important to make the text that appears in the results for your site as attractive as possible. Google also pays attention to how long a visitor stays on your site before returning to their search results, so give your site 'sticky' content to keep readers there for a while. ?h) Adding fresh content to your pages will often boost their search rankings. What this amounts to is: build your links organically by exchanging links gradually, consider each site carefully to only exchange links with relevant, high quality sites, vary the anchor text of incoming links, and add small amounts of new quality content to your site on a regular basis. 3) Automating Link Exchanges with LinkMachine ------------------------------------------------- Exchanging links has increasingly become an important part of successful SEO. However, it can also become a very time consuming process, taking up hours that could instead be put into building content and improving your site. This is where link management software comes in, to automate the most time consuming aspects of the link exchange process. There are several different link management tools out there. The one that I've seen produce the most successful results, both for myself and others, is LinkMachine. This is a Php script that runs on your site itself. It generates your link pages right there, so that they are updated as soon as a link is added, with no need to upload new versions. LinkMachine produces polished link pages that can match the look of the rest of your site exactly, with a simple custom template. It also produces a link submission form so that visitors can submit their own link. You can have LinkMachine run all of the submitted links by you for approval, or you can set criteria for it to automatically accept or reject new links. For instance, you could accept only new links with a PageRank of 3 or above, or only new links that are on the home page of the submitted site. You can also have it filter out links with inappropriate content. Besides accepting and filtering link submissions, LinkMachine lets you search by keyword for new sites to add. You can send link exchange invitation e-mails to these sites (or any other sites you add) very quickly, using customizable e-mail templates. You can even exchange links with other LinkMachine users directly through the program, with no need to send e-mails. This is a great way to start getting links to your site right away. LinkMachine will automatically check up on each of the backlinks to your site, and can send out e-mail notices when a backlink is found missing, and eventually remove the link from your directory if the backlink is never replaced. If a backlink is missing because it's just been moved to a different page, LinkMachine will find it by spidering the whole site. There are several automated link exchange programs out there that do a very good job, but what I find really sets LinkMachine apart is its ease of use, the professional link directories it creates, and the extra touches found throughout. For example, it has a built in feature called "alternate profiles" that allows you to easily vary the anchor text of incoming links to your site. This is increasingly important for ranking well, especially in Google, but I don't know of any other software that handles it as well as LinkMachine. There are also several other built in SEO tools such as the Rank Tracker for graphing your site's search rankings over time, and the SEO Wizard for analyzing your site and producing optimization suggestions. My only complaint is that, as a Php script, it can't run on web servers that don't support Php. Most web servers do support Php these days, and the automatic installation process is a breeze, but an offline version of the software would be a appreciated. If your web server doesn't support Php, Arelis is a good option. Overall LinkMachine is a fantastic package, that I highly recommend. You can try it out for free here. 4) Avoiding Being Cheated By NoFollow ------------------------------------------------- Not long ago Google and Yahoo teamed up to introduce a new link "attribute" called NoFollow. It's very simple; by adding rel="nofollow" into a link tag, you're telling the search engines not to follow that link. This was introduced to defeat the practice of blog comment spamming, the shady SEO technique of posting links to a site in every blog out there in order to raise the site's PageRank. This sounds innocuous enough, and it's done well to improve the quality of search results, as was its intent. So what's the downside? If a link to your site is marked NoFollow, it doesn't help your site's search rank at all. And some unsavory webmasters try to cheat their link exchange partners by marking their backlinks "NoFollow". So it's possible that you'll exchange links with a site, and the link to your site will appear on their site. But only by looking at the page's source code will you be able to see the rel="nofollow" within the link's code, which makes the link useless to you for SEO purposes. Checking the source code of each backlink to your site can be quite a task, especially if you have a lot of link exchanges. Here are two ways to make this process easier: ?a) Use an automated link checker that does not count "NoFollow" links as being valid. Right now LinkMachine (see above) is the only one I know of that handles this, but others are sure to follow suit shortly. ?b) There is a simple trick that allows you to create a "Favorite" in Internet Explorer that will outline in bright red all of the NoFollow links on the page you're viewing. Here's how to do it. Create a "Favorites" shortcut to any page at all. Then go to your Favorites menu, right click on the shortcut you created, and open its "Properties" window. For the shortcut's URL, replace whatever is there with this: |
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