Not but 3 hours after I found this site on Google… http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1792196/posts
Search for “Glitch Around 2PM Caused [delay in reporting of] Dow Jones Drop 200 Points In Short Time Around 3PM” and tell me if you see it in MSN or Yahoo yet. Google has an unparalleled ability to not only organize the worlds information, but also do it at lightning speed. Thats impressive don’t you think?
Finally some action in the SERPS, and something worth blogging about. Yesterday I saw some major changes in certain rankings for competitive key phrases. What is basically happening is larger more authoritative sites are getting downgraded on spots were they would typically be. Smaller, spammish doorway sites now have over taken certain sites. Now this isn’t across the board but here and there you will find this happening. These smaller sites I have found to have spammy keyword rich link profiles.
Is this googles fix for all the .edu and .gov spamming in the SERPS? Perhaps this is there fix on combating large sites manipulating there rankings. What do you think?
What is a Link Profile?
A sites link profile simply put is the overall summation of links that points to a given site. If you break it up into 4 parts it will start to make sense. Relevant Links, Authoritative Links, Link Volume, and the Timing / Age of the links.
Relevant Links
These come from sites that are similar in topic to yours. The weight of the link doesn’t matter as much, why, because its an on theme link. These are important because they help convey to the search engines what the overall theme of the site is, IE. What keywords should they rank for.
Authoritative Links
Authoritative backlinks are ones that come from old, trusted sites, that have large amounts of links. A link from these sites pass lots of juice, and show the search engines that the site being linked to is one of quality.
Link Volume
The sheer amount of links pointing to a site is known as the volume of links to a site. This is a highly debated subject in the SEO world. Many beginners get caught up in this facet too much, thinking, many links is > a few links. When the fact of the matter is some sites with a few on topic, relevant, authoritative links can rank higher then a site with thousands of backlinks from unrelated sites. Although this is the case, having lots of links certainly wont hurt your site (in most cases, as long as the links are on topic).
Link Age/ Timing
The older the backlink, the better. Obtaining links for short periods of time in my opinion are a waste. A true, natural link will persevere, and generally stays on a site for a long time. The longer it stays, the more juice it will pass. This is built into the algorithms. Along with the age of a backlink, timing is also involved. Some topics become stale, with no new links for extended amounts of time. If a site begins to obtain lots of related, on theme backlinks, then that can be a sign to the search engines to rank that site higher.
Overall Link Profile
As you can see the overall link profile of a site can say a lot of different things. It is important to have a diversified link pattern. Sites that choose to take part in 1 of the 4 things are more likely to plummet when certain algorithmic updates occur. Keep your site safe by simply diversifying.
In an attempt to stop sites from further increasing page rank via Wikipedia’s easily accessible means of posting links, Wikipedia announced it will now use NoFollow tags around all external links. In my opinion this will deter SEO’s from taking advantage of Wikipedia.
I have seen many examples of “resource” sites utilizing Wikipedia for increased search engine exposure to only later, turn the resource site into an Ecommerce site.
In the past Wiki pages have ranked extremely well for many competitive terms. It will be very interesting to watch the SERPS too see how Google reacts to the NoFollow tag placement around all external links. It will also be interesting to watch the sites that ranked well via the large amount of Wikipedia links they had.
Keep those link sellers honest with automatic NoFollow checking!
Here’s a short snippet of important abbreviations that you might see in SEO forum / blog posts around the web.
BL = Backlink
CSE = Comparison Shopping Engine or Custom Search Engine (Google)
CSS = Cascading Style Sheet
DC = Data Center
DMOZ = Directory - Mozilla
HTML = HyperText Markup Language
IBL = Inbound Link
IPB9 = Internet Business Promoter
LSA = Latent semantic analysis
LSI = Latent Semantic Indexing
OBL = Outbound Link
ODP = Open Direcrory Project, See DMOZ
OWBL = One way back link
PPC = Pay Per Click
PPP = Pay Per Post
PR = PageRank
RI = Regular index
RSS = RDF Site Summary, Rich Site Summary, Really Simple Syndication
SE = Search Engine
SEM = Search Engine Marketing
SEO = Search Engine Optimization (Optimisation)
SERP = Search Engine Results Page or Search Engine Results Placement
SI = Supplemental Index
SSE = Yahoo! Search Submit Express
SSP = Yahoo! Search Submit Pro
SWL = SiteWide Link
TBPR = Toolbar PageRank
TR = Trust Rank
VIPS = Visual-block Page Segmentation
WP/WP4 = Web Position/Web Position 4
XML = Extensible Markup Language
Sites
WWS = Web WorkShop
DP = Digital Point
WPW = WebPro World
Thanks for posting this Dave @ WWS
Our team at ManageYourLinks has excitingly announced our free version of the bulk reciprocal link checker that we have developed into our tool. You can check up to 5 links with the free tool for 3 important things all at once:
With our registered tool, you can check all of your links all at once.Be sure to sign up for an account; We are currently offering free accounts!
Im not one to talk much about email since I like to concentrate on search engine topics, however, this trick deserved some attention.
Gmail, it has become very popular and works well. There is a small trick with adding “+” signs in the front of your gmail account to essentially create many accounts with one email. For example, lets say your email account is Steve@gmail.com.
You use it for personal and business related emails. Set up a work related account and name it Steve+work@gmail.com Then go into gmail and make a rule to redirect all Work related emails to your Work folder, checking for the above prefix steve+work@gmail.com
Another example would be to keep track of your accounts that you have signed up with. Lets say you want to catch spammers, set up one for each site you sign up with, example:
steve+photopics@gmail.com Once you start receiving spam from the Photopics website you can redirect it all to the trash.
Sub Domains. There is lots of theory out there as to how to use them, and to be honest, most of them have validity. However a few things can be said about how Google looks at them. It should be known that weight / link popularity are not inherited from the parent domain. Sub domains are essentially looked upon as a different site.
A good rule of thumb for sub domains is to use them when you need to separate content, because it might not be relevant with the rest of the site. In my opinion this helps Google understand the true content of your site and will not lead to the dilution of its overall theme.
Another way to use them is promotional marketing purposes, in an attempt to ingrain a message into the user. Perhaps its needed to help the user remember the site, for example a television ad for the new Video by AOL - video.aol.com
.Edu and .Gov domains are supposedly worth a lot of weight in Google and other search engines. Many people go out of their way to build links on educational and government websites. The first thing to do when building these sorts of links is to find the most relevant locations. For each of your keywords that you are targetting go to google and type the following:
“Target Keyword” site:.edu
“Target Keyword” site:.gov
Doing this will show you the most relevant pages to start looking for links from.
#1 Title Tag
#2 Anchor Text of Links
#3 Keyword Use in Document Text
#4 Accessibility of Document
#5 External Links to Linking Pages
#6 Primary Subject Matter of Site
#7 Internal Site Links
#8 Link Popularity of Site
#9 Uniqueness of Text
#10 Age Factor
Title Tag:
Denoted by the < title > tags in HTML, this tag always shows at the top of a browser window and often appears in the results as the title of the web page. You should use unique Title tags on every page of your site. Keep the title tags short and concise and focus on no more then three key phrases.
Anchor Text of Links:
Several factors involved with this including the phrasing, words used, and order and length of a link’s anchor text. Specific anchor text links help a site to rank better for that particular term/phrase in the search engines. IE.< ahref = " http://www.example.com " > this is the anchor text < /a >
Keyword Use in Document Text:
Basically this is your content on your pages. You don’t want to overuse your target keywords nor do you want to under use them. Good practices is to have ~500 words on the page with about 1-2% keyword density.
Accessibility of Document:
This isn’t necessarily a ranking issue but is extremely important to rank in the first place. Accessibility can be compromised by using URL re-directs that search engine spiders cannot follow, hiding content behind select forms, javascript, or pages using long dynamic strings IE. eaxmple.com/test.aspx?testID=75858&TabID=654956&UrlID=234. Frankly put if a search engine cannot find your content then you cannot rank for it.
External Links to Linking Pages:
Quality > Quantity. At first glance one might think the more links pointing to a page on your site the better the chance is has to rank for that term. This isn’t true in some cases. When developing “backlinks” you should try and obtain links on other relevant sites. Gaining thousands of links from random, obscure sites can actually hurt your rankings if you’re not careful.
Primary Subject Matter of Site:
This one is pretty much common sense but important none the less. A site that specializes in just basketball for example, is more likely to rank for the term “Basketball” then a site that specializes in Football.
Internal Site Links:
This for example is your site navigation as well as any link on your site that points to another page of your site. It is important to use keywords throughout your site that link to other relevant pages. Beware however, if your not careful you can hurt your rankings if you abuse this. The longer an internal link is there, the greater weight it carries as well.
Link Popularity of Site:
This is what makes an “authority site”. Link popularity simply measures the importance of all the links to a unique domain, the more links from related, on topic sites the better. This factor really helps you rank for terms that you might not necessarily optimize for. IE. Terms you don’t purchase links for, terms you might not have in your title tag, terms that are less competitive etc. etc.
Uniqueness of Text:
The sites overall uniqueness of text is a key determinant of its ranking. Sites with template style text, where every word is the same on each page except only a handle full of terms just doesn’t look as “authoritative” as sites which have unique content on each page of the site.
Age Factor:
The age factor applies to basically everything. Age of domain, age of back link, age of internal link, how often text is changed, how often back links are acquired. In most cases the older it is the better. This aspect helps show authority to the search engine.
Summary:
Optimizing your site for the search engines can be a daunting task. The following list is a good general breakdown of what to look for when tackling this challenge. Keep in mind search engines don’t like you “gaming” them. All the factors stated above should be done to a degree, carefully optimizing and drawing the line of “over optimization” is critical. Steadily build unique content. Strike link deals with relevant sites that are not spammy in nature. The best piece of advice to follow in my opinion is to optimize for the end user.
