Category Archives: link building

Q and A : I’ve lost 1000 backlinks – is my site now permanently damaged?

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QuestionDear Kalena…

I have a site which has lost about 1000 back links, they were weak back links (repetitive links from same domain).

My question is this: is the site now permanently damaged or is it possible I can get it ranking again?

Thanks
Louie

Dear Louie

No the site is not permanently damaged – you’ll most-likely find that since the links were poor quality, and site-wide, a bulk of them probably weren’t even being counted in the first place.

Not all links are equal and the better quality (ie. more authoritative, trust worthy, relevant etc. ) the fewer links you’ll need to achieve the same results.

Jim Boykin explains this nicely in his post about Why that site with 50 backlinks beats your site with 1000 backlinks where he quotes:

It’s not always “He with the most links” who wins the game……often, “He with the right links” can win the game as well. Really, very often, he with the right 10 links can beat the guy with 1000 of the wrong links – I see it all the time.

So all you need to do is go out and find some decent links and you’ll be fine. If I were you, I’d consider this a good thing to be rid of the old crumby links and a golden opportunity to start building a better inbound link profile.

Hope this helps

Peter Newsome
SiteMost Search Engine Optimisation

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Q and A: How do you choose “Good” Directories for Link Building?

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Question

Dear Kalena…

How do you distinguish a worth while directories from non worth while directories when designing a link building campaign? there are so many directories on the web but what factors you will consider it is a worthwhile? Kalena Page rank, alexa ranking or ? the second question is I have in mind is when design a link building campaign, often some directories require a review fee, so what do you suggest for link building if the website has no budget?

thanks
Proson

Dear Proson

As you are no doubt aware, Link Building is one of the most important strategies for raising the visibility (and rankings.. and traffic… and enquiries… and sales…) of your website via search engines. However, because it can be hard work and tedious, Link Building is also often one of the most neglected SEO techniques.

Directory Submission, involves submitting your site for inclusion to online directories, and is one (of the many) activities which can help build up backlinks to your site.

As you have highlighted, there are many many directories out there – some are free, some offer guaranteed listings for a fee, some will review your site for a fee,but will not guarantee you will be included.

Finding directories is pretty easy (there are even directories which list directories to help you with this), but it can certainly be difficult determining which directories are worth being listed in, and which are worth paying money to be a part of.

Just because a site is free doesn’t necessarily mean it is of no value, and many paid directories can be a complete waste of money.

But, back to your question – How to distinguish between a worthwhile and a useless directory. Here are some tips that should help you decide :

A Good Directory…

  • Will not guarantee listing – If they are selective about the types of sites they listed, they are likely to be better quality and offer better link value
  • Will be targeted – general directories are OK, but a directory that focuses on your particular niche is going to be much better for you
  • Will add value – by including extra relevant content and information rather than just a list of links
  • Will have a history – Older, established directories are often better than new ones (even if they dont look as pretty)
  • Will be up to date – check the existing links on the category/page you expect to be listed on. If it contains broken links, think twice about listing
  • May link to your competitors – If the directory already links to your competitors, and they are ranking higher than you in search results , it’s an indicator that it is worth joining
  • Will have good PR – while Page Rank is not the be all and end all, if the directory (home page AND sub pages) has a low or no PR, then it is probably of little value to you

You should also consider local business directories, as these are often free, or inexpensive, and links form them can significantly improve your local search visibility.

Some Good Directories

Following is a small sample of some directories which are widely considered to be “good”

DMOZ (aka The Open Directory Project) is regarded as a reputable directory that lists only sites of good quality. Submission is FREE, but there is no guarantee of a listing. Listing requests are screened by volunteer editors, and listing can take months (if it happens at all) – depending on the category and how active the volunteer assigned to it is. DMOZ used to be a “must have”, but there has been much debate whether it is still of much value. Because it’s free, and easy, I would generally recommend a submission .

Yahoo Directory : ranks second to DMOZ in popularity but is one of the more expensive paid services (US$299 a year). However a single listing in Yahoo Directory will get you listed in multiple international Yahoo directories (18 last time I checked), and is important if you have the budget.

Best of the Web :  Another older and well used web directory which takes pride in the listing and categorisation of quality web sites. US$99.95 per year or US$2499.95 lifetime.

JoeAnt : Like Best of the Web,  Joe Ant is an older and valued directory which is a hybrid of paid and volunteer editing. US$39.99 review fee.

Gimpsy : Very similar to JoeAnt, this is also an authority directory and excellent for link building. US$49 review fee.

Regards,

Andy Henderson
Ireckon Web Marketing

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Q and A: How do we target our demographic when link building?

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QuestionDear Kalena

You’ve said in your SEO 101 course to look into sites within the same industry when building links.  I have been able to talk my supervisor into letting me “play” with our company website and give her some feedback with the knowledge I have already.

One of the things I have found is a lot of broken links on our website so they are going to fix those but some of those partners will not reciprocate and post our website link on their site.  Do you find this quite common?

Also, some of the professional medical organizations we belong to will also not post our website link as they say it is against their rules.  If we just use general business directories, how do we know we’re targeting the demographics we want?  What do you suggest?

Louisa

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Hi Louisa

When link building, it’s not the number of links that is important, but the quality of those links. Reciprocal links are not your ultimate goal because one-way links are generally more valuable.

Unless there is a very popular site in your niche that won’t give you a link unless you link back, in my opinion you shouldn’t seek out reciprocal links and should instead be aiming for one-way incoming links to your site.

So for example, a one-way link from a medical related category on the JoeAnt Directory back to your site is generally worth much more in the eyes of Google than say 10 links from poorly trafficked sites in your industry or reciprocal links from low quality link farms. That’s because business directories such as JoeAnt, Business.com, Gimpsy and similar directories have a large audience and a long history so they have more *trust rank* in the eyes of Google.

So what you should be doing is seeking out links from sites with a similar medical theme, medical categories on trusted business directories and related sites that have a lot of traffic and preferably a high Google PageRank. One good method is to look at your major competitors and check their backlinks in Google to see what sites are linking to them and then approach those sites to see if they’ll link to you too. But remember to verify if those sites have a decent Google PageRank and suitable audience before pursuing a link.

Check these link building resources for more info:

How to Set Up a Link Building Campaign for a Web Site or Blog

How to Evaluate a Directory for Link Building

Link Building articles

Hope this helps!

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Q and A: Is it a good idea to use a different domain for each product?

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QuestionHi Kalena

In Lesson 3 of SEO 201, there is a suggestion that “if you sell wool socks AND cotton socks, then have a page dedicated to each kind”.

The owner of the website I’m trying to optimize said that she was once told that it’s a good idea to have several domain names for that same purpose. For example, have a separate domain for wool socks and one for cotton socks. What do you think of that idea?

Jena

Dear Jena

I think that’s a terrible idea. You can read up on this issue here but basically, creating multiple sites defeats the whole purpose of trying to attract traffic and promote a single brand. If you have multiple web sites, not only is it confusing to customers, but other sites will be linking back to several sites instead of your main site/brand and that dilutes your link popularity.

Google and other engines will be looking at the number of links your site has pointing to it and if those links are spread across several domains, you will lose trust-rank and therefore won’t rank as highly as you would if all links pointed to your single site.

I understand the desire to rank for several products, but you can easily achieve this on a single domain if you design individual pages for each product and carefully optimize those pages for keywords relating to each. Alternatively, you can use sub-domains for each product which provides the bonus of having each product page sitting at the root level of your site. Google staff actually recommend using sub-domains in this manner.

More information on this issue can be found in these older posts:

Could purchasing and redirecting multiple domains to our main site hurt us from an SEO perspective?

How do we stop our domains from competing with each other for search rankings?

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Google Now Helps You Clean Up 404 Links

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Google logoGoogle has just announced the easiest way to obtain inbound links to your site in a short space of time.

Webmaster Tool’s new Crawl Error Sources feature allows you to identify the sources of 404 Not Found errors that are found on your site. Listed next to “Crawl Errors” in the Webmaster Tools control panel, you’ll now find a “Linked From” column that lists the number of pages that link to a specific “Not found” URL on your site.  Clicking on an item in the “Linked From” column opens a separate dialog box which lists each page that links to this URL (both internal and external) along with the date it was discovered. You can even download all your crawl error sources to an Excel file.

If your webserver doesn’t comprehend 404s or fetch error pages very well, Google has also introduced a widget for Apache or IIS that consists of 14 lines of JavaScript that you can paste into your custom 404 page template to helps your visitors find what they’re looking. It provides suggestions based on the incorrect URL.

You can use the “Linked From” source information to fix the broken links in your site, place redirects to a more appropriate URL on your site and/or contact the webmasters linking to missing pages or using malformed links and ask them to fix the links.

Webmasters have been asking for something like this for a long time, so it’s a relief to see it live at last. The official post about the feature is on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog and Matt Cutts goes into more detail on his blog.

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