Category: Link Building Tips & Tricks About Creating Backlinks

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Link Building Tips & Tricks About Creating Backlinks

Improve backlink profile, avoid Google Penalty

Apr 30, 2024 by Wouter van Nierop 0 Comments #Avoid Google Penalty, #Better Backlink Profile, #Improve Backlink Profile, #Optimize Backlink Profile
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How can you improve your backlink profile before a new Google update arrives under the motto “prevention is better than cure”!

Google started the Penguin updates in April 2012. There were 2 minor updates in May and October 2012, and now the Google Penguin 2.0 update is expected shortly. Spammy websites will now be tackled even harder in an attempt to provide even better search results to users of the Google search engine. To prevent your website from dropping in search results, we provide a number of tips below.

Provide backlinks and quality content

The new Penguin update will severely punish web spam. Sites with a low-quality backlink profile are at high risk. A backlink is a kind of reference to your site, and it should be relevant and from a reliable source. In such a case, there is a chance that Google will also judge your website as web spam. Firstly, you must of course ensure high-quality content, because quality is what Google wants to offer its users. Google will measure the quality of your content based on time on page, number of shares and comments on your posts. In addition, make sure that you do not have duplicate content on your site and that you avoid stuffing your texts with as many keywords as possible. You have control over the quality of your own site. The quality of sites that link to you is not. Therefore, be extra careful with link building.

Analyze backlink profile and adjust if necessary

What should you do now to make and keep your backlink profile healthy? The first thing you need to do is analyze your backlink profile with, for example, Ahrefs.com, Link Explorer, SEO Spyglass, MajesticSEO of Raven Tools. You should try to remove or adjust low-quality links.

You can recognize backlinks from low-quality pages by:

  • Low Domain and Page Authority (Quality Factor developed by SEOMoz)
  • Low AC Rank (Quality Factor developed by Raven Tools)
  • Low Citation Flow & Trust Score according to Majestic SEO’s standard
  • Sites with a very high Alexa rank (and therefore few visitors).
  • Low Page Rank
  • No relevance with your niche
  • Your overall impression of the quality of the site (design, content, etc.) is below average
  • The website contains “site wide links” (links that appear on every page) or blog roll links (links on the side of the site that often appear on every page)
  • Avoid backlinks from websites that are set up solely for SEO reasons, the sites should contain content that is interesting to visitors.
  • Try to vary your anchor texts
  • Make sure you don’t have backlinks from sites or pages that are about gambling or eroticism
  • Avoid backlinks from sites that are new (unless they are still growing)
  • Avoid backlinks from sites on the same server (these sites have an IP address or C-Class that partially matches)
  • Make sure that the vast majority (more than 80%) of your backlinks consist of backlinks from the target area, i.e. with an IP address from the Netherlands if you want to score in Google.nl and the language on your site is Dutch.
  • Ensure an even better, varied link profile by obtaining different types of backlinks. You can check this carefully by downloading your backlink profile in a CSV file from Open Site Explorer and then loading it into Link Detective. You can see the approximate result you will get below.
Link type overzicht backlink profiel
Link type overview of a backlink profile

How to remove low quality backlinks?

As mentioned above, there are various online tools available with which you can check your backlink profile. My tip is to list all the bad links in a spreadsheet and go through them one by one and contact the webmaster with a request for adjustment or removal, possibly for a fee if the link is terrible or the budget allows this.

Of course, there is never a guarantee that all bad backlinks to your site will be removable or editable. Therefore, make sure in the first instance that you never create bad links and if you outsource your SEO that you go with a reliable SEO company with a proven portfolio and verifiable reviews. You can also ask your SEO company where they get their backlinks from and how they create a good link profile. If your link profile looks neat and does not contain any spammy links, then you don’t have to worry and can probably look forward to the Google Penguin 2.0 update unless you fall among the innocent victims because they are also there when the broom is swept through the algorithms.

local-linkbuilding
Link Building Tips & Tricks About Creating Backlinks

Why Local Link Building Matters

Apr 30, 2024 by Wouter van Nierop 0 Comments #Local Backlinks, #Local Directory Links, #Local Link Building

Why local? Local link building is a resource that is often under utilized when starting a link building campaign, but has gained increased importance since Google’s Pigeon algorithm update hit the US, and recently the UK. Over and over again, we see google updating their algorithm to give the user the best search result for their inquiry, and devaluing links that aren’t relevant. Local link building is beneficial, because those kinds of links are almost universally relevant. Locally oriented SEO efforts, when done well, can benefit a local business twofold. First, local SEO helps by helping your business rank higher in Google’s SERPS, driving organic traffic to your website; and second, it aides in establishing influence, authority, and trust within your local community, which is invaluable in drawing in new customers and enticing return customers to your site and to your storefront. Here I hope to outline a few strategies for community building, which lends itself well for SEO purposes.

Local Directories

As a small business, when beginning a local SEO campaign, the first thing you should focus on is local NAP listings and review sites. This is a great and simple way to gain exposure with a geo-targeted audience. Your local chamber of commerce, local newspapers, yellow pages, and city and county directories are a great place to start. Once you have the basics out of the way, find an influencer in your community is who is ranking well in the local SERPS and use a backlink reporting tool to find other directories they are listed on. This allows you to see which directories are most impacting the local search results. Directory Critic is another great resource to use during a local campaign, as it allows you to sort listings by various categories, such as paid, free, Pagerank, etc. If you’re submitting your information to non-localized directories, adding localized anchor text is beneficial, as it adds additional geo-targeted anchor text for search engines to crawl. If you owned a law firm and you were trying to submit to a general law firm directory, it might be best to put “Boise Law Firm” so as to attract geo-specific traffic.

Content Generation

As with any website, you want to be providing content that a potential site viewer wants to see or know about. For a small business, you should be looking to answer questions that the community you’re a part of might be asking.

  • What information can you provide that nobody else in the community is offering?
  • What is important to your community?
  • What can your site do to help bolster a sense of community?
  • What local events can you promote on your website?
  • What new businesses have opened in the area?
  • What are people in the community talking about?
  • What do people in the community have questions about?

In the example above, a local coffee shop created a page where they list events they are hosting for the community. This is great local, linkable content. People participating in gallery openings, or who are planning on attending a film showing are very likely to post a link to your event page on their own websites or on social media, generating new leads and site visitors. Some other options might include creating a calendar of local events, a local guide to restaurants, a list of tourist attractions near your storefront, a list of local links or preferred vendors that complement your business or website. Keeping your blog active and interacting with your community on social media is also important. Local campaigns are the most successful when they focus on user intent and provide fresh, relevant content.

Build Relationships and Authority

As with any link building campaign, the more authoritative the page linking to you, the better. A link from wikipedia is always going to be more valuable than a link from your daughter’s best friend’s blog, right? From a Local SEO perspective, you need to find out the most authoritative websites in your community and find a way to become affiliated with them. You might be able to leverage links with influencers in the community by trying some of the following:

  • Sponsor your local fire department
  • Host a fundraising concert
  • Sponsor the library or a museum
  • Sponsor the local animal shelter
  • Host events for the community
  • Hold a fundraiser for the local women’s shelter
  • Sponsor a school field trip or department
  • Offer a scholarship to the local university

Sponsoring events in the local community is a great way to build authority to your business and website, as well as nurture a sense of loyalty from your business to the community. Treefort Music Festival, as an example, is a fairly small local music festival with a great amount of community participation and is largely run by volunteers. Since the festival is so beloved by members of the community, it makes it authoritative and influential. Because of this, acquiring a link on their page will pass similar authority to your site. Sites and organizations like this, as seen above, typically have a “Sponsors” page to which they link to all companies involved that make the festival possible. Attaining a link on a sponsored page like this helps, not only for SEO purposes, but also proves that you are invested in an organization that the community finds valuable. For your own site, determine which festivals, businesses, colleges, or organizations are the most authoritative in your community, and get involved with them. Your click-through rate will thank you for it later on. In sum, one thing to keep in mind when adopting a local mindset to linkbuilding, is that before you can build links, you have to build community.

You have to foster and maintain relationships with people in your community. As a business owner, you have to be a part of the community in order for those results to show up in the SERPs. Providing resources to the community, whether by sponsoring events, or creating content strictly for the user’s benefit creates linkable content in itself, and you’ll see the results in community building later on in your link building efforts.

SEO-authority
Link Building Tips & Tricks About Creating Backlinks, Seo Blog - Search Engine Optimization News

Facts Are Increasingly Replacing Backlinks As Google Ranking Signal!

Apr 30, 2024 by Wouter van Nierop 0 Comments #Backlinks Less important, #Content strategy, #SEO Content Marketing

Google has released a report that discusses how to rank pages by facts instead of links. If this happens, it would be a major change for the Google search engine, which traditionally uses links as an indicator of relevance. In fact, it was the PageRank algorithm that made Google so important in the first place and allowed the company to surpass competitors like Yahoo.

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Google Ranking Factors

Today, Google uses more than 200 signals to determine page rank, but links are still an important factor. How important is unclear, especially because Google is showing more and more content and answers directly as search results and because this differs per industry in terms of authority, relevance and the number of backlinks. The Google algorithm is also constantly changing, which also increases or decreases the influence of the backlinks. Of course, the report does not mean that Google has actually implemented this ranking strategy or will do so. The company has numerous patents, not all of which are in use. Still, the fact that Google has done research into this, combined with the search engine changes already implemented, suggests that this is something Google could use in the future. The abstract of the report is as follows: The quality of Internet resources is traditionally determined on the basis of exogenous signals such as the hyperlink structure. We propose a new approach that depends on endogenous signals, namely the correctness of the factual information provided by the source. A source with few incorrect facts is considered reliable. These facts are automatically extracted from the source by methods that are also regularly used to build knowledge bases. We propose a way to distinguish errors from the extraction process from actual errors on the Internet resource itself.

Knowledge-Based Trust (KBT)

We call the calculated reliability score the Knowledge-Based Trust (KBT). Using synthetic data, we show that our method is able to determine the reliability of sources with high confidence. We then apply this to a database of 2.8 billion facts taken from the internet, and use this to estimate the reliability of 119 million pages. Manual evaluation of some of these confirms the effectiveness of the method. Conclusion Report: So they have confirmed the effectiveness of the method. That is interesting. And if that’s not enough to get you thinking, the report’s opening paragraph more or less sets links aside as a valuable signal: “Quality of sources is of great importance to search engines. This has traditionally been assessed using exogenous signals such as hyperlinks and search history. However, such signals mainly indicate how popular a web page is. For example, gossip websites often have high PageRank scores, but are generally not seen as reliable. In contrast, some less popular websites have very accurate information. Are you curious about what is meant by “gossip websites”? The designated section directs readers to this list of the top 15 most popular gossip sites:

  • Yahoo!
  • OMG!
  • TMZ, EOnline
  • People
  • USMagazine
  • WonderWall
  • Gawker
  • ZimBio
  • PerezHilton
  • HollywoodLife
  • RadarOnline
  • PopSugar
  • WetPaint
  • MediaTakeOut
  • FishWrapper

Later in the report, it is noted that fourteen of these sites have a PageRank rating in the top 15% of all websites on the Web due to their popularity. However, their KBT is without exception in the lowest 50%. “In other words, they are seen as less trustworthy than half of all sites,” the report says. It is also stated that forums often have a low KBT, giving an example of inaccurate information on Yahoo Answers, which is often highly ranked in Google search results. The report notes that KBT as a signal is orthogonal to more traditional signals like PageRank. It also seems to refer to identifying content that is not relevant to the main topic of a website.

Search Results Can Potentially Improve Hugely With Implementation of Google Knowledge Based Trust

What Google proposes in the report could theoretically lead to some huge improvements in result rankings. There are some good points made, the most important of which is that popularity may not be the best indicator of relevance. The question remains, however, how well Google is really able to distinguish fact from fiction and outdated information. We’ve already seen the problems with this with the Knowledge Graph. If Google Knowledge Graph becomes the backbone of the search algorithms, it could potentially cause errors. However, Google uses so many signals – of which this is just one of it would be – that I personally think this is a better idea than PageRank. It is clear that links can be manipulated for Google rankings, and this signal could be more difficult for malicious parties to bypass. After all, facts are difficult to buy, although you may wonder how the advertising industry will deal with this. For now, at least, it’s all still theoretical; If anything, you should be more concerned about making your site mobile friendly. This is a signal that Google will start using it next month. If you have an Android app, you should definitely make sure that it is indexed: this can make a difference in the short term.