This post actually may not even come out the way it’s being thought of in my head and it’s just for discussion purposes, I may not be on point on a few things or maybe even just the basic principle of paid links and why Google deems them ‘evil’ almost…right? Do no evil.

I think all SEOs and those who want better rankings (WEBSITE EXPOSURE) should be allowed to buy links if for the right reasons. It seems link buying is always associated with a negative connotation and how it’s all about manipulating the search algorithm for better search rankings.

I guess we have to think about certain things in practical manners. Why would Google punish a company for purchasing links? What about the purpose of buying those links? Besides links helping search rankings, many links that one could buy can and do provide real benefits in regards to traffic which leads to sales and lead referrals.
What about paying for a directory link? Why isn’t that penalized? A directory is a business that is purely made for profit (if they charge for links) and create content of no real substance (not in todays web.) SO, a blogger who consistently works on his/her blog and puts good content will get penalized for selling a link somewhere in their content (or wherever they choose) because a company approached them for a link. They worked hard at building their blog and content…why not let them be rewarded? What about the company buying the link? Besides having a benefit of having a new link placed in a good blog, that company may see a real benefit from that link, more than just POSSIBLE better search rankings.

Google on Paid Links: “…However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

• Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file”

So, Business.com or the Yahoo.com directory aren’t directories that people choose to buy for ranking (pagerank) purposes and are do-follow links? It seems that statement is too general to apply to a world wide web. If you’re a website that sells beatles memorabilia, shouldn’t you have the option to buy a link from a website with the intent not only for traffic but to better your search engine exposure as well as having the publisher provide a service (passing authority, pagerank, whatever you want to call it) to an advertiser as a perk. After all, that publisher is creating content that is also serving Google.

The web MADE Google…Google didn’t make the web. They shouldn’t penalize link buying but should have a better method of ‘quality control’ or I guess that’s what Matt Cutts and his team is there for, really trying to make the web a clean place…I just don’t see paid links as spam unless a company like a big department store decides to buy links from something like a network which places links in porn websites, etc…I give this example because I was looking at a backlink profile (don’t remember whose now) and came across a few adult websites with followed links to this big company…I should have saved it.

We all want an anti-spammy web. I just don’t believe companies/websites should be penalized automatically for purchasing links from websites as it’s not only about better rankings but also an economy based on work (content) by many bloggers, website owners who could monetize (and deservingly so) their content.

I guess the argument would be that if all link buying was OK, any company with a lot of cash can come, buy thousands of links and dominate the search result for specific keywords. For the most part, I can tell you that that may already be the case with most big companies that have the money to really promote their website.

Like anything else in this world, theres some good in link buying and some bad. My thoughts on this aren’t finished…I’ll get back to them.

Just a rant…still thinking about this one.

p.s. i dont buy links and i love google. really.

SUMMARY: CLEANER CODE = BETTER SEO

I’m always looking to see what top ranking websites may be doing to get the rankings they do. One of the tasks of any SEO I guess is to really analyze competitors, right?

I want to really stress that what I am writing here is completely opinion based and have not (due to time) validated this correlation enough but would like to get the discussion started. Nevertheless, I did enough research to see that there may be a correlation between code validation and top ranking websites, at least for certain queries where the number of real big players/brands is limited or non-existent.

So, what do I mean? http://validator.w3.org/ validates code on websites. This tool shows you errors and warnings that may be making it harder for search engines to crawl your website. Looking at top competitors for certain niches, I was surprised to find that top sites had very few errors compared to 2+ page rankings. That’s not to say that all the sites on the first page had fewer errors (cleaner code) than websites in the 2nd page plus. However, again, top ranking websites for keywords that I was looking at had cleaner code which may have a correlation in regards to organic rankings.

What’s your take? Does this have any effect in regards to SEO in your opinion?

Tweet

As Google explained, “Content recommended by friends and acquaintances is often more relevant than content from strangers. For example, a movie review from an expert is useful, but a movie review from a friend who shares your tastes can be even better. Because of this, +1?s from friends and contacts can be a useful signal to Google when determining the relevance of your page to a user’s query. This is just one of many signals Google may use to determine a page’s relevance and ranking, and we’re constantly tweaking and improving our algorithm to improve overall search quality. For +1?s, as with any new ranking signal, we’ll be starting carefully and learning how those signals affect search quality.”

Of course, as we’ve seen with some major Google updates in the past 2 months or so, this button can very well and I believe will be used as an algorithm signal. This is Googles best attempt at competing against Facebook in terms of sharing content.

Will this button have that much of an influence on users sharing content as compared to hitting the like button? I really don’t think so. Whats the real benefit for your typical user to hit this button instead of the Facebook Like or Twitter button? Nevertheless, of course, you should add this button and again, can have impact on your content and how it ranks.

Google also goes to say the +1 button can and most likely will have a page crawled or recrawled. “Once you add the button, Google may crawl or recrawl the page, and store the page title and other content, in response to a +1 button impression or click.”

If you look at the biggest blogs or sites in the industry, you’ll see that Siztrix, the company that crunched through 1 millions keywords, put out a report about the visbility index loss and other key metrics which shows the affects of this Google algorithm change.

The biggest losers seem to be article submission websites where duplicate content has always been an issue as SEOs submit content for link building and turn one article into 10 different ones and submit them.

The biggest losers in the article directory space:

-eZine.com
-Suite101.com
-Hubpages.com
-Buzzle.com
-AssociatedContent.com
-ArticleBase.com

There are many more losers that lost serious rankings and visibility in the search engines and now, more than ever, Google is really showing us the value they put on unique content which has always been a white hat push on SEO.

Get the full listings of the most hurt online properties: Number Crunchers: Who Lost In Google’s “Farmer” Algorithm Change?

Source: SixRevision.com

SixRevisions.com listed 8 excellent wordpress SEO plugins that can really improve your search engine optimization efforts on the blogging platform.

1. SEO Rank Reporter
2. All in One SEO
3. SEO Ultimate
4. SEO Content Control
5. SEO Friendly Image
6. SEO Smart Links
7. Google XML Sitemaps
8. Platinum SEO Pack

Read The Post —-> 8 Excellent WordPress SEO Plugins

Source: SEOMoz.org

We all know anything that Google may even show a slight signal, 1,000 SEOs or webmasters try to game that system. Nevertheless, the social space is providing some good data to online marketers as well as Google.

On SEOMOZ, there is a great post today titled, “A Tweet’s Effect On Rankings – An Unexpected Case Study,” which first hand shows the effect of a Tweet by a significant Twitter account and its impact on a certain page for the SEOMoz blog. From this post, we can certainly see that a Tweet that can catch “fire” can have SIGNIFICANT search engine rankings impact.

See the story @ SEOMOZ.org —–> A Tweet’s Effect On Rankings – An Unexpected Case Study

Yoast.com has a GREAT piece on site structure for SEO and how to plan your website structure for best results and best practices. To avoid a big mess when building a big site, it’s best to go through this process from the get-go. I currently am working with a website that has never put any emphasis on site structure and now we are seeing the outcome of such disregard. This is a very important aspect of search engine optimization.

Read The Whole Story @ —–> Intelligent Site Structure for better SEO

At the end of the day, as much as we all consider Google to be the almighty, when our projects become the SEO instead of the actual product itself (that being the website,) you know you’re getting off-track.

“As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites. Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content. We take pride in Google search and strive to make each and every search perfect. The fact is that we’re not perfect, and combined with users’ skyrocketing expectations of Google, these imperfections get magnified in perception. However, we can and should do better.

These principles have always applied, but it’s important to affirm they still hold true.”

Is this post considered duplicate content because I am summarizing the most important part of the post by taking a part of the story to share with my readers and will also link to the story as a guest on Matt Cutts blog questioned? Google still has issues to tackle when it comes to duplicate content and web spam.

Read the Google Webmaster Blog post —–> Google search and search engine spam

Search Engine Journal, which I wrote and still do just very NOT frequent, had a great post on linking building predictions for 2011. I have to say it was right on the money with what I speak about with others, read from other credible sources, etc.
The 5 that were listed were the following:

1. Less use of keyword-based anchor text, more use of brand name (MONEY)
2. Less focus on quantity, more focus on quality (I think this goes back…)
3. Less emphasis on Pagerank, more emphasis on authority (YES)
4. Less links to the homepage, more links to content (FO SHO)
5. Less concern about rankings, more concern about conversions (Well…)

OK…Let’s start this damn post but don’t like making things long…just because.

As you may have read or heard, Google has been putting more emphasis on BRADS when It comes to ranking websites. Now is this a fact? The truth is Google never really tells us for sure signals in their algorithm except we know they use meta tags and links to rank websites. Now, there is some evidence, (for example read some stuff by Aaron Wall on SEOBOOK) that suggest that Google is in fact favoring brands so instead of using anchor text for links, going back to #1, start using your brand as anchor, I think this is a very important aspect that is changing in link building.

#2- I think many of us who do SEO have understood for a while that it’s not about quantity but quality…this may be in the 10 commandments of seo link building which I will write (in an upcoming post)…RESPECT MY AUTHORITAAYY.

#3- Another one which in my opinion has been talked about by SEOs in regards to how much weight we put on pagerank. Pagerank is definitely a signal of authority but don’t just depend on PageRank to base on a websites authority.

#4- This is something more SEOs and people engaging in SEO will start doing a lot more of which is DEEP LINKING. Don’t just link to the home page! Come on now!

#5- I love this one because the truth is if a client is paying for SEO, they judge their results by rankings, right? For the most part that is. However, it’s important to understand or I should say, make THEM understand that search engine optimization; from their perspective should be about ROI and not just ranking well for a keyword.

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

How credible is the whole story from the stand point that all the negative reviews helped this website in their rankings? I don’t buy it 100%. For one, you can do the same if you did your best to get the same amount of POSITIVE reviews. Second, you can build a long list of links by registering your website with these rating websites as many already do it automatically.

Nevertheless, many saw this algorithm change coming long before this article was posted and Google also announced a change in their algorithm to use customer ratings to rank websites. If you look back about 3-4 months, you’ll see Google partnered up with POWERREVIEWS to service ratings in organic listings. PowerReivews is one of the largest review hubs on the internet. Google understands ratings can really help grasp the service of a business but is Google now going much further than figuring out the authority of a website and really looking at your BUSINESS and not just your WEBSITE anymore? It seems it’s going that route. It has too, right? With the manipulation that happens on a daily basis, Google keeps working on ways to serve the best possible results to users.

And if you really want to shop a credit website on line for sunglasses, check out ShadesDaddy.com =).

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

Nevertheless, it still comes down to link building, just not the way we always thought would be the most effective way to rank for a keyword. SEOWIZZ.net has a great post which I loved titled, “Anchor Text Has Lost Its Edge, Time To Build A Healthy Strong Domain, Old Techniques Are Not Going To Cut It.” Basically, Tim Grice talks about linking metrics and what is weighing most in the search engines.

Let’s look some of his facts which shows us some real good/cool data:

>One of the main factors now is getting more links to your domain as a whole, not just the homepage, you need to show Google that you have a whole range of pages that are worth visiting, a domain filled with worthwhile material that is liked and referenced by as many people as possible.

>You may or may not have noticed but since the May update and caffeine some major websites with monster link profiles have been losing rankings left right and centre. They’re doing all of the above, getting links from thousands of different domains and generally targeting a good amount of pages on the website, however they still can’t seem to rank for their main terms.

- Over optimisation of anchor text
- Lack of brand links
- Large amount of site wide links

How can you show Google that your website is indeed a brand and not just a website? Start focusing anchor text on your websites name and not just over-optimizing anchor text for keywords. Also, old school url linking such as the URL link, TO ME, is still a good way of link building in certain aspect in/around good content.

HEY, WAIT! We’ve talked about this before!
- Googles New Algorithm Change: More Domain Authority
- Why Branding Has Never Been As Important As Now For SEO

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

“Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type.”

So of course when Google announces something and it can have an impact on the SEO side of things, people become…almost paranoid.

Don’t worry, this won’t have any real impact on SEO as far as the algorithm goes and rankings changing because of Google Instant. Basically, instead of suggesting more keywords as you type underneath the search query, now it automatically starts filling out while showing the index of the search. Will this change what the user actually wants to search and is looking for? NO. While it may alter search as far as having Google suggest stuff, search itself when it comes to the humans basic motion to think of a keyword, type it, and want to see results for THAT KEYWORD hasn’t changed.

While the SEO side things may not be altered in the rankings space, the Paid Search side may be impacted. It is being speculated and I can see how advertisers may start bidding for the first few letters of their keyword (partial words) which will add to Googles paid search revenue as the more keywords advertisers bid on, the more money, right? We’ll see how that plays out as Google Instant rolls out.

BENEFITS:

Faster Searches: By predicting your search and showing results before you finish typing, Google Instant can save 2-5 seconds per search.
Smarter Predictions: Even when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, predictions help guide your search. The top prediction is shown in grey text directly in the search box, so you can stop typing as soon as you see what you need.

Smarter Predictions: Even when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, predictions help guide your search. The top prediction is shown in grey text directly in the search box, so you can stop typing as soon as you see what you need.

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

For different reasons, I can’t go exactly into what I did but it’s a blog that is just focused on content as an ‘affiliate’ site. The blog, started about 3 months ago or so has about 200-400 visits a day and brings in about over $1,500.00 in sales to the site it points to. Not much…but growing…

Us SEOs and online marketers spend so much time on finding strategy, etc. Sometimes, you can overlook the simplicity of what the internet is, how it works, and what it can do without much if you find the right thing. TEST TEST TEST. The blog is growing 100% organically. No SEO or any sort of link building. Of course, every post has its keywords and I do put emphasis on meta data as that has always been the basic rule of SEO and still applies as importantly today as ever.

Thinking back to an older post I wrote in 2008, I blogged about a very similar subject. Really the same. Read the story: Achieving #1 Google Results Without a Link

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

If you haven’t read or heard about Googles latest algorithm change, see the post titled, “Googles New Algorithm Change: More Domain Authority.”

So, now that we know what this change will bring about, how will users and people who are involved in the SEO community feel about this change? Is this a smart change for Google to implement? Is it really bringing about a change that will ultimately help users while searching for certain queries that are strong on domain matches?

I was pretty surprised at what some readers of the official Google webmaster blog had to input regarding this change (comments taken from blog post announcing change):

> “I dont think its very useful. it will eat up my time by having to click on subsequent pages, for if i wanted more results from a single site, i could always do “more from site” command.”

> “I don’t think it’s very practical. Users don’t want to check the same site over and over again.
One page results with ONLY 10 results is not a good place to put 7 from the same site…”

> “…these changes seem too intense. They have the potential to take out relevant information a searcher might not have know existed, for instance. Today the links under the main listing (for those that are strongly related to the search) are or should be enough. The site and homepage should be structured and designed friendly enough to let me find what I’m looking for on the site. Lastly, I can’t help but to imagine the SERPs being populated by pages unintentionally optimized for the search term….then again, these are all first impressions. I hope I’m wrong. But I can see lots of people not liking this.”

>”Agreed with the people who said this could get to be a problem in a hurry. I know how to navigate around a website. I don’t need a page of results from the very same site. I want to know what else is out there – and this change makes me have to work harder to find the best information.”

>”This is a horrible feature.. Major retailers that sell “branded” products will be pushed off the page, giving users fewer options. ”

As you see, feedback from the get go from certain users points to a negative view on this change. Then again, when anything changes towards the algo, that creates a whole new problem for seos but may also result in some very positive results for certain websites.

We’ll see what feedback will result once it begins to really take place and be noticed.

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

What does this new algorithm change and do? (according to Google Webmaster Blog)

“Today we’ve launched a change to our ranking algorithm that will make it much easier for users to find a large number of results from a single site. For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain…”

If you ask yourself what benefits there is to this change for website owners? Well if you think about it, go do a search of your domain. How many other sites are ranking that can mean less visitors to your website? Not only that, but also this can be a blessing for many who try to outrank other sites for certain issues with online reputation management.

Google goes on to explain, “Prior to today’s change, only two results from www.amnh.org would have appeared for this query. Now, we determine that the user is likely interested in the Museum of Natural History’s website, so seven results from the amnh.org domain appear. Since the user is looking for exhibitions at the museum, it’s far more likely that they’ll find what they’re looking for, faster. The last few results for this query are from other sites, preserving some diversity in the results.

We’re always reassessing our ranking and user interface, making hundreds of changes each year. We expect today’s improvement will help users find deeper results from a single site, while still providing diversity on the results page.”

Have you seen any changes in search related to this new algorithm change?

↑ Grab this Headline Animator