Link Building

Just throwing my hat into the ring for Marketing Pilgrim's latest contest.

Changing URLs and moving domains is a fact of life for web site owners. The scary part about making such changes is the potential negative impact to rankings in search engine results. The good news is that the search engines, Google in particular, have become much better at mapping old URLs to new ULRs and transferring the value from existing external links from the old URL to the new URL. All that is usually required is a 301 redirect and the search engines will eventually take care of the rest. And yet URL changes still cause stress because a lot of what goes on is behind-the-scenes and invisible to us. Will the search engines really give me credit for all of my previously acquired links? Or will I have to start from scratch?

I may be dreaming, but I'm pretty sure I was once on TopRank's list of SEO blogs back when I was using a different domain name for this site. It seems that I've dropped off. Well, since Google has just blessed this new domain with a PageRank of 3 I figured I would try to get someone on Lee Oden's team to notice my soon to be 200 post blog.

Eric Ward had a good post on Search Engine Land recently about a situation where a link building campaign would most likely fail. In his article he describes the site as one that is template-based and largely a duplicate of many other sites. Hence the conclusion that it wouldn't be able to attract links.

A couple of years ago web site owners scrambled to adopt the latest and greatest URL structure to help their rankings. What people finally settled on included characteristics such as these:

• Free of session IDs
• As few parameters as possible
• As Short as possible
• Keyword-rich
• Dashes as word separators

A quick note to let you know that you're not going crazy. I've had to change the domain for this site from SearchGrit.com to AllThingsSEM.com. The later is more generic and will keep me out of potential trouble due to associations that are no longer desirable.

I'm working on getting the FeedBurner feed to migrate nicely and hopefully I won't mess it up. The new feed URL is http://feeds.feedburner.com/AllThingsSEM.

Sorry for any confusion this causes!

A lot of bloggers complain about their pages going in to Google's supplemental index. This happens to me for just about every new site I launch and I don't worry about it because the pages recover on their own as the site ages. However, sometimes pages go supplemental and stay that way. Not a good thing

Matt Cutts, of Google, recently wrote about some of his employer's efforts to ferret out paid links. Namely, they are testing algorithms to detect such links; providing a form to allow people to report on the use of paid links; and recommending that anyone that takes payment for links clearly disclose this payment.

There's a new form of reciprocal linking that is sweeping the blogging world. Big name bloggers are promising to link to any other blog that writes a review about them. At first blush this seems like a win-win situation, but I think one side is getting a much better deal than the other.

I recently installed a plug-in on this blog to remove the nofollow attribute from links people submit in the comment headers i.e. the link back to the commenter's web site. The plug-in, LinkLove, I use removes the nofollow attribute after the user posts their second comment. I figure this'll give me some protection against any spam that sneaks through Akismet as well as providing value to those that just don't stop by to write "nice post".

DMOZ, the open directory, has been a tool used by web site owners to promote their sites for many years. And more recently, it has been used by search engine optimizers to get new sites listed in search engines because the directory represented a trusted and free inbound link. The question that is now coming up is whether the directory will continue to provide value.

I learned from a post by Andy Beard today that Wikipedia has slapped the nofollow attribute to all external links. The obvious reason for this is that the site has become a breeding ground for spammers who just want the benefit of a link to their web properties.

Not too long ago, the notion of search engine friendly URLs surfaced and many people scrambled to make sure every URL on their web sites included keywords each separated by dashes. Now that the initial flurry has passed, friendly URLs have become yet another recommended item from those involved with search engine optimization (SEO). But, I think people aren't considering the potential consequences with changing URLs before making the switch.

For the last few years or so, reciprocal links were all the rage when it came to search engine optimization (SEO). The idea behind reciprocal links was that since Google valued external links, it made sense to trade links with other sites. It was a win-win situation for both sites since both benefited from the external links. And as with other SEO techniques, link exchanges were over-used (or abused depending on your perspective).