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Tag: link popularity

  • A Free (sorta) .EDU Link » SEO Factor

    « I’m Back – Header Tags and SEO » 26 June 2007

    I first read about Adison University’s blog offering from Cristian Mezei at SEOPedia. Apparently, you can sign up for $25 a month, and get your very own blog with a .edu domain. You could setup a blog, get some text on there, and link it to your main site/blog for the almighty .edu link. This, I think, is great marketing by the folks at Adison; targeting the “SEO savvy.” But those that are just a bit more “savvy” will know that there is just one problem… .edu’s don’t help.

    That’s not to say a link from a .edu or .gov won’t be very helpful, but there is no special attention or reward given to inbound links from these sites. There has always been this myth that getting a link from a .edu or .gov domain would yield higher rewards, with the thought that (and rightfully so) in order to get one of these domains an organization has to adhere to a set of rules or guidelines, thus inherently proving it’s authority to the search engines, and boosting the validity of a link.

    This is a great idea, but Matt Cutts himself has gone on record several times debunking this myth. However, .edu and .gov links are indeed very sought after, even by SEO’s that know the truth. Why? Well, .edu and .gov sites are normally very established and usually have a great deal of link popularity. So, if a link is given to a site, so is that large amount of link juice.

    Always keep this in mind when perusing your links. It’s not that .edu’s and .gov’s get a magical boost, it’s just that they gain a lot of popularity. That being said, a link from the above mentioned blog would be no more useful than any other blog.

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  • Outer Marketing » SEO Factor (2)

    16 April 2007

    Matt Cutts wrote recently that he would much like people to report sites that sell/purchase paid links using the spam report on his blog. This is obviously causing something of an uproar because a lot of people make use of purchased text links for more than just ranking reasons.
    But it seems that Google will […]

    Link Popularity

    11 April 2007

    Because the blog will be ported over, I want to touch base on a lot of older topics, with an updated view. The first, and probably one of the most important of which is link popularity.
    In the old days (no more than 2 years ago. That’s a long time ago in the www world), link […]

    Blog directories

    9 October 2006

    Blogging is an ever-growing method of networking on the Internet. This one, for example, was created to help beginners that I work with in consulting on search engine optimization. It since has grown out of that, but that was the original intent. A great deal of companies are using blogs as an avenue of marketing, […]

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  • SEO Factor Blog

    December 1st

    Link Bait

    Well, I’m back from vacation and getting back into the swing of things. Over the large feast, a friend of the family asked about link popularity and what the best method of gaining quality links…

  • SEO Factor Blog

    December 1, 2006 Well, I’m back from vacation and getting back into the swing of things. Over the large feast, a friend of the family asked about link popularity and what the best method of gaining quality links would be. I offered the advice of link baiting. Link baiting is the method of providing relevant and “buzz worthy” content or subject matter on your site, inducing the desire of other site owners to link to you without your request. This will look a lot more natural to Google than the sudden spike in IBL’s due to submitting to hundreds of directories in a day.

    Education

    Ahhh….yet another reason that quality text is important. Having a nice, attention grabbing text is a great way to get others to link to you. Creating something informative and/or useful in writing can help. Articles on you subject matter, giving tricks of the trade or the like will usually yield link bait.

    Negative PR

    Something we are starting to see a lot of is purposefully creating a controversial statement in hopes of link baiting. The problem I have with this method is the idea that it won’t always give you the traffic you want. Also, playing with negative PR is a scary thing on the Internet. A blog that gets more traffic than you will likely post something that will have a lot more staying power in the search engines, resulting in a bad online reputation when someone searches for the company name. Also, once the buzz stops and passes, where will that leave your link popularity.

    Free Tools

    My favorite, and one of the best ways to link bait is to offer a free tool on your site that helps others in your community. This blog often links to neat new tools we find.

    In the end, link baiting was the original way of gaining link popularity, and though it has gone through a few changes in definition and methodology, it’s coming back again. These are just a few and most popular of the methods, and people are coming up with new and inventive ways almost every day.

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  • SEO Factor Blog

    October 9, 2006 When optimizing a site, we are faced with many daunting tasks. It’s hard enough to generally optimize a page for “the search engines.” But when we say “the search engine,” what are we talking about. Obviously Google, Yahoo!, and MSN carry many differences, so optimizing for one would not necessarily yield results in another. So what do each of these main players in the search engine business care about most? Google Google gives some consideration to content, meaning that your site should provide a good amount of information. Keyword stuffing is quite useless in this case, as the Google crawler doesn’t even look at keywords. The biggest thing with Google is to be sure you aren’t using any “black hat” methods like hidden text. They seem to be the best at finding and penalizing for these methods. The next biggest thing is link popularity. Google gives so much consideration to this, that webmasters all over the world are complaining about the lack of real relevance when searching on Google. To be honest, Google gives such a low consideration to the meta tags, that I am wondering why I mention them in a consultation. But then I remember that there are indeed other search engines. MSN MSN places a very large emphasis on the description tag. If that is well written and relevant to the site, you can almost count on MSN’s love. The give next priority to the title tag and content on the site. They don’t seem to be as concerned with link popularity as Google, which is actually why, in my opinion, MSN returns better results when searching. (I can’t believe I just plugged a Micro$oft product, but it’s true) Yahoo! Well, now we come to something that may be changing quite a bit. A month ago I could say that Yahoo! places most of it’s consideration on the Title tag, then on the content of the page. But there are reports that they will be moving towards the link popularity idea. There are even more reports that they will be giving consideration to only relevant and worthy links, so that will make it a little better than Google, but I really don’t know how much consideration it will be getting. In the mean time, we will stick with the idea that title is most important, followed by the content on the site and good use of the title tag. Synopsis In Order of importance. Google * Link Popularity * Content * Readability MSN * Description * Content with good use of the description Yahoo! * Title tag * Content with good use of the title words * May be giving more emphasis on link popularity All in all, we should be optimizing for every search engine. Sure, Google sees a lot of traffic, but closing 2 other doors of substantial opportunity just to keep one open is silly. Besides, there isn’t really anything that one search engine would require that would hamper rankings in another, so there is no reason not to consider all of them.

    I hope this helps to clear up a lot of questions. Everyone has their search engine preference so this should help answer some of those questions.

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