Entries Tagged 'Link Building' ↓

Today I am trialing a piece of software that provides semi automated submission to online directories, social bookmarking websites and article sites. What’s more this free directory submission is hosted right here on markrushworth.com for you all to try out.

Basically you register with the system (i give you 1000 free credits – 1 credit per domain which i think is more than ample) and you fill in some basic details of your target site. The free directory submission tool then visits each directory in turn and all you need to do is fill in the captcha and appropriate category for submission.

The reason for my trialling this is my annoyance with the paid services out there where there is no control over the quality of directories in a list. Also Google seem to be using ‘low level’ link building techniques like directory submission with great effect (even Rand thinks so).

Give it a try and let me know your thoughts.

I recently was tasked with sourcing the largest list possible of Pligg sites (don’t ask why). For those of you who dont know Pligg is open source community software that allows members to post, comment on and ‘Vote Up’ topics that are of interest.

Pligg can be good for SEO if treated like a PR service with topical, newsworthy articles and content being published but is more often than not uses for spammers.

So if you’re interested in Pligg and would like a massive list of over 10000 pligg sites then here you go.

Pligg List

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

Tim of SEOWizz fame and resident guru at Branded 3 has recently posted an article which he debunks popular link building myths.

One key point he argues is that Google is attributing the anchor text on the first pass of the bot and that changing anchor text once its been ‘indexed’ has no effect.

This is massive as one of the first things I (used to) do for every client was to check the backlink profile and re-purpose any links that were not anchor text based.

It seems the key is to get the link right the first time.

I need to see how this effects new links pushed into old content as that could be a huge hurdle for link aquisition.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

I’ve been looking through the vast raft of automated and semi automated SEO tools out there and one that is free and appears to work is a free online directory submission service called Easy Submits.
Basically you register your site, fill in the standard directory prerequisites and then click through each directory title in their list of over 2000. The site then pulls in the form and captcha and you click submit.

Don’t CTRL click a bank of links open as it messes up the captcha reference – its best to do them one by one.

Oh and you can filter by captureless directories if you want to speed through some basic directory submissions.

Theres some really great features like having the ability to check each directory for acceptance, reporting errors and basic PR data etc for each directory listing.

Check it out today.

Another new tool launched a few days ago is a Google Local Citation Finder which aims to help you track down the link sources and references that incluence Google Local listings.

Basically you find a target keyword where alocal listing is shown, fill in the form and press submit, the app then emails you back once a report has been done and bobs your bothers brother, you have a list of credible sources that can influence your local listing.

Check it

If you’re heavily into SEO and link building then you should be into content aggregation and Guest Posting is a great way of not only getting your content out there but also a way of building your brand (and the brand of your clients). If you don’t know what guest posting is then its simply the act of having an article posted on a 3rd party website.

There are pleanty of guides to how to effectively guest post out there and key to this is tailoring what you have to say around what the target blogs community wants to read so I’d even go so far as to say you’d be better of writing completely unique content for this purpose.

Theres a new resource in town created (I think) by the world famous Anne Smarty and this is myblogguest.com. It’s basically a forum of publishers and SEO’s/writers who are looking for their opposite party within the guest post relationship.

The main reason for this post is to encourage UK bloggers and SEO’s to get involved as at the moment its mainly USA focused and the good ol’ UK needs to represent!

If you want a guest post from me then look me up on there.

njoy.

I know its a dog but it still pays to factor in Google’s Pagerank as a qualifier for your link building efforts.

Ive discovered this great tool that, via copy and paste, will mass check the pagerank of 100s of urls at a time.

Its even better because it also exports a CSV and includes Alexarank (for what its worth).

Give it a go and save yourself hours:

checkprinbulk.com/mass_pagerank/

Do you use use the Google Toolbars PareRank meter as a way of determining the ‘value’ of a link? Well it may be that you’re missing a trick or two when discounting Grey Bar’d (perceived) PageRankless pages as a source of links.

For those of you who don’t know, I’ll recap a standard policy on Link Building. Building effective links falls into 3(ish) camps with a combination of all 3 needed to give you a well rounded, Google proof organic backlink profile. These are:

• Authority – sites that are trusted sources of information
• Juice – sites that pass PageRank (not green bar)
• Relevancy – links that are wholly relevant to your niche

Add to this list that links to your site should have a nice keyword rich anchor text and you’ve got the cornerstones of a highly effective campaign.

It’s rare for one site to deliver a link that achieves all three (unless your competitors start linking to you) and within boundaries where anchor text is king, it is important to make sure that many of your terms are linked using one of the 1000s of keywords you’re firing at your site.

In the quest to build great anchor text rich links many people qualify pages on a wide variety of measurements including SEOMoz’s Domain Authority, Number of inbound links from unique domains, domain age and the ubiquitus PageRank however it is Anchor Text where the real power lies.

For example. I currently market a furniture site that is doing really well for its main two word terms but we would like to attract more traffic from fuzzy searches where people don’t know the type of product we well whilst targeting terms that accurately target our niche i.e. Vintage, Antique, Period etc. To achieve this with maximum effectiveness and minimum outlay we have decided to use Directory submissions as a way of quickly building a back-link pool of targeted terms (you could use social media, articles or micro-sites if you are prepared to spend more time) but with so many low quality directories out there and PageRank disappearing straight off the home page how are we to determine effectiveness?

As an experiment I decided to use Googles Cache date as a measure of whether Google is actually visiting the internal Directory pages, on sites where the site is listed and the cache date is under 45 days I requested a link.

The net result is that our site is gradually improving in ranking for these fuzzy prefix and suffix terms. Agreed its only a start, but Ii think that when you’re trying to deliver maximum benefit for minimum cost that tactics like these when properly monitored and controlled can deliver great results.

Valid until the end of May, the promo code: 25BUCKS will get you a massive $25 off all BOTW directory and blog directory submissions.

Just be careful where you’re placed as the powers at BOTW tend to dump you on a page within a regional sub domain which isn’t cached or has any ‘visible’ PageRank

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As Many SEO’s out there including myself try to use every tool in the chest in order to give our clients/employers the best back link profile. For many years there has been a number of ‘top SEO directory’ lists that quote many sites as being the best in class for providing listings that help improve your Google search position. In recent years directory owners have noticed that there’s a great potential revenue stream for paid directory submissions, possibly as they see paid submission as a way of telling Google that their site is a growing concern and a serious business as opposed to the many rubbish directories that popped into existence back in the 00′s as a way of building a pseudo-authoritative site on a particular niche.

I thought it would be beneficial to put some of these rock star directories through my basic back link qualification process to see if any of the big names actually deliver on their promises. As a caveat I’d like to point that this research was conducted to determine a directories benefit to organic search placement and does not in any way reflect the traffic driving capabilities of such directories. In addition I’d like to point out that I’ve picked the ‘best’ category for my listing, this being the one that most accurately reflects the target sites content (in this case furniture/living room furniture/sofas etc)

Key

dR

Domain Rank (Via OpenSiteExplorer)

IBL

In Bound Links – The number of unique domains linking to the sites home page

pR

Googles PageRank

pR: N/A

No PageRank i.e. Grey Bar

OBL

Out Bound Links from this page

Data

Analysis

The key to this research is whether the page on which your listing is places is indexed by Google and has any PageRank to pass onto your site. As you can see in a vast majority of cases this is what lets these sites down. Of course you could attempt to ‘game’ the directory owners into putting your link onto a less relevant page (in this case it could be antiques/antique furniture etc) and a pR search using the SEOChat tool will certainly show you what pages have the highest PageRank for this purpose.

So what’s my advice? Firstly to Directory owners, it’s no good saying your a pR9 directory if you’re listings pages aren’t in the Google index. So work through your sites to ensure each page has adequate content and reduce the number of links off a page i.e. think more about your category structure. For SEOs and Directory submitters, don’t waste your time or money on directories that aren’t passing juice.

And finally. I know the Google toolbars measure of PageRank is not a great indicator however is it is the standard rule of thumb and as this is a quick guide, it should serve most peoples purpose.