Exhausted your link sources but still not ranked number one?

Posted by stuart as linking, link love, seo, search engine optimization

I’m doing some SEO work for a friend of mine at the moment. It’s been an ongoing thing, the site’s been optimised as best it can be for the keywords in question, I’ve exhausted my list of around 1,000 directories (yes this does work), written and submitted articles to all the worthwhile article directories (this works too), yet he’s still not ranked number one for his main keywords. First page, no doubt, but yet to grab the number one spot.

So what to do? Give up? Sit and wait?

I don’t think so.

We’re obviously on the right track, we wouldn’t be on the first page of results if we weren’t, we’d struggle to improve the on-page or on-site SEO, so it just comes down to links. There’s not a whole lot of other places for us to drop links. This is a particularly competitive industry, so none of his competitors are going to pony up a some linky goodness.

Do we just start buying links? I think not, this is no long term strategy, as we don’t want our ongoing rankings being held to ransom by some random webmaster.

There is one thing we can do though, which can help immeasurably. Whilst we may have used up pretty much all of the places we know of to drop links to this site, we can create another site and do it all over again.

“What, so you can have two sites in the top ten, but neither of them in the number one spot?” I hear you ask?

Well, you’re half right, and half wrong. I know we can move a second site into the top ten for his keywords, we’ve done it once, there’s no reason we can’t do it again. But doing it again gives us one distinct advantage.

We have an authority site to link from.

Whilst I’m a firm believer that a shitload of links is a good way to get a site ranked, there’s also a lot to be said for a single link from an authority site in the same niche. Google obviously thinks our existing site has some sort of authority, or it wouldn’t rank it in this quite competitive local niche.

So we’re off to create a second site. This is a particularly long term strategy, I wouldn’t recommend it for an affiliate or AIS site. The site we’re doing this for is a bricks and mortar business where long term rankings will be particularly beneficial.

This second site won’t simply be a second site for his business, I believe that search engines are smart enough to pick up on things like two websites in the first page of results having the same contact details, addresses etc. This site will simply consist of half a dozen well written and researched articles on the niche in question, with no outgoing links.

The important thing to keep in mind whilst building this second site is to keep it completely un-connectable to the first site. This means:

• Don’t use the same registrar to register the domain name
• Don’t use the same contact details to register the domain name (private registration with a different registrar is good)
• Don’t use the same Google Analytics account to track the site’s statistics.
• Whilst you could probably get away with hosting the site on the same IP as the original site (resellers host thousands of sites on the same IP, so the search engines can’t be sure that sites of a similar subject on the same IP are owned by the same person), it’s probably better to host this site on a different IP or hosting account from the original.
• Try to avoid using the exact same anchor text as you’ve used for the original site when gathering links.
• Don’t use the same web template as you used on the original site.
• Don’t place contact details on the second site.

Once we’ve written our articles and published the site, we start promoting the site in exactly the same way, in exactly the same places where we promoted the original sites:

• We write half a dozen more good quality articles and submit them to article directories
• We hit up our 1,000 or so link directories and drop our links on them (this is a good one to outsource - 1,000 submissions can be bought for around $70, but I find that they can be a bit hit and miss as far as accuracy goes)
• We hit up all the same blogs we did with the original site and start commenting on them using the new site as our URL

Over time, when our page reaches the first page in the search results (or even the second page), we drop a single, good anchor text sitewide link to our original site.

……and wait and see if this link is enough to tip us over into the top spot in the rankings.

Wasting your time creating linkbait?

Posted by stuart as linking, linkbait, link love, links, seo, search engine optimization

Spend any time reading the big boys (and girls) of the SEO blogging world, and you’ll hear an awful lot about creating linkbait.

Linkbait is defined by wikipedia as thus:

Link bait is any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites.

Which is all well and good, assuming that your readers have the capacity, inclination, and skill to actually link to you.

I have a blog where I write about the issues facing people who suffer from kidney disease (an issue close to my heart). I could create all the linkbait I like in this field, but the simple fact of the matter is that the vast majority (over 95%?) of the readers of that blog don’t actually have their own blog or website.

The fact that they have no means to place a link on a website or blog of theirs makes my linkbait virtually worthless.

So remember, it’s all well and good to create linkbait for your make money online blog, as the chances are that the majority of your readers has the capacity to link to you, but think long and hard before you spend a lot of time creating linkbait for people who can’t link to you.

Giving away free shit!

Posted by stuart as linking, link love, links, advertising

The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and my doctor has just increased my anti-depressant dose, so I’m feeling all warm and fuzzy about the world.

So what better way to celebrate my newfound joy than to give away some free stuff.

So here it is: I’m giving away, for free, three six month site-wide sidebar text links here on Pimp My PageRank.

“So what do I have to do to get my hands on these awesome free text links, Stu?”, I hear you ask.

Well, I’m glad you asked! Here’s the drill: leaving a comment here on this post will get you one entry in the draw, and linking to this post from your blog gets you five entries. (You don’t need to write a whole post about the giveaway, just drop a link in a post somewhere mentioning it.)

If you choose to link to this post, you’ll need to drop a comment here letting me know (that gets you an extra entry, too!).

In a weeks time (Thursday (13th March) morning my time here in Australia, Wednesday afternoon for most of the rest of the world), I’ll tally up all the entries, and randomly select the three winners.

These links will not be nofollowed. I’m not getting any money for them so that shouldn’t be a problem, and if it is, google can bite my big hairy ass.

Of course, I reserve the right to refuse any links I don’t like the look of, but you’re welcome to use keywords of your chosing if you win.

So hop to it, drop a comment here, or a link on your blog, and go in the draw to win a free site-wide text link on this blog for six months.

What can we learn from Asian dudes gettin freaky?

Posted by stuart as linking, link love, links, seo, search engine optimization

My last post about Asian dudes gettin’ freaky produced an odd result. I actually garnered a few splogger backlinks from splogs scraping content related to Jennifer Lopez.

So in the spirit of research that lives within this blog, I thought I’d throw a hundred or so keywords from google trends into a post, and see how many trackbacks I got from by friends the sploggers.

I’ve used the trends from today, as the indication in some of the forums I read, sploggers are actually scraping the google trends results and creating automated blogs in real time.

Here’tis, let’s see how we go:

Do you dofollow your pingbacks?

Posted by stuart as nofollow, dofollow, linking, link love, link exchange, links, pagerank

I’ve noticed something interesting a happening little more frequently lately, and I’d like to ask you, the punters for your thoughts…

The thing I’ve been noticing is that when other bloggers link to a post of mine, they are no-following the link.

Now when you link to a post of mine, you basically get two, and in some cases, three do-followed links back to your blog:

1. From the original pingback/trackback section under the post you’re linking to,
2. From the recent comments list in the sidebar of the blog, and…
3. If you comment often enough, in the “People who Rock!” (most active commenters) section in the sidebar.

I can understand people’s reticence to dofollow links in this age of Google getting a little over-zealously slap-happy with bloggers who sell text links and paid content, but let’s have a look at the reason that the nofollow attribute was first introduced.

The nofollow attribute to a href tag is meant to tell the search engines that the owner of the page upon which the nofollow tags appear cannot vouch for the quality of the content being linked to.

That original purpose, noble as it may have been, is now being held like the sword of damocles above the head of bloggers who now fear any outgoing dofollow links may be penalized.

Taking the above point about being able to vouch for the quality of the content beyond your nofollowed link, the linker needs to ask themselves whether they should be linking to the content in the first place. If you don’t trust that the quality of my content is good, why are you linking to me at all?

Take a look at number 5 in this list from searchenginejournal of 13 reasons nofollow sucks:

5. Linking to someone with a NoFollow attribute is a sign of not trusting them. It’s like reaching to shake someone’s hand, but stopping to put on a pair of latex gloves.

In my opinion, it’s also a little like going to one of those sweets boxes you see on the reception desks of large companies, usually selling bags of sweets for some charity or another, and instead of paying $2 for your bag of lollies, paying one dollar and taking the candy anyway.

You’re getting full value from your link from me, why are you being so stingy at passing that link love back?

So here’s the question:

What do you think is a fair policy for nofollowed pingbacks? Should I nofollow the outgoing link back from my blog? Delete the pingback alltogether? Just leave it and get on with writing content so maybe some one eventually links to me with a dofollowed link?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this….over to you!