Everybody knows that article directories are the only way to use your literary works to get those oh-so-valuable backlinks, right? That’s been the way of thinking for a long time, but it might not be quite that accurate. In fact, many SEO pundits are pointing towards using document sharing sites over article directories. This might well be the big link building trend for 2010.

But why document sharing sites? Well, Google seems to like them better. Might that have something to do with their very own Google Docs? It’s possible. Whatever the reason, Google appears to rank document sharing sites higher than article directories. Documents are also indexed at a faster rate, usually within a few hours of being published.

Perhaps the biggest reason to consider document sharing sites though is the fact that most of them don’t limit the number of links you can have in an article. Obviously you don’t want to overdo it, but it would be nice not to be confined to the resource box. It’s not just articles. Links can be added to anything because many types of documents are allowed, from simple .doc files to PowerPoint presentations. This can result in a higher click-through rate because it’s easier to use images, etc. to draw a reader’s attention.
It’s certainly seems worth the effort to check out sites like Scribd and DocStocs. It might be the wave of the future for those article marketers out there.

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There is this discussion in Webmaster World about the recent change in PR among websites. The funny thing about it is that it is not simply because of the lowered rankings of the links. In fact, the site had boosted up in rankings without links. The question that the users of Webmaster World are debating on is “How can such a phenomenon happen?”

Through the concepts of search engine optimization, we have always believed that backlinks have a lot to do with the site’s rankings. This means the more websites linking to your website, the more PR it gains. PR is very important. If you do not know what PR is, it is an acronym for page rank which is a grade given by Google to a website after it has considered several factors such as content, authority and of course, links. That is the reason why webmasters are so keen on gaining page rank in a short period of time.

However, recent news has revealed that links are not contributing to page rank anymore. This is surprising especially for SEOs who have relied in offpage optimization to gain rankings. As a Webmaster World user points out a website that gained rankings despite the absence of backlinks, he showed confusion and the yearning to find out what is happening.

It seems that Google is experimenting on something on their algorithms. Matt Cutts made a statement about “mom and pop” sites getting a boost in the Google rankings. The users of Webmaster World pertained to this theory as they try to figure out how the page’s PR has increased despite the absence of backlinks.

Does this mean that backlinks are slowly turning to be useless? We hope not. Link building has always been known to work with double purpose, promoting the website and building search engine ranking. Removing this advantage may lead to a harder internet game for webmasters.

As of now, we have no idea how this happened. As suggested by one of the Webmaster World users, it is possible that PR has increased if the website linking to it has its PR increased. But it will still not explain how one website had gained ranking with only one link to a PR0 LinkedIn account.

I guess this is one of the recent mysteries on the internet world. It may take some time to figure out what is happening but once webmasters arrive at the answer, then there is no turning back. Whatever happens, these webmasters will try to figure out one algorithm after another until they arrive at the secret of the trick. No need to be discouraged.

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There was this interesting post in YouMoz yesterday entitled “LinkBuilding:Mislead to Believe” where the author Tripti debunked 6 linkbuilding myths that has been an area for debate in the SEO world for the last few years.

Myth #1: Outbound Links can kill your rankings

There is this belief that outbound links can diminish your PR or rankings but this is not true according to Tripti. Linking to other websites will not kill your rankings if you do it to provide value to your readers. Just imagine if you become a good resource and link people to the places they like to go in the internet. Wouldn’t your website have more value? Even if some people think that the search engine algorithms is robotic, it is not. It still looks for quality websites who care for their visitors.

Myth #2: Reciprocal links won’t work

The issue here is not the act of reciprocal linking but how the reciprocal linking is done. When some people hear about reciprocal linking, they immediately assume that they should search for people with link pages. This is wrong. Search engines do penalized people who are engaging in this link focused activity. However, if one person saw his link on your website and decided to link back then there’s nothing wrong with that. Yes it is a reciprocal link but it is done all because the sites are related and they compliment each other. As you can see, search engines do not like it when you try to game their system. So it is best to do linking in the most natural way.

Myth #3: Link with a Higher Page Rank

People have always fussed about pagerank when in reality, they should be looking on the combination of page rank and outbound links. Tripti showed this in his example:

Who says backlinks from PR 5 is better than PR 1? Look at this PR calculation formula:

PR (A) = 1 – d + d ( PR(B) / L(B) + PR(C) / L(C) + PR(D) / L(D) + ….. )

d = 0.85 (damping factor derived statistically)

The final Page Rank of your web page equals to 1-0.85 + 0.85 x (PR/ number of outbound link).

Now, for instance, you have web page A. You are getting links from two pages: one is B and other is C.

Page B (page rank- 5, number of outbound links – 100)

Page C (page rank- 1, number of outbound links – 10)

According to the formula above, if web page A gets link from page B, the final PR will be 0.15 + 0.85 x 5/100= 0.193.

And if A gets a link from C, the final PR will be approximately 0.24.

So you see, the final PR value of Page A will be better if linking with C has PR 1 than linking with a page B that has PageRank 5.

Myth #4: Link with a high PR website

Linking with a high PR website is worthless if your link is not located on a high PR page. You must learn to search high PR pages. This goes for the traditional linking methods of commenting and link building as well.

Myth #5: Permanent Link Building

Links are never permanent. You have to build it on a continuous basis and some webmasters tend to remove some links as time passes. It is therefore important to make your link building process continuous.

Myth #6: Paid Links are Unethical

In reality, there is really no difference between free and paid links except that the paid links are put in particular pages they like and it is paid. There is nothing unethical about it for they are not stepping over those who are securing free links.

It is a rather interesting read. For the whole article, visit YouMoz.

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Directory submission may have been one of the oldest link building methods out there. However, it is still as effective. With the way the economy is taking the spiral downturn, a resort to free ways of link building is becoming more common. And why should they not be? Directories offer one-way quality link juice. That is, if you post in the right directory.

As Debra Mastaler puts it in her post in Search Engine Land entitled “A Link Building Stimulus“, people are “willing to cut back on the number of link building techniques they contract for, but not the quality of the links secured.” With this, she came up with some of the most popular directories.

Some of the directories she mentioned are DMOZ, Yahoo! Directory, Best of the Web, Ezilon, Joe Ant, Massive Links, GoGuides, Rubberstamped, Greenstalk, Business and Aviva. Of course some are more popular than other but submitting to each of them will still contribute to the link juice one is after.

Also, Debra noted the power of specialized directories. There are niche-specific directories such as dog directories and cat directories while there are format-specific ones like RSS directories and podcast directories. The key is to find some niche-specific directories to ensure the quality of links as well as reformat the site in different ways so it can make use of format-specific directories.

Okay, so we have established that directories bring link juice. But what about traffic? Directories may bring traffic only if the website is submitted in a relevant directory. That is the reason why finding a niche-specific directory is very important. Just think of it this way. When a person is looking for information on dogs, will he visit the cat directory? Definitely not. But if he visits the dog directory and found your website there, then he will have a higher likelihood of visiting it. That’s the simple concept.

But upon knowing the power of directories, one does not need to rush. There have been a lot of stories on the internet which have seen their sites get deindexed because they got too excited and submitted to multiple directories at once. Manual submission is still best for it can be regulated to a specific amount per day. Of course, this may take some time that is why it will be wise if you hire a manual directory submission service.

With all the things said in this article, we can expect directory submission to stay despite all the global ups and downs.

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The latest post on SEOmoz blog entitled “Nofollow is Dying: The Impact of Microblogging and Nofollow on SEO” touched on a very important issue in the the SEO world – that is the importance of nofollow links. SEOs have always believed that links should always be done on dofollow sites because nofollow does not provide link juice. However, SEOmoz have this theory that nofollow does not matter anymore.

SEOmoz provided good basis for this claim. The author referred to microblogging platforms such as Twitter that only have nofollow links. However, the conversion of these links are phenomenal since links are shown to concerned followers. If this idea is going to be applied to SEO, this can somehow change the search engines’ algorithm. With their goal of providing the most relevant search results to their users, it is not surprising if they will consider nofollow microblogging links in the future.

Another basis SEOmoz have presented is the explosion of 3rd party program users. Like social media sites such as Twitter, 3rd party websites such as blogger, wordpress.com and others usually have nofollow links. However, with the increase in users, search engines can’t always say that the links to these blogs must be ignored. Some of them are relevant and ignoring them are not practical.

Third, nofollow links have been proven to be more trusted. This can be attributed to the announcement that nofollow links are not counted by search engines. It is with this reason that spam is not present in most of the nofollow websites. Spammers usually flood the dofollow sites with their links expecting link juice. Ironically, the people who try to game the system only make the dofollow links look worse than the nofollow links. This is an aspect that search engines may consider as they weigh which link is worth more.

I have personal experience with this as well. I have found that the search engines managed to crawl my site even if I commented on related nofollow sites. I tried searching the links and the nofollow comment came out in the listings. This means that the search engines are still counting that link even if it comes from a nofollow blog.

However, this is just a theory. I think it is still best for Google to have this rule because it limits comment spam as well as build relevant content to a particular page. But it is still an interesting thing to know that nofollow may also be valued by search engines.

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We all know that link building is a dreary, but vital part of any SEO campaign. High ranking or high PR pages that are relevant to your site and linking back to you is always the bomb. But, contrary to what some people will have you believe, those same kinds of sites that aren’t related to your site can be just as worthy of your attention. Recently, some of the most sought after back links are those that come from the majestic .edu websites; Google loves them.

I see a lot of people, though, that go after .edu links almost exclusively. Given, these are often the same guys-n-gals that think that Google Page Rank is the most important thing in the world. Yes, they’re great to get back links from, but I don’t think anyone should be dropping the majority of their link building efforts into searching for .edu’s.

Yes, Google see’s them as royalty. Yes, getting those kinds of back links is awesome. However, how many .edu sites have you seen that are, well… plain crappy. I’ve come across many that don’t offer much at all, while I’ve also seen some very informative and helpful ones. The question in my mind is will Google start to realize how very non-helpful many of these are? Will Google start to notice the trend that everyone and their grandma is focusing on getting these back links? If that happens, and you spent all of your precious time seeking these back links, what is going to happen to the value of your website?

What do you think? Do you think their authority and importance are here to stay or do you there’s a possibility of change coming any time in the near future?

photo credit 1

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Insurance company Gocompare.com look to have secured there place back in the top 5 positions of googles SERP’s for the keyword “car insurance”, After being heavily penalised by Google for practicing blackhat link building techniques involving link purchasing to boost there PR. It is said to be that although they were dropped for about six weeks it shows they have cleaned up there act and have received only minimal punishment from Google. A little warning to Go Compare is that they are very lucky and this shows the reason why you should always perform SEO as per Google’s guidelines.

It is reportedly stated that Go Compare actually lost about 84% of there traffic giving there competitiors a major income boost over the past few week, it is also sending a spark warning as to how powerful Google actually are for either making or braking an online business.

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Dmoz the worlds greatest and largest human edited directory has been a debatable subject on all terms in our community but what really are the SEO effects of getting listed in one of the worlds most reliable directories.

Well to begin with if you dont already know DMOZ is a human edited directory meaning that the editors will only accept top quality sites related to there industry, this has caused not only caused a lot of knit picking but it feels as though somewhat alot of favouristism has been awarded to say for example “editors friends”. Lets just put it this way if you are looking to get listed in a freelance area of the directory and the editor also owns a freelance site and may see you as competition then there is no way they will accept you. We feel that although DMOZ can create could quality links as alot of directories extract listing from there, including google. Dmoz has nowaday become somewhat of a black market whereas if you know the right people or have the right funds your going to get listed just CLICK HERE and take a look at this its terrible.

Our conclusion is that Dmoz a few years ago was well worth every effort and can still get you a heck of alot of backlinks, but you should not become obsessed with getting listed instead concentrate more on your link building campaigns and overall if you stick at it you wont feel you need DMOZ at all.

Remember if you want to rank well, getting listed in one site wont do this for you so:

D = Do,

M = More,

O = Optimization

Z = Zestfully

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As we all know link building is the major and has been the major hot topic in the SEO world for years.

Lets go back to the beginning before the existence of the artificial intelligent search engines, with very smart and clever algothirms. The old days were great the only way to really get your site noticed was word of mouth – posting your link in forums and other discussion so that people would actually be interested and click on your site. Nowadays the links are still there but are perceived in such a different way now we need to obtain them links not to be clicked on but to be picked up by the search engines spiders. Here we have a look at ways to obtaining these:

Natural Links

Natural links are the best way possible to obtain rankings but are very hard the key is to keep writing unique relevant content and eventually people will start linking back to you. Another half natural way is to submit your sites to top directories this will cause a bounce on effect as most small directories extract content and listings from the larger ones giving you quality one-way links.

Paid Links

Paid links is very much disapproved by most major search engines due to the fact that links are meant to be given to you in a natural way by webmasters because they enjoy your content or what you have to offer. Purchasing links does some what the opposite as it is like paying your way up the SERPs. In the end we all know that gaining links naturally is a very hard task these days as there are billions of web pages, so the best advice fo buying links is find sites that do not tell the whole world they are selling links as the search engines will find out and penalize every site that is involved.

Reciprocal Links

Reciprocal Links have also been somewhat devalued by the search engines lately especially with google due to the same reasons as above, we still think reciprocal links do still have slight value so try and get links that are the same theme as your site and related to the users – and again try to just obtain these via one on one discussions with the webmaster in question.

Three way links

We feel that three way links are a much better alternative than reciprocal linking as there is more weight on these sort of links due to the fact that the site that links back to you, you do not have to link back to them. e.g If we link to www.wordpress.org and they link back to us from a totally different site they have.

Article Links

Article links are a very good way to obtain natural backlinks especially with the rise of social media sites. The way to do this is write a great article or a news flash on your niche. Submit them to sites such as Digg or Propeller and once popular they will bring you in a ton of natural backlinks which the search engine will love.

So whatever ways you decide to do remember stick to the search engines guidelines, as you can never trick them.

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