Today I was sick and tired of getting beaten on some rankings I was working hard for, so I decided to dive a bit deeper and see why GoDaddy was ranking as well as they were. When I looked into the link profile for those high ranking pages, I found a lot of homepages linking to these landing pages with highly optimized anchor text. These were anchor texts like "ssl", "bulk email", "web hosting", "web hosting companies" etc. Stuff like that just doesn't happen by accident, so there had to be a reason for those. I was baffled when I found what they were doing.

Want a Website Tonight, anyone?

You see, GoDaddy offers a service called "Website Tonight"; this service allows you to quite easily create a website by offering you an editor and all sorts of widgets. Not exactly the power of WordPress, but nothing wrong with it from the users perspective. What is wrong is what I found when I created such a website: when you create such a website it has an image in the footer by default saying "Powered by Website Tonight". It's possible to turn this image off, but most people don't bother as in the editor it looks rather harmless, like this:

Now, if it were just that, I don't think I'd be all that bothered (not the border is because the image is selected). The issue is, that on the live test site I created, it looks like this:

That link wasn't there in the preview... That's called deceiving your customer. Note that by default, the image is black, you can switch it to white or you can switch it off, but in the editor it'll always show. This is probably the reason why some people choose to use the white version, as they think they can't disable it and want a version that's less ugly on their design.

Example time

Ok it's time I show you some real live examples of these I guess, these websites all have ugly links like that in their footer:

• http://www.motorinsurancee.com/
• http://www.universalhealthinfo.com/
• http://www.autoinsurancecoinc.com/
• http://handson3rd.com/
• http://www.onemilerunner.com/
• http://www.trophyshowroom.com/

But those links don't work, right? Wrong.

Google has been telling us for quite a while now that footer links etc. are not that important. Well guess what, that's not true if you have enough of them. Using SearchMetrics I ran a report for the top keywords they rank in the top 3 for. Each and every keyword in there that is not their brand name, from website hosting to webhosting to website builder, to domain name registration and more: all of those landing pages have exact match anchor text links pointing to them. All coming from these types of domains, thousands if not tens of thousands of clients who are paying for a service, are unknowingly also helping GoDaddy's business by helping it rank.

These links are on by default. They are not editorial. It's not the first time this happened, Hostgator has been caught adding links to their clients websites in the same way, I mention that in my WordPress hosting article. The issue is that Google rewards these kinds of practices with top rankings, which they shouldn't.

How well this works, well by my estimate they started doing this more aggressively in September / October of this year, see how their visibility according to SearchMetrics almost doubled:

This would correlate well with the Majestic SEO's historic back link data:

For hosting related terms like the ones GoDaddy targets, doubling your search engine visibility like that is worth a fortune. To show you even more how blatant these links are, this is a screenshot of the top pages report in Majestic, after doing an advanced historic report, look at the anchor texts and notice that the two with a flag on the right are reported wrongly, the anchor text for the link in fact is email marketing there as well. You can click for a larger version:

Some of these sites however already show these links a the beginning of 2011. See this archive.org example and this one to see that, they even changed the link in the meanwhile... What I think happened in September / October that made me catch them was that they started doing this for more keywords.

The long and short of it

GoDaddy is playing this game a bit too aggressively in my opinion, and Google should really start discounting those links. The right way would be for GoDaddy to ask their customers whether they're allowed to insert a link and make them choose where it points. No single customer would, by own volition, link to an email marketing page...

I am, though, disappointed in Google's filtering of these links; there are far too many spammy links pointing at those pages that:

• have a very unnatural anchor text distribution
• they're all in the footer of these sites
• are distributed over only a select number of IP's.

Those 3 things combined, I can't believe they didn't catch that.

Disclaimer: I'm not saying anything that GoDaddy does here is illegal from a legal point of view. In my opinion it's against search engines guidelines and they're not transparent towards their customers, so I'd call it bad karma.

Thanks goes out to Dixon Jones of Majestic SEO and Marcus Tober of SearchMetrics for helping me figure all this out.

GoDaddy’s spammy link building techniques is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Adding that keyword to the title of every page is not going to help. Nor is writing 200 articles about it without one central article to link all those articles to. You need one single page that is the center of the content about that topic. One "hub" page, if you will.

That page will need to be 100% awesome in all ways. Brian Clark of Copyblogger calls this type of content "cornerstone content" and has written an awesome article about it (a few years ago, already). In fact, go and read Brian's article, he explains that way better than I can, I'll wait... ... ... You're back? Ok, read on:

Position that new Cornerstone Content within your site

That article said a lot, right? It told you about keyword research, title tags and headlines, content and why your content needs to be awesome and more. Now let's talk about where, within your site, that content is going to live. In my opinion, really important content deserves a page within your site's structure, not a news item / post. It should be easily navigated to within a few clicks.

So, you go ahead and create that page within your site. Take some time for it, this is going to be the content that's going to make you rank, but not just that, it's going to be the content that is ranking. Which means real people will read it too and you need to convert those people. So think about search engines all you want, but think even more about the visitor that will end up on that page and give him / her something worth while.

Creating Internal Links

Now, once you have that cornerstone page, it's time for the next step: creating internal links for your article. You're going to do this by figuring out which pages Google already thinks are relevant for your targeted keyword / key phrase. The easiest way to figure out which pages Google thinks are relevant for that keyword is doing a "site:" search in Google. So if I were to try and find the most important page for "website review" within yoast.com, I'd search for:

site:yoast.com website review

You will probably find more than a few pages within your site. Go into each of those pages and add a link to your new cornerstone content. If possible, use the keyword you're targeting as the anchor text for that link, but most importantly: link from within the content. Don't just add some site wide sidebar / footer links. The reason for this is simple: links from within content are way more valuable than links from sidebars.

Afterwards, when you're writing more content for your site, when you touch on a topic related to your cornerstone content, don't forget to link to it! Now, let's go on to the last and final step:

Promote your Cornerstone Content

If you've created it well, your cornerstone content is something to be proud of, something that others will easily share and thus also something that will attract links. Don't be afraid to reach out to other people who have written about related topics: show them what you created and that it might be worth while for their visitors to see that. You might even want to offer them to write a guest post about the topic, linking back to your article.

Stock photo credit: Computer Generated Concept Of Cornerstone from Shutterstock.

Using Cornerstone Content to make your Site Rank is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Link Building Tips from Eric Ward

There are a couple of guys out there who do have link building tips, tricks and ideas that might save your life. One guy, that's been doing this for ages, literally since before Google existed, in fact, since before the Yahoo! Directory existed, is my good friend Eric Ward. We started calling him LinkMoses, because he's just that old. Sorry Eric, it's true.

Here's the thing: Eric is giving away (well, selling, more on that later) tips, in a program he calls "LinkMoses Private". After 16 years of blogging (and I might persuade him to do a guest post here sometime in the future), he's gone for a paid program and if you're serious about link building, I think you should subscribe. The cost? A mere $8 a month.

That, my friends, is hilariously little money. If you get one good link a year out of what he sends you, it'll have been worth it. I've been following for a while now, and he has sent various "Link Opportunity Alerts" that I could use for my clients. Not "general advice" but specific sites to target for specific types of websites. Good solid links, with great instructions on how to get them. These are not paid links, they're awesome link opportunities that don't cost money!

I've subscribed for less than 2 months, because he's been going for less than two months, and already, I've gotten several links out of the link building tips. Now you see why I think all of you, should go and subscribe. I'm not getting paid for this, if I thought his content was bad I wouldn't share it with you. Go, subscribe, NOW!

Link Building Tips that Work is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

How does a link help your site?

A link to your site "helps" in four ways:

• It adds value to the "receiving page", allowing it to improve its visibility in the search engines.
• It adds value to the entire receiving domain, allowing each page on that domain to improve its rank ever so slightly.
• The text of the link is an indication to the search engine of the topic of the website and more specifically the receiving page.
• People click on links, resulting in so called "direct traffic".

The value of a link for the receiving page is determined in part by the topic of the page the link is on. A link from a page that has the same topic as the receiving page is of far more value than a link from a page about an entirely different topic.

On top of that, a link from within an article is worth way more than a link from a sidebar or a footer. Furthermore the more links there are on a page, the less each individual link is worth.

So what makes a good link?

Imagine, you're working on a link building campaign for this Link Building 101 post and you get to choose where to place a link and what page to point it at. You'll have to consider the following questions:

• How strong is the site / page that's going to link out?
• Which receiving pages on my site make most sense as far as topic is concerned?
• Which page of this set of sensible pages would deliver the best ROI when it's ranking?
• Which page is most sensible for the visitor of the linking page, clicking on the link?

The last question is often the one best to ask of yourself: link building delivers, if done well, better rankings and more direct traffic. You have to keep in mind though that in most cases those visitors coming to you directly from the other site will behave differently from people coming from the search engines. Say you get a link from a site aimed at elderly women, these people will behave drastically different from the diverse public you'll get from the search engine when the page starts ranking. In your design of the page, you'll have to account for both.

How strong a site and/or a page is, can be judged on several criteria, PageRank being one of them, though often not very accurate. MozRank is useful at times, but the most useful and sensible check often is the following: does the page that you want a link from, rank in the top 20, 30 or even 50 for terms related to the page you'd want it to link to? If the answer to that is yes, a link on that page is usually a good idea.

Link Building 101: The anchor text

If you've decided which page you're going to be linking to, the second question arises: which anchor text will you be using? The anchor text in itself influences two things:

• The anchor text indicates to the search engine what the topic might be of the page the link points at and it can therefor help that receiving page rank for that term. If you want to rank for "WordPress SEO", you'd want to have links to that page with anchor texts like "WordPress SEO", "SEO for WordPress", etc.
• The anchor text also has an effect on how many people will be clicking on the link. While from the above bullet you might have gathered that "click here" is a horrible anchor text, as you probably don't want to rank for it, it does tend to get clicked well and therefor gets you more visitors.

Of course, don't overdo this. If all links, or a too large percentage of links to your site and / or page have the same anchor text, you'll look like a spammer. So if you're actively link building, vary your anchor text.

As you see, these are not trivial decisions, ones you have to make on a site by site and page by page basis. You don't always have the luxury of controlling anchor text and to be honest, that's a good thing; way too much sites out there would have a far over optimized "link profile" if they had such a level of control. Because you have to make these decisions on a site by site basis, buying a "backlink package", something still far too common these days, is often a wrong decision.

Link Building 101: Are there any rules about links?

There are two kinds of rules that influence SEO and thus link building. First of all, there are the rules of the search engines, with Google having said most about links. Then there's the law about advertising, these laws differ per country but especially within the EU they tend to have the same "ring".

What Google says about links and link building

In their article on link schemes Google gives some examples of links that can influence your ranking negatively. This deals with both links to and from your site (f.i.: don't link to spam sites). They're most clear about paid links though: they're a violation of their guidelines and can lead to a ban of your website.

This isn't to say that such links would have an immediate negative effect. In fact, in the short term they might even boost your rankings, as quite often Google has to take manual action to discount those links, as not in all cases Google see whether a link has been paid for or not. But, especially keeping in mind the recent debacles with JC Penney and Overstock.com, both of whom have been penalized by Google and publicly scolded for their behavior by the press, this tactic is seldom worth while.

Google recently published an article on quality links on the Google Webmaster Blog, it's worth reading to get their perspective.

The law about links

I've talked about the Dutch specifics in an article on Marketingfacts recently, which in trun goes back to an article on eConsultancy: if something is an ad, it has to be visibly (for the visitor) marked as such. A paid link could under these new rules be called an ad and would therefor have to be disclosed. I don't see a court case just yet, but it's a good thing to keep in mind.

Link Building 101: Read More

Outside of this link building 101 a lot is being written about the topic and a large part of it is, excusez le mot, crap. Because of that I'd like to point you at some sources that I do consider worth while:

• Wiep.net
  The blog of my fellow countryman Wiep Knol, an amicable guy and great link builder.
• Eric Ward aka LinkMoses
  When I went to my first class in high school in '94, this guy was already doing link building. His insights are therefor based on a treasure trove of experience.
• LinkSpiel by Debra Mastaler
  She has more of a wider marketing approach to link building and is therefor very usable for each and everyone.

Link Building 101 is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Let's draw an analogy: when you have someone build a house for you, what would you say if they'd say: "oh and btw, we'll leave a banner up on your roof", or to make the analogy better, when they said nothing at all and just did it? You'd either be mad and tell them to come take it off, or you'd throw it off yourself, right?

The question is of course: why do web designers and web developers do this? The reasons are simple: they'd like everyone to know that they designed that certain website and they use these footer links (if they're smart), to increase their search engine rankings. Luckily search engines, most notably Google, have been aware of this practice and are pretty good at making links in footers of pages not work as well, but that doesn't change the basic fact that the link should not be there.

The reason why this annoys me is that it's abusing the fact that most people who have a website built either for themselves or their company don't know the value of these links. It's basically the web developer taking advantage of the ignorance of their customer. A customer who, in most cases, wouldn't even now how to take a link like that out. Now what does that make them?

Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying web developers and web designers can't have these links, they should just be very open about it and not make it a default. If you're a customer with footer links on your site, and it hasn't been discussed with you, nor is it not in the contract with your web developer or designer, feel free to take it off or, better yet, ask for that discount.

If you're using a WordPress theme or free template that has one of these footer links, and you've gotten it for free, I'd leave it there, because that's how you "pay" the designer / developer. If it has multiple links like that, or really spammy ones like sometimes happens on non-legit theme sites, I'd personally take them out immediately, or not use the theme at all.

“Design by” footer links… is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

The reason Directory Journal and some other directories can still survive is because they do editorial reviews of sites they list in their directory, and as far as I've been able to tell, they really do a pretty good job of those. If you check out a category like Business Software, you'll see a couple of listings, and when you click one, like the one for Fuel Quest, you'll see that along with the homepage link you get up to 3 deep links you can submit. Now Fuel Quest doesn't rank top notch with those links yet, but they do rank second page on some nice terms when they've only got 2-3 links, one of them being from Directory Journal.

I've investigated some more sites, and it seems that these links do help. After seeing that I dove into why that is true, after all, to be able to give away link equity, a site must have some of it first. If you check out the Majestic SEO report for the site, you'll see they've got an awful lot of nice pages with pretty good backlinks, acquired through multiple methods. They've got some free WordPress themes to download, not one but a couple of very decent blogs with some real quality, unique content and some nice tools for webmasters as well. In all: they've earned their links, and have quite a few of them, which explains why a link from the domain would help in your rankings.

So I think I can honestly say that I think investing the $159.95 for a permanent listing along with 3 deep links is worth it if you need a couple of extra links, and that Directory Journal belongs in the small list of directories that you can still use and feel good about.

DirJournal: a directory still worth submitting to is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Microsoft has also updated their webmaster portal, I'm currently figuring out how to include that again, but have for now disabled it. So go check it out and enjoy the new tool!

SEO Link Analysis 1.0.4 is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

In this third article of the series about B2B SEO we'll be talking about link building. We expect the reader to have a basic knowledge on link building. We won't name the standard B2C link building techniques and focus us on the differences between B2B and B2C link building. What are those differences? We first mention some differences so we can explain them later on:

• There are less linkerati in a B2B market
• A B2B website needs lees links

There are less websites capable of linking to you. A B2B market is much smaller than a B2C market. Compare the travel market with the market of industrial pumping systems. The number of blogs in the travel sector is hundreds of times higher than in the sector of industrial pumps. This means it's much more important to keep being friends with your linkerati. Keep in contact, comment on their blogs and give away a nice scoop.

On the other hand: you need less links in a B2B market than in a B2C market. This is because of the simple reason that your competitors don't have a lot of links as well. Of course this doesn't work in the situation of polysemy: if one of your B2B keywords is an important keyword in a B2C market as well, it won't be easy to rank for it.
However, specific terms like 'peristaltic pumps' are not that competitive. And for those terms, your competitors are having problems finding links just like you.

Enlarge your linkerati group

AS we just said, one of the biggest problem in B2B link building is the small size of the linkerati group. Therefore, it's important to keep in touch with that small group. It is even better to enlarge your potential linkerati. Your niche might be very small but there are always enough related topics whose linkerati might be willing and able to link to you too.

B2B Link Building tip #1

Every B2B company has suppliers. Take for example the case of our industrial pump client. There must be another company building the machines which are used to build the pumps. Make an arrangement with your supplier and let him write a case on their site about how they build your machines. Make it interesting for their visitors, but don't forget the backlink. In this way, you can transform your offline network to be your linkerati.

B2B Link Building tip #2

For some niches, there is not much interesting to say. In such a case, you might want to enlarge your linkerati by blogging about other company related issues. Start a blog about running a B2B company. Corporate blogging isn't as easy as it sounds, but of course it's an option. Doing link building for such a blog shouldn't be a big problem.

Linkbait in a B2B market: knowledge

In the more B2B markets, knowledge is your USP. It's not strange that most B2B companies are somewhat afraid of sharing their expertise. But there is another side of this coin: if you are afraid of sharing your knowledge, other people will be looking for it. A website showing off your expertise and knowledge will attract many visitors. If your niche market isn't that big, people will soon recognize you as an authority in your area. And good content always attracts some links. This is the main advantage of B2B link building: you do have the capacity to write good content. Content is still king, even for link building.

B2B Link Building Tip #3

Start a blog in your niche. Don't only tell about your successes but also share linkworthy content. Make usable checklists, compare products or solutions with each other, tell about new developments in the market. Let users comment and react on their reactions. Write in a personal way to build friendships, to increase the chance of those people linking to you.

B2B Link Building tip #4

Another way to share knowledge is setting up a wiki. Put a wiki on your site and let everyone participate. Start with a lot of enthusiasm and keep networking with the people who write on your wiki as well. After a while you'll be an authority within your market. Everyone writing about your niche has to mention you.

Linkbait for a larger crowd

Even if your product is so boring, there are always opportunities to do something with. Industrial Search Enige Marking quotes Danny Sullivan:

Find a way to make your topic relate to nerds or a large society that frequently expresses their opinion online. (…) With most link bait you are not trying to gain topical expert links… more likely citations from people with a mild interest in the topic (and how you related it to their nerdy interests).

B2B Link Building tip #5

Create a link bait action for your market, that has a strong focus on a different but related market with more linkerati. Place this link bait on social media sites, use press releases (if your link bait has some news value) and promote your link bait in different ways.

Which kind of link bait you have to use depends from case to case. Let's give a few examples:

• Let BMW write a piece of content about their open source Telematics system. Let them say something about what innovations have occurred. Sent press releases to blogs of open source fanatics.
• Let our industrial pump provider make a movie in which all things are placed in the cutter: car tires, potatoes, bottles of shampoo etc. Let 'Will it blend?' on YouTube inspire you. Put the movie on your site and spread it through social media.

Expert knowledge and link building

You don't have large numbers of competitors as a B2B company. However, you do sell a complex product. Therefore, it's quite easy to make yourself an expert within your market. This gives plenty of room for doing link building.

B2B Link Building tip #6

Suppose that our industrial pump manufacturer is looking for high quality links. There must be a few high quality websites about technical stuff which are looking for interesting case studies. Make yourself the authority within your market and place such a case study on a big, high authority website.

Concluding remarks

B2B link building requires different goals than B2C link building. It's less important to get high PageRank backlinks, because your competition doesn't have them as well. The quality of B2B backlink isn't measured in PageRank but in relevancy. B2B link building is easier and more difficult than B2C link building. Easier because you have good content; more difficult because your linkerati group is relative small.

B2B SEO: Link Building is a post by Erik-Jan Bulthuis on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Nofollowing your internals can affect your ranking in Google, but it's a 2nd order effect.

My analogy is: suppose you've got $100. Would you rather work on getting $300, or would you spend your time planning how to spend your $100 more wisely.

Spending the $100 more wisely is a matter of good site architecture (and nofollowing/sculpting PageRank if you want). But most people would benefit more from looking at how to get to the $300 level.

Ok, so it's of a "2nd order effect". Let's say, you could increase your traffic by 2% if you did it (and for the record, to my experience it's a bit more, more like 10%). If you have 2 million visitors a month, 2% more visitors are 40,000 visitors a month, 480,000 visitors a year. Let's say your conversion rate is as low as 1%, with a revenue per order of $25. That's not too much, is it? Well... It's $120,000. I can spend a few hours doing some sculpting for that, and still make a profit...

There's of course a lot of "mis use" of PageRank sculpting. A lot of people are trying to compensate for bad site architecture and information architecture by nofollowing a lot of links, I'm even guilty of that on this site. Or people are calling the whole process of creating a good site architecture PageRank sculpting. It's not. Good site architecture is one of the few main pillars of on-site SEO.

So, in all, PageRank sculpting is a nice technique. It's useful for sites which have a lot of traffic to play around with. I agree with Matt, that if you have $100, you shouldn't start with it. If you have $100,000,000 though, I'd definitly put it on my list.

PageRank sculpting: my view is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

These pages were notorious for selling links and creating very weird link profiles for loads of Dutch pages, and luckily enough, these clones have recently been dropping hard in the rankings. Not the original startpagina.nl though, which is still a source of a lot of traffic, traffic that often converts very well. As such, people are very willing to pay for links on these pages, and in my opinion loads of companies should be buying those links.

The problem is that the company which sells a lot of those links wrote an article on MarketingFacts today, one of Holland's biggest marketing blogs, highlighting the traffic and conversions these links provide, but also highlighting the search ranking aspects of these links. I'll try to literally translate the sentence I took beef with: "Google sees paid text links as spam, unless (bolding mine) they're placed in a relevant context."

Now my personal opinion on this doesn't really matter, but by putting it like this, in my opinion they claim to have gotten some sort of "ok" from Google, or know that they're doing the right thing. Now of all I've seen in the discussion around paid links over the last months, my conclusion is that Google does not look at it that way, and instead just thinks that all paid links should be marked as such with a nofollow link, whether or not they're relevant doesn't matter.

Because the debate about this can go on forever in Dutch, since there's no one from Google to chime in, I've made the above post, and hope that allows for feedback from Google. I also hope that if I'm drawing things out of context or putting them wrongly, the Dutch people who followed or joined in the discussion at MarketingFacts will correct me.

Update: while checking out the site of AdLantic, the company selling those links, I found this:

AdLantic adverteert uitsluitend op thematische linkoverzichten met een hoge pagerank. De linkoverzichten hebben meestal 1 specifiek onderwerp (bijvoorbeeld: hypotheken, vakantie, dating, computer, etc), waardoor ze bij Google een zeer hoge relevantie hebben.

In English: "AdLantic advertises solely on thematic linkpages with a high PageRank. The link pages usually have one specific subject (f.i.: mortgages, travel, dating, computers, etc.) which makes sure they have a very high relevance in Google."

I'd like to say: case closed.

A Dutch discussion on paid links is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Hello,

I recently came across your blog: example.com while I was looking for good blogs to link to from the website HiSunglasses.com. I am trying to link to blogs that my visitors might like to visit once they are finished on the site.

Since HiSunglasses.com is visited by 1,000s of people daily, I am sure many of them would be interested in visiting your blog. I figured since we are not competitors in any way, you wouldn’t mind if I link to your website. Please email me back and let me know if this is OK with you. Would it be possible for you to link back to my website HiSunglasses.com? Please let me know. Thanks.

Magdiel

Now, it won't surprise you, that I do not own example.com, and that this is an extremely bad way of asking me for a link... I hardly ever link out to people I don't know unless they've written something link worthy, and if she had really taken taken the time to look into my blog she could have guessed that.

Link request mistakes… is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Now I make it a habit to try and comment when someone links to me in a post, have a bit of a look around the site, and if I like it, I'll throw it in my feed reader. You get that chance only once though, since in the statistics program I use to track that, Mint, you'll only be a unique referrer once.

I might notice you through other channels too: you might show up in my vanity Google Alerts, Technorati blog reactions feed and Google Blogsearch feeds. And still, people manage to stay hidden for a few weeks. So here's the deal: if you know you're a low traffic blog, or you're linking to someone and for one reason or the other you're not sure people will click that link within 24 hours, click on it yourself! Make yourself and your link known to me, and that goes for any other blogger too.

Every blogger likes getting links, and there are more bloggers who use the same policy towards the people linking to them as I do, make use of that, make sure we notice you!

Linking out? Make sure people notice! is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I didn't do that because I thought you guys couldn't find my blog. It was actually a plugin requested by Shoemoney, who wanted to make the scrapers work for him too, by getting some more backlinks from them. I thought it was a great idea, and this is actually quite a simple plugin: you upload it, enable it, maybe change the default text (which is "This is a post from <link><blog name></link>"), and you're done.

It's called RSS Footer, and a few people, like my friend Marcus, picked it up and ran with it already, I hope it works for you too!

Update: based on a quote from Matt Cutts in a post by Patrick Altoft, "How to foil scrapers on your blog", I've added the option to add a link back to the post itself, with the title of the post as anchor text. This looks like this:

Make the scrapers work for you! is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

If you're not convinced yet you should go get it now, here are some screenshots:

So here is the SEO Link Analysis extension!

Update: just updated the script to 1.0.1 to fix a change in Yahoo!'s interface.
Another update: 1.0.2 is now available for download.

SEO Link Analysis Firefox Extension is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Link Value Factors is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

There are a few things which I've noticed and I wanted to share with you:

Sitewides
I don't know if it's always been like this when it worked before, but the way it handles sitewides is awesome:

Nofollows
Live search seems to be the first to not show any backlinks which have nofollow on it at all. That's kinda great, because that means this is now the most reliable link data out there.

API
Perhaps my biggest discovery: if you add the + in front of the query, you can now also get all this data through the API again! I updated my domain info tool to take advantage of that (and fixed that tool completely).

Combinations still work
You can still use link:, linkdomain: and linkfromdomain: in combination with other parameters like site: or -site:, so you can get all the links to a domain, without the internal links, by doing "+linkdomain:example.com -site:example.com".

In all, it rocks that the commands work again, let's hope they don't kill them.

Live Search’s link command work again and they’re awesome! is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Matt, Adam, Please let me report linkspammers! is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

He's always been risking this, and he'll take the punishment with a smile, respecting his "enemy" for his cleverness in finding him.

Now imagine a second client, who's bought links all across the globe, with only one single purpose: increasing his PageRank. At one point in time, some 4 years ago, an SEO told him that's what he should be doing and he hasn't changed his tactic since, unaware of the search world, and the changing ethics within it, and thus unaware of the fact that he's doing something wrong.

If the first one decided to do a reconsideration request, and Google decides to let him wait for a while before they reinclude him, that sounds fair, right? But if the second one finally finds out what went wrong, and decides to do a reconsideration request, they shouldn't make him wait too long, right? Or is it perhaps not so simple?

Now you'll hear people say that it all boils down to one thing: intent.

Bullshit.

They both did what they did with the intent of increasing their search engine rankings and traffic, knowing full well, that what they did was game the search engines. The important thing here is whether they knew that they were breaking rules or not and how Google treats that. After all, under most governments, breaking a law that you didn't know about is still breaking a law (ignorantia juris non excusat).

The other important thing to know is: did they do the buying before or after Google had said that buying links to increase your PageRank was wrong, and how does Google treat that. In a lot of countries only very specific laws can be applied to you if you did something to break them before the law was invented (ex post facto laws).

All this then boils down to: what is Google's reason for punishing anyone? Well, they're probably the same reasons as sanctions are used within criminal law: retribution, deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation and restitution. The question is though whether retribution is any good in this case, as most people will never openly tell that they've got this problem...

While Michael Gray was very right in saying that Google is not the government, they do have the right to "do as they please" within their own search engine. If Google were a government though, you'd probably have a court of some sorts, deciding on how to deal with issues like this and creating openly available jurisprudence in the process.

Now that's what we're missing here, and that's what makes decisions on whether to reinclude people or not and how long you will "punish" them, seem arbitrary. So what we need is openness, jurisprudence to go by, and a judge. Basically, what we need is a Google court!

We need a Google court! is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

The second thing I noticed was the result #5 in there, the geocities page. That page was created back in 2003, and hasn't been updated since. For a subject like CSS3, that basically means the page is completely out of date. Now it's a known fact that search engines tend to like "old" things, whether it be pages or domains, and favor them in their rankings. But you'd think, that if these pages don't get linked to anymore, they'll slowly drop in the rankings. Consider this history:

The geocities page is created in 2003 and acquires 27 links in the six months after it is created. It rules the SERPs for the keyword it targets and is left there to age. In 2006, css3.info is created. It acquires an enormous amount of links, and is updated every few weeks. Yet it takes until the beginning of 2007 for that page to "beat" page 1. Since 2003, the keyword it targets has become way more popular, and people have been writing all kinds of great articles about it. And still, that page is there at #5 in Yahoo!, mostly because the page and it's links are old and the geocities domain is strong.

What's going wrong? Well, the geocities page might have old backlinks, and some authority due to it's age, but it hasn't been acquiring any links any more for the last 2 years. On the other side, a lot of other pages about the same keyword have been gaining lots and lots of links. Search engines should use link-data over time to determine whether a page should be ranking or is not "up to date" anymore. However, from the fact that the page ranks #13 in Google, and #19 in the new Live search, I determine that the search engines aren't using this data as much as they could...

Now it could be that the geocities domain is just too strong, but I think this is something the search engines should fix...

Are search engines using link-data over time? is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Another Dutch SEO wrote a week ago that Google "can't algorithmically detect paid links" (translation mine). Well, if you agree with him, I beg you to reconsider that. If you had 200 links on day 1 with all sorts of anchor text, and you went out and bought yourself 500 links with only 3 different anchor texts, you don't think Google (or any other search engine) can detect that? Then I'm very glad you're not doing my link building. (And I'm not even talking about the horrible code patterns some of these guys have, you can recognize an awful lot of TLA "blogroll" lists without any trouble if you know how their WordPress plugin works.)

You have to remember, that Google doesn't only have the current snapshot of your domain and it's links, it has the entire history. Your link building profile is coming along with your domain for the rest of it's existence. Eric Ward talked about that on SearchEngineLand back in April, and we've had quite a few new clients at Onetomarket over the last year with the same problem: a link profile full of spammy links. And believe me: a spammy link profile is not something easily fixed.

Back to your natural link profile: it's natural for me to have a lot of links with the anchor text "Joost de Valk", "yoast.com", or even "Joost de Valk's SEO Blog". It would not be natural for me to have twice as much links with just "SEO Blog" as with "Joost de Valk". That would raise flags. So using "click here" as an anchor text every once in a while might be a great idea. It's not "wasted anchor text", it's just a natural addition to your natural link profile. And if you're smart, you'll use it in places where you actually want people to click, because, as Brian pointed out, people work that way. Want to test it?

Click here to get my WordPress Google Analytics plugin, and it will automatically tag all your outbound links in posts.

Click here to read all about a natural link profile is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!