18 Mar 09 Link Structures – Link Building Part 5

Many people got so anxious about their SEO works, that is no one to blame, we always wanted to see better and higher results. That’s the probably the only reason why you are actually reading this blog too. SEO is not a overnight work and if you rush it, you could crash it.

Speaking of link structures, you need to know two important things. They are

1. Natural Link &
2. Artificial Link Structure

Easily, Natural links must look naturally linked to each another whereas Artificial link structure will definitely look like we plan and create it. Natural links are actually valid and even when search engine variables and algorithms change, they might still be valid. Because once there is a new PR update, many people actually dropped their ranking as well as SERPs, and they will complaint rather than looking back what they have done in the past. It is generally because they did not build Natural Links in the past.

So, what are the differences between Natural Link and Artificial Link?

• Natural link tends not to be reciprocal whereas artificial links are.
• Natural link grows in number gradually whereas artificial link grows suddenly.
• Natural link anchor text varies whereas artificial link anchor text still the same.

Therefore, avoid your links to become artificial link structure, because they are easy to be discounted in search engine world. Also, do not exchange links in web ring and link farms.  In short, the link that are ranked high in PR or SERPs are the links that are not orchestrated to be seen, favors the links that are useful, great content and informative to be found. You may as well have known that buying links and selling links to earn votes is not allowed in most search engines.

In conclusion, the most important thing about link structure is when building your link, all the search engine cherish your natural link structure and they actually dislike/discount your artificial link structure.

Tags: link building, Reciprocal, search, search engine, SEO, SERP, SERPs

18 Mar 09 SERPs VS PR – Link Building Part 4

Understanding of SERPs VS PR is a common misconception about link building. That is not an issue anymore once you read this. Well, many people think having huge amount of backlinks will give you top results in SERPs (search engine result pages). It is a myth.

Google considers many factors for your website/blog ranking in search results, it is fair to say that PR players indirect role in SERPs, but higher PR doesn’t mean higher SERPs at all. Sometimes in search result pages in Google, you may probably see PR1 sites results showed up higher than PR4 sites. Try some keywords about it, You will definitely learn that PR is not as useful as you believe to be. Of course, higher PR will give you potential impression, but not complete monetization result for you. That’s why SEO experts work for SERPs whereas SEO beginners work for PR. The mystery of SERPs is nobody exactly knows every single detail search engine algorithms and their technologies since they are using million of terms and variables. Here are some of the facts you can actually learn about getting higher in SERPs.

• keywords optimizations and relevancy (avoid keyword spamming and get to the point, for example, if you are selling shoes and you put completely spammy words such as free download, even you have a brochure PDF file to give away free, the relevancy % is highly unlikely to match to your entire site, Remember, it’s called “KEYWORD”, the word that is key to you)
• anchor text of the links (what you explained and the URL)
• previous factors of your site history (To name a few… the age of the websites, the content of the websites, how frequently you update, how good your internal linking is, how quickly a particular page is linked or indexed..etc)
• quantity of links from other sites to certain searched keywords
• quality of links from other sites to certain searched keywords
• human ranking (just introduced a couple of months ago where people can rank their search results, let’s say if you found what your looking for in page 2 of SERP, you can actually move up to page 1 yourself).

Lately, I do not actually have any internal linking because I do not want my readers to click on each URL like a wild goose chase (clicking another URL before finishing this and that). However, below you can see the related posts, so that you can read more about what is relevant with this post (I deliberatelly assign certain keywords to relevant posts so that you can actually keep reading for more).

Thanks for reading

Tags: backlinks, google, keyword spamming, link building, monetization, search engine, SEO, SERP, SERPs

13 Mar 09 How Google Calculates Page Rank – Link Building Part 3

Some webmasters constantly debate, Page Rank is very important, some argue otherwise. For me, Page Rank is not my type of tea to brag about it. But yes, you can definitely make good income with higher Page Rank, that is no doubt about it. However, SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) are not directly related but relevant with PR although I personally believe higher PR has brought some unique traffic to the site.

How does Google calculate?

The truth is, there are many variables and terms. You can actually view Google’s technology overview here. So, let’s break down a little bit about Page Rank.

PR History: Larry Page started it, hence the Page Rank, LOL. The project started in 1995 and led to a functional prototype, named Google, in 1998. Shortly after, Page and Brin founded Google Inc., the company behind the Google search engine. While just one of many factors which determine the ranking of Google search results, PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of Google’s web search tools. (Reference: Google)

PR definition: PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”. (Reference directly from Google Inc.)

PR how it calculates: Google assigns a numeric weighting from 0-10 for each web page; Therefore,  PageRank denotes a site’s importance in the eyes of Google (of course, many search engines are more or less very similar actually). PageRank is derived from a theoretical probability value on a logarithmic scale. Here’s the graphical analysis of Page Rank.

“Mathematical PageRanks (out of 100) for a simple network (PageRanks reported by Google are rescaled logarithmically). Page C has a higher PageRank than Page E, even though it has fewer links to it: the link it has is much higher valued. A web surfer who chooses a random link on every page (but with 15% likelihood jumps to a random page on the whole web) is going to be on Page E for 8.1% of the time. (The 15% likelihood of jumping to an arbitrary page corresponds to a damping factor of 85%.) Without damping, all web surfers would eventually end up on Pages A, B, or C, and all other pages would have PageRank zero. Page A is assumed to link to all pages in the web, because it has no outgoing links.”

Above PageRank is directly quoted from Wiki so that I do not make mistakes with explanation and wanted to avoid plagiarism.

okay, The $$$ part.., the most important SEO ideas about PR are…

1. The page rank of the linking page, especially backlinks
2. Relevant linkage – if your site is about home loans and backlinks, outgoing and incoming links are about home loans, you get more votes.
3. Quality of incoming links connected at the website of outgoing links
4. The number and quality of outgoing links on the page – if you put one URL 1 million time on one page, it will not only discount as a spam, also count as no quality link.
5. Get different sources of traffic - such as organic search, direct visits, referral visits. To be honest, direct visits to sub-pages many times will help you rise in PR especially with social bookmarking sites such as digg, reddit, etc. Because the subpage will also contribute the rank of the domain (Overall PageRank).
6. Have more original and unique content so that you will have more page added to your domain consequently creating more votes to your internal linkage. (if you can follow timely manner, it is the best, for example, 1 new page every week or 1 new page a day).
7. Have less dangling links (no internal or outgoing links), in other words, dead end page.
8. Don’t worry about sub-directory, worry about correct internal links.
9. Submit free to article directories (of course high PR ones) and put the direct link to your website.
10. Exchange the link with higher PR sites

There you have excellent 10 tips to build up your PageRank for your SEO jobs, Others will charge you hundreds of dollars for these. If you do it yourself when you have some sparetime, it can be achieved. Please keep in mind that easy ways such as buying links, submitting to no-follow sites, submitting to most of the directories, or spamdexing (spamming on indexing) will not only discount your PageRank, but also have a chance of being penalized. So, do the right way, your PageRank will be up consistently whenever Google updates PR.

Tags: bookmark, digg, infomm, link building, pagerank, reddit, search engine, SERP, SERPs, social bookmarking, tools, unique content, webmaster, Website

20 Dec 08 All about Google – Easy, Simple and Effective Part 3

As a member of several SEO/Wed Development Forums, I’ve seen a lot of “Google Penalized” threads appearing all over the place. In fact there’s a couple, if I’ve counted correctly that just rocked up on DP today. I want to dedicate this entire post to explain to you on what grounds Google will/can/should penalize your site.

Google Penalization
Q: What is the “Google Penalty”?
A: It’s simple. When you try to cheat the system, or do something you’re not meant to Google will “punish” you and this will effect everything from the behavior of your visitors (to a lesser extent) to your monthly earnings (to a greater extent)

Q: How can the penalty affect me?
A: Well for starters, you will be deranked. Meaning you are likely to be completely kicked of the Google Search Engine if the committed “crime” is bad, i.e. using extensive blackhat techniques. However, alot of things can happen through this penalty which isn’t limited to anything from loosing SERPs to being banished from the G-Empire. It just depends how serious your crime was.

Q: What reasons can Google use to penalize me?
A: The answer to this question is mainly common sense. Much like this thread itself. Google will punish you if do the “wrong thing” but it seems that most of us, have trouble figuring out between wrong and right at times. So, let’s clear some things out! Below is a list of the most commonly used reasons behind the Google Penalization… it’s not surprising to see most of them in the list, like I said it’s just common sense.

~ Usage of BlackHat Techniques – Search the forums, and you’ll know what I’m talking about. BlackHat SEO Techniques involve “cheating” the system or finding loopholes and exploiting them. This will allow you to get great SERP boost but won’t last for long, they will find you out!

~Usage of GreyHat Techniques – Similar to BlackHat but the damage isn’t as bad. It’s like a less “bad” version of the BlackHat technique but you can still be penalized. Google will only accept WhiteHat SEO Techniques and you should stick to it too!

~ Content Duplication – This not only applies to Google and other search engines, but to us in general life too. If you copy/rip-off other peoples work, work they’ve spent time and effort to create you will be punished. It’s a form of stealing; you wouldn’t steal now would you?

~ Purchasing Links from other Sites – One of the most discussed “link building” techniques is this. People all around the internet purchase links from higher PR and niche-related sites to gain quick authority. However, the unspoken truth is that it’s against the Google TOS, so if they catch you – you will have to face the music.

~ Invalid URL Redirection – I talked about 301/302 URL Forwarding in the earlier FAQ and how important it was, well this is why. If you shift sites and don’t set up the redirection properly – when the incy-wincy Google spider comes along, it won’t realize the shift – resulting in your “new URL” to be treated as a new website al-together, loosing it’s backlinks, PR and authority!

~ Keyword Stuffing – Its name speaks for itself, if you stuff your website with keywords to please the crawlers, it will look bad to real human visitors, and eventually to Google as well. You should “sprinkle” your page with targeted keywords not flood it! Keywords are important, it helps direct the “right” visitors to your site and helps “target” your Adsense adverts. The more targeted the ads, the more clicks you will get.

~ Un-natural Link Building – This is the least of your worries, It’s true that there are penalties for websites building a lot of links in an “unnatural” way in a short time, but I don’t think it will effect normal and legitimate webmasters like ourselves . If you site contains real, unique content and a legitimate product, and should be able to build links naturally without any problems on the search engines. This “reason” mainly focuses on spammers, scrapers, or people who own a lot of domains and start “inter-linking”

Q: I just got penalized! Now what?
A: Well you can’t do much, just spend the time rebuilding and regaining the “mutual trust” between you and Google, which you once had. You can contact them, but unless your sites extremely popular, I wouldn’t bother cause neither would they.

Q: Can Google penalize me for using Auto-Surfers?
A: Obviously, it can’t be good. I’ve researched this question extensively but couldn’t find an exact answer. Then again, common sense will tell us it cannot do anything but harm. Surely “fake” views of Google Ads won’t be something to be proud of. Avoid them as much as possible, frankly you shouldn’t even be using them for anything – imitating “person’s” surfing can’t be for a good cause.

Tags: blackhat, content, duplication, engine, google, greyhat, invalid, keyword, penalty, redirection, search, SEO, SERP, stuffing, submission, url, whitehat