We have a plant seller nursery website that contains mostly product and contact information etc. How can I attract more links to my site?

Thanks in advance,
Trish

Dear Trish,

In order for your site to be considered ‘linkworthy’ you need to build some good-quality, industry-specific content that people in your niche market will find useful. If your site is purely product-based there are fewer reasons for other sites to link to your site.

Building links is all about obtaining online referrals. A good link building strategy considers internet users and website owners. The ultimate aim is to obtain more referrals for your site from other website owners and ultimately to get more customers to your site.

Think about the people that view your website (in your case plant growers and gardening enthusiasts) what would they find useful? What would make them want to revisit your site? A searchable database containing photographs and general information about the plants that you sell would be an appealing addition. Or an article library/blog - filled with gardening ideas, advice and resources could keep your customers coming back to your site again and again.

When it comes to attracting inbound links, content is king. If your site contains good-quality, industry-specific information, people will come to your website not only to buy things, but to find information. Also other websites may refer to information contained on your site in order to be associated with your quality content. In this way you will develop an authoritive presence within your industry that will attract good quality inbound links over time.

Sarah Parker
Parker Communications

I’ve contacted you because I feel frustrated. Until last night my site was listed within the second page results in google with the key words “learn Spanish free”. Thanks to the SEO course at SEC and my work , I was proud to see results like this. However for some strange reason this morning (UK time) I am nowhere to be seen with this key words. I have checked other search engines (yahoo, bing) and I am listed there (3rd and 2nd pages). Would you be able to tell if I have done anything to upset google? And if I have what?

Furthermore, I have checked all key phrases that have brought me visits before and I am nowhere to be seen within google index. (I used to appear on the first page with these key phrases). The only time I am in google listing is when I search the words “Spanish aid” ( the name of my domain) or the full URL of my web pages. I am also appear in google listing with the  word “Spanish colours” under Images. I find this extremely weird as it seem that google has penalised me for something I don’t know of. As I said on my previous email I was progressing and I was happy that I was learning an seeing positive result, now it seems that I have taken a big step back. I hope you can give my an explanation as at the moment I am banging my head against the wall.
Thanks a lot for your help

Thank you
Luis

Hi Luis

Fluctuations in your Google rankings are completely normal. Sometimes, they’ll make a slight tweak to their ranking algorithm which can result in other sites ranking above yours and/or lowering your previous ranking for certain keywords. But this doesn’t mean you’re suffering a penalty.

See some previous blog posts about this, particularly:

Why is my CMS based website only ranking for the home page

Why does my website not rank high on search engines?

Your site is still in the Google index and you rank #1 for your brand name so you haven’t been penalized. I could see nothing wrong with your content that would trigger any alarm bells with Google.

However, the big problem with your site is the low Google Toolbar PageRank score (1/10) reflecting the very low number of incoming links pointing to your site. Has your PR score always been 1/10? If it has recently dropped from a 2 or something, that might partially explain the ranking drop. While a higher PageRank score is not a pre-requisite to high rankings, it can be a key indicator of your site’s link popularity, which in turn has a strong influence on your ultimate keyword positions in Google.

The more links you have pointing to your site from related sites and using relevant keywords in the anchor text of the link the better you should rank for those keywords. The best thing you can do for your site right now is to build links pointing to it and to add new content. That will gradually improve your PageRank score and your link popularity – then the rankings will follow.

If you’re still worried, you can take the steps outlined in these posts:

How do I fix ranking penalties?

Why doesn’t Google index my entire site?

Kalena

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Finding that optimizing your own site is a challenge? Download our Free SEO Lesson. No catch!

Link History

Twelve years ago, pre-Gooogle, search engines just analyzed content in order to rank sites, says Ian. Linking wasn’t part of the ranking algorithm. Google put paid to that by making links part of the equation. Suddenly, SEO became a lot more difficult.

Ian explained Term Vector Analysis (TVA) and Citation Analysis and how they influenced the concept of links. TVA is how keywords appear on a page (relevance). Citation Analysis is the influence of keywords on a page (authority). Google was built by students who were using citation analysis on a daily basis. Keyword density isn’t used by search engines. However, it is kinda similar to term vector analysis, which IS used by search engines.

Every web page stored in Google has a term profile containing number of times a keyword is used, density, proximity, position etc. Google then looks for clusters of terms that appear in proximity to the search phrase and finds the Representative Average to display in the SERPs. The process of TVA is excellent at figuring out informational pages such as Wikipedia pages.

The problem is that TVA can’t give search engines the entire picture – it’s difficult for them to tell the difference between spam and awesomeness. This is how search engines worked up until Google. Then Google came along and threw links into the equation. The more links you had to the page, the higher rank you would have in the SERPs.

Typically, the better writing, the worse the SEO, because good writers use flowery, descriptive language.

Types of Links

Now, to rank, you need three kinds of links:

1) Authority (aged)

2) Relevance (current)

3) Buzz (social)

So you need a combination of old and new links. Therefore you need to be constantly building links!

Stinking Linking – reference to articles by Mike Grehan about the prob with aged domains and links.

Link Quality

Link page quality is measured by:

• PageRank of the page
• cached
• nofollow
• number of other links on page
• topic

Remember that it’s the PR of the PAGE that’s important, not the PR of the domain or main site. So if someone is offering you a link and bragging about having a PR4 on their home page, but your link is going to go on a inner page that has PR0, there’s no value there.

Page sculpting is not as influential now. No point no-following all your links on a page as they all leak PR anyway.

Sources of Links:

• Seeds – Yahoo, DMOZ
• Directories and connections
• competitors (meet then beat)
• articles and blog posts
• widgets
• reviews
• case studies
• contests and publicity
• profiles
• social media
• internal linking campaign
• link reclamation
• pick up the phone!

Ian suggests starting any link campaign with your own site. Make sure you are cross linking internal pages. Then go and do link reclamation – check your 404s in Webmaster Tools to see if anyone is linking in to pages that no longer exist and ask them to update.

As an idea to attract links, Ian suggests holding a contest e.g. school laptop giveaway – put the rules of the contest on your web site and then the school / parents etc link to your web page for the rules.

Anchor text is virtual content. Rule of thumb is, if you wouldn’t spam your web site with the same keyword phrase, don’t do the same with your link building. Mix and match the anchor text linking to your pages and ask people linking to you to do the same.

Deep links are the best links. Don’t ask everyone to link to your home page! You’ll get better crawls and better rankings and your audience gets a higher quality experience if you inner pages are well-linked. Plus the crawler starts at inner pages that it might have missed before.

Tools for Link Building:

• Opensiteesxplorer.com
• Seo-browser.com
• Google Toolbar
• SEO Quake

Link Don’ts:

• Use Free For All (FFA) links
• Off topic links
• Non-editorial
• Obviously purchased links

You’ve mentioned on your blog about the importance of using resources to locate regional search engines for link building purposes. Could you explain a little further how one would use a regional search engine, and could you give a concrete example of finding one?

Thanks a lot.

Terry

Hello Terry

The reasons you might want to locate regional search engines include:

1) Your / your client’s web site contains information limited to a particular region / country.
2) Your / your client’s business owns multiple web sites with different TLD e.g. widgets.com, widgets.com.au, widgets.co.nz.
3) Your / your client has multiple country target markets they wish to reach via search engines.

The situations above mean that you need to have the web sites listed in the relevant regional search engines so they can be found by the specific target markets. This is all part of the vital link building process – having your site listed in as many relevant locations on the web as possible. This is especially important now with Google placing more emphasis on local search.

Some regional search engines may find your site automatically using their crawler (e.g. Google.com.au, etc.) but others, such as niche search engines and hand-edited directories, may require you to submit the site/s manually. This is why you need to have a list of regional sites handy so you can check them all for the existence of your site/s and submit them if needed.

A couple of sources you can use to find regional search engines worldwide include:

• Search Engine Wiki – which is a crowd-sourced collection of search related resources founded by our team at Search Engine College.
• Search Engine Colossus – a collection of worldwide search engines.

These sites list different sub categories of search engines for various countries and regions. So, for example, if you were looking for a list of search engines and directories specific to Australia, you would click on the relevant country category and be taken to the Australian list. You could also simply type a search into Google for *list of Australian search engines* and find other lists.

You should do this for every country market that your / your client web site targets.

Kalena

So, I’m a freelance writer, cruising through Elance.com, looking for projects to bid on. I see a project for a site called buildmyrank.com. They say they are looking for 150-word blog posts that will be website summaries. I can do this work, but…are these sites legitimate SEO tools or just ways to get around link building that is considered acceptable?

Thanks for your thoughts!

Denise

Hi Denise

I think your spidey-senses are accurate! This site looks and smells fishy. They’re also hiding their domain registration details, which, while not necessarily suspicious, is a common practice amongst sites employing less than legitimate SEO methods.

There is a very easy way to determine if they are *white hat*, have a look at their Google Toolbar PageRank. Oh look! A zero PageRank score. If Google doesn’t think they’re trustworthy, that’s a big red flag right there.

I would avoid them like the plague.

Dear Kalena…

Hi there, I hope you can help. When I have a look in google webmaster for my site, I see 216 links back to my site but when I do a link:domain.com in google, it comes back with zero backlinks. Can you explain why that would be? Is this affecting my SERP? How can I rectify the issue?

Thanks! John

Hi John,

Monitoring the third party sites that link to your site (backlinks), is an important activity, as the quality and quantity of backlinks you receive is considered one of the more important factors that will influence how your site is ranked in the search results.  There are plenty of third party tools available to help with this (try a Google search for “Backlink Checker“), but, it can be quite difficult to get an accurate list of your backlinks.

You can also use search engines to help determine backlinks, however, they are notorious for only providing a subset of the total number of backlinks.  One advantage this method has though, is that you are also able to check competitor backlinks (which can be very handy for linkbuilding).

Traditionally Yahoo backlink data was much more accurate than that provided by Google – however since the Yahoo/Bing merger, the functionality of Link: and Linkdomain: commands under Yahoo has been restricted. You can still get an indication of backlinks via a command of the following form (under Yahoo or Google).

linkdomain:yourdomain.com -site:yourdomain.com

Which is intended to show which pages link to yourdomain.com, but exclude any inernal links.  For your site [URL Provided] Yahoo shows 363 links and Google 214)

Rand Fishkin (SEOMoz) wrote an excellent post in August outlining some alternate methods for determining backlinks  (see: 6 Ways to Replace Yahoo’s Link & Linkdomain Search Commands )

Googles Webmaster Tools is probably one of the better ways to determine backlinks on your own site (although you are not able to use it for competitor sites) .  It is widely accepted that webmaster tools will again not show all backlinks – however, it is believed to show most of the pages linking to your site that are likely to have an impact on your rankings.

Andy Henderson
WebConsulting SEO – Brisbane

Hi Kalena,

After a search of backlinks to the page one ranking sites for my main keyword ‘carpet cleaning Brisbane’ I noticed that the top spot at that time was a site with 29 backlinks to their main URL and 29 backlinks to their whole domain. The number 2 site at that time had 253 / 349 backlinks respectively and the number 3 site had 195 / 9873 backlinks respectively. How are we supposed to determine the best path for our own backlink strategy with such variation?

Thanks Mark

Hi Mark,

As you are probably aware, there are many things that can influence search rankings (Google has indicated that they take over 200 factors into account).  Clearly some factors are more important than others, and it is generally accepted that backlinks (links to your site from 3rd party sites) are amongst the most important.  In my opinion backlinks come in position 2 of ranking factors – right after good quality, keyword rich, unique content.

It is important to recognise that not all backlinks are equal, and it is not just the number of backlinks that you should be considering. In fact the “quality” of your backlinks is more important that the quantity – Some backlinks are much more likely to improve your rankings, and some can actually have a negative impact.

What makes a Good Backlink?

Some of the factors that influence how useful a particular backlink might be include :

• Site Authority – How “important” the site is generally (Page Rank is a rough guide to this) but also in terms of the keywords relevant to the niche
• Relevance – How relevant the linking site is to the linked site – a site about Carpet Care is clearly going to be of more benefit to you than a site about Acne
• Anchor Text -  Does the text used in the link contain relevant keywords
• Neighbourhood – Are other sites linked to from the same page/site related, and trusted?  If the site contains lost of links to unrelated sites – particularly if many of the links are spammy.  The “neighbourhood” can extend to the server and other sites hosted from the same server

Backlinks are not going to be the ONLY factor that influence your competitors rankings – but they are likely to play a significant part. 10 Great backlinks are likely to be more effective than 100 good ones, or 1,000 OK ones, and 100 bad backlinks can have a negative impact on rankings.\

What about “Bad” Backlinks?

I’ve had a very quick look at the backlinks to your site (URL provided), and you currently have over 8,000 backlinks – which on the surface might seem a good thing. Dig a little deeper though and we see that many of your backlinks come from sites about such topics as – weight loss, yeast infections, various other health issues, making money from home, weddings, iphone apps, and a host of other topics – in fact I was hard pressed to find any of your backlink sites even vaguely related to carpet cleaning.  This is a very good example of “bad” link building and to the search engines is obviously not the result of natural links, and may very well cause ranking penalties (which could very well be the reason you are appearing well down page 2 of the search results).

Analysing which sites link to the top ranking sites in your niche is likely to provide you with a useful insight into the types of sites that you should be pursuing for your own link building strategies.

Andy Henderson
WebConsulting (SEO Brisbane)

CAUTION: Rant Ahead

I was alerted to the Promote JS! site today by a programmer pondering the benefits and tweeting to ask about the SEO logic behind the idea.

Basically, Promote JS! is a cause born out of the JSConf held in April this year. The idea is for JavaScript programmers to spread the word about Mozilla’s JavaScript Developer Center via the use of links to try and improve Mozilla’s Google ranking for searches relating to JavaScript documentation.

A noble cause right? Maybe. However the implementation is inherently flawed in several ways:

1) First of all, the site provides a banner for web site owners and bloggers to place on their sites.  The banner uses a script which creates a link to a different page of the Developer Center at every refresh so you can choose the destination link of your choice. This method is just plain silly, in my opinion. They’ve taken a noble idea and tried to implement it using link farm tactics. A series of identical banners with nearly identical link code smells very much like an affiliate program to Googlebot. Their code has basically created an affiliate link farm which is likely to be filtered out by Google’s ranking algorithm, potentially doing more harm than good to the Developer Center’s link popularity.

2)  The alt tag for the banner is stuffed with multiple JavaScript related keywords. Keyword stuffed tags of any kind can easily be detected and ignored by Google’s ranking filter. There’s just no need to shove multiple keyword repetitions in there.

3) Developer Andrew Hedges had written a blog post about Promote JS! questioning the value of linking to multiple sub pages of the JavaScript Developer Center and suggesting perhaps everyone should link to their home page instead. He cc’d me on his tweet asking for SEO advice and inviting comments on his post. My response is that people should link to ANY page in the Developer Center that they want to promote! If their blog post talks about APIs, they should link to the API documentation. If they were impressed by a particular javascript tutorial, they should link directly to that tutorial.

The whole point of the PageRank algorithm is to attribute relevancy weight based on inbound links to specific pages. It’s not about the top level domain. If everyone points to the home page, the inner pages – those containing the most valuable, useful content – won’t rank as well. For a web site to rank well for a wide number of keywords, you need to spread the link juice, not channel it to a single page. You have to trust Google’s own system of rewarding good content – they have a zillion brains working on this full time.

4) Andrew had also tweaked the Promote JS! code somewhat to create a banner that generated a random link at every refresh. In my opinion, this method is also flawed. Link popularity is based around the acquisition of trusted, related, inbound links to a page. If links appear and disappear to a page, that’s hardly trustworthy, right? Google won’t be counting your links as trusted. They are looking for solid, stable links from directly related topic pages.

This is another reason why it makes sense to link to specific inner pages at the JavaScript Developer Center, based on your specific blog post topic/s. If your blog post talks about JavaScript drop down menus and it points to the documentation specifically about those, the TrustRank of that page goes up, as does the eventual ranking potential for related search queries.

Promote JS! shouldn’t be creating link farms to promote the value of the JavaScript Developer Center.  They should simply be encouraging developers to use logical linking strategies as recommended by Google to promote great content. Either that or convince Mozilla to make their JavaScript documentation more search engine friendly!

I’m sure there’ll be developers out there who disagree with me and that’s fine. I don’t know how long the Promote JS! site has been live, but it doesn’t have a Google PR, so it’s either too young or hasn’t built up any TrustRank. Make of that what you will.

Dear Kalena…

I am a dentist who owns his own practice. My website (domain provided) currently has a page rank of zero and zero backlinks. This is despite many attempts to optimize my site, requests for backlinks, etc. I believe I do have a few linking sites with Page Ranks greater than 3. I don’t understand why they won’t show up in google backlinks? (Yes, i have the toolbar.) Any advice you could give me (in lay terms, i’m a website novice) would be greatly appreciated. thanks.

Ryan

Hi Ryan,

I’ve had a quick look at your site and you have a reasonable amount of keyword rich content, but the dentist niche (like many others) is rapidly becoming more competitive.  It’s not clear how long your site has been active, but with the PageRank of zero I’m guessing that your site has only been around for a relatively short time.  These days Google only updates the published PR of sites a few times a year so it probably doesn’t reflect the “real” PR value of your site.  Don’t be too concerned over this – it is likely to improve over the next few months.

Google is notorious for only publishing a very small subset of backlinks.  You are better to use Yahoo for checking your backlinks – use a search query of linkdomain:yourdomain.com -site:yourdomain.com , which will show you most sites that link to your domain (excluding your own internal links).  For your site, Yahoo is currently showing 29 backlinks.   Yahoo still only shows a subset of your links – but it is typically a lot more than Google shows.  For a more accurate list of backlinks from Google you should register your site with Googles webmaster tools.

As you are probably aware, establishing links to your site from external websites is very important to your rankings, so you should always be on the lookout for related sites that might be prepared to link to you – and don’t be afraid to ask.  There are many strategies for link building, and many agencies that offer a link building service.  You can even learn how to do it yourself via Search Engines College’s Link Building Course.

Andy Henderson
WebConsulting SEO – Brisbane

Step 1: Link Map / Blueprint

Greg’s team creates a Link Map Profile. Greg says analyse the top sites in your space and work out the job ahead

Things to look at during this stage:

- average number of links

- average age of competing sites

- average PR of competing sites – will determine how hard it’s going to be to compete. Also take into account the unique IPs.

- average number of linking domains

- average age of linking domains

- average PR distribution of incoming links

- average concentration of anchor text

Greg then showed an example profile for an *Online Poker* site – to give us an idea of the data he’s dealing with. Each of these profiles will be different. This particular profile proves that it’s going to be a hard space to get results in using link strategy. Provides the blueprint

Step 2: Tactics

Once you have the big picture – your blueprint and now it’s time to look at the individual tactices each competitor is uins to gain links

- make a list of the top 2-3 tactics

- usually competitors will only be using 1 or 2 tactics, giving you the opportunity to overtake their efforts by using all tactics available to you.

- Yes, you can purchase links – provided they fit the criteria established in your blueprint.

- Get the quality links first – because as links age, they count more.

- When you get to the end of the process, your link map will look just how you planned it.

Tools

- Majestic SEO is highly recommended by Greg

- Linkscape

- Use tools that go out to get data then compare with your own

- Site Explorer

- RavenTools

- SEOBook Toolbar

During Q and A, Greg Boser said that if you want to target Australia and get good link popularity in Oz, make sure 90% of your links are from Australian sites.