Google’s miserable failure on Paid links

Google recently penalized lot of websites that were buying links. In this process some sites were penalized even though they don’t buy links. Google’s new algorithm that detects paid links is a miserable failure according to me. So many sites got affected and even 2 or 3 our sites got affected. We never bought links for our client sites but 2 sites were affected because it looks like the backlinks were bought. The pattern of our links are no-where the same as the paid links that others get for their sites but still we lost 5 or 10 places for some important keywords. I can understand an automated algorithm cannot be 100% accurate in detecting paid links but they should also be careful before pulling the plug. I feel more manual review should happen so that the sites affected are really buying links and not just because their backlink pattern might look similar to a site that buys links for top ranking. The worse thing here is so many sites that are buying links got away with it and the sites that never bought links got caught. I hope Google is more careful with their buying links algorithm in future.

Are embedded links in widgets ethical?

Google and other search engines have always stressed for people to get only natural links. The whole link based algorithm depends a lot on natural links. Scientists wrote link based algorithm because links are natural and more reliable. Talking about widget embedded links this has been in debate for a long time. Search engines always have mixed opinion on this.

Embedding links in widgets has been in existing from the day widgets were introduced. Statcounter.com a world famous tracking company which provides free tracking were PR 10 because of the links embedded in their counter. Seeing this people started this natural usage of links in a commercial way. People started approaching commercial counter companies to embed their links when free counters are distributed in exchange for a payment. Lots of companies got temporary benefit from it but the search engines immediately woke up to the occasion. An SEO company which did this as part of their link building strategy was completed banned from Google’s search engine. Also Google started implementing link based penalties like the -60 penalty for sites that use widgets to embed links. Even we were affected a bit but later recovered. So is this ethical? . In my opinion I feel the user should know that the link is embedded into the widget code as long as they know it its fine. But if the links are embedded without the user’s knowledge then it’s wrong. I feel search engines too have similar view. People should have the ability to embed the link or remove it or make it no-follow. If they can do it I am confident the search engines will accept it whole heartedly.

Tags: Link Building, SEO

New Sitelink-type links with meta descriptions on some searches

Google has recently made a lot of changes to their site links. When site links ( links that appear below the site when the domain name or other major name that the domain represents appears ) came into existence people thought its a weird thing. But now Yahoo, Bing both uses them copied from Google. Its an interesting way for people to find pages to a site they get a chance of multiple pages to be clicked from the search results itself. I have personally used site-links for a long time. Every one out of 2 times i have clicked a site link than the primary result. So yes as an active internet user i use sitelinks which i feel is a big achievement from Google. A trial has worked for them and we usually see tracking URLs in Sitelinks so even Google is monitoring the clicks on sitelinks.

Today Google has improvised a lot when it comes site links. They came up with a site link similar to simple single line text links we see it visible these days. Take a look at the following example.

Now furthur improvization they are able to show actual links in descriptions it was not the case before. It shows how much effort Google is putting into their organic search too. They know Organic search is their primary area and they need to keep focusing on improving it. I am sure we can see a lot of improvization in future.

Great going Google keep it up.

Can hot-linking benefit your website?

What is hot linking?

Directly embedding or linking to a resource on another server, such as an image or video, so that it appears to be part of the linking website. Hot linking provides the ability within an online manual to jump from place to place by clicking on table of contents and index entries, cross-references, or icons.

So can hot linking benefit you. Yes I would say hot linking benefits you because you can get some quality traffic to your images from other websites that embed your image. We get loads of traffic from hot linking most of them are valid visitors. People who follow hotlink images also tend to look around your website for other images or videos. So yes there is solid benefit. But there are some draw backs imagine your image is added to an adult site and Google image crawler picks it up it might damage the reputation of your website and your image might start featuring only when safe search filter off. Most people don’t switch off safe search filter so its recommended to keep note of who is hot linking if you see a bad source feel free to request them to remove your image.

Bizarre places to get backlinks for a quality website:

There is no limitation in getting backlink for a high quality site. Especially high quality site like ours get 100s of backlinks from good sources as well as some bizarre sources. There are lots of bizarre links we get when we monitor our blogs here is a list of some of them.

1. From PDF and Doc files which are actually not html or web based files. PDF ( Portable Document Format ) is a format used to create important documents, thesis, projects, invoices and lots of other users. We get links from PDF files as well as doc files from some edu sites as well as other sites which use our website as reference for their project or report.

2. From PPT: Google , yahoo, MSN all top 3 search engines crawl power point slides effectively we have some Gov sites use our website and tools as reference on their PPT slide shows and this turn up as backlink for our website. You know edu, gov backlinks are some of the best backlinks you can get for your website.

3. From Other language sites: We get links from Japanese blogs, European language blogs, urdu blogs, Arabic blogs and from lots blogs in different languages. Though we are an English only site we have people visiting our website all over the world.

4. In college personal project pages: We get links from some students from major universities who use our tools as a testing base for their projects, also they use our articles and other good resources we have for their college projects. We get some good quality links from this source.

We get lot more bizarre links which I will share in future in our blog.

Link Development Tactics

• Choose quality over quantity:- Link quality carries more weight than quantity. Spend time getting the highest quality links pointing to your site.
• Begin with Web directories:- Yahoo Directory and DMOZ are two reliable places for high-quality links.
• Harness online publicity:- How-to tips, helpful articles, even press releases often attract links from other websites. The search engine optimization world calls this “link bait .”
• Use blogs and forums wiselyL:- Blogs and forums can call attention to useful information on your site.
• Use search engines to research link development:- Look at competitors’ sites to determine their link development strategy. It can help you with your own. What newspapers and media outlets do they use for online publicity? What Web directories link to their sites? No link popularity checker (“link: domain.com” in Google, “linkdomain: domain.com” in Yahoo) can substitute for doing the research yourself.

Inbound or Outbound links are important for new site

New webmaster spends too much time in getting inbound link and forgets completely about the value of outbound link. For all new sites outbound link are more important compare to inbound link.

Getting an outbound link provide you more exposure to the wider web and is a proof for the existence of your site. Search engine crawl links to go from one page to another, all you need is one inbound link to your site to get the whole thing crawled whereas outbound links tell much more than inbound links. They tell your visitors that you are willing to provide valuable information.

Most of the webmaster care where there traffic comes from, if you link out then you will appear in referrer logs. Outbound links helps to get traffic from webmaster that are curious enough to know about you that why linked them. They will even get back to you if they like what you are doing it.

With this great differences it is clear that though inbound links helps to get the page rank but out bound links are more important drive traffic to your site and to make trade which is the main aim of online marketing strategy.

SEO – Spam – spam spam and more spam from junk SEO companies.

We get these regular spam emails and we at Search Engine Genie are against spamming people for SEO related work.
Spam SEO email:
“On studying the lately Google algorithms – we have launched our new Link Building packages which are highly competitive and more productive in terms of Back Links and SERPs of website. You might have noticed that these days when we analyze PR pattern in top ranking sites, most of them are not high PR and even if you analyse backlinks of any site, most of the sites listed in backlinks list are low PR. In nutshell, there is no pattern of Pr is fond either in SERPs or Backlinks. Therefore only relevancy of the linking page matters these days. Also, it is suggestible to go with a mixture of all page rank links to avoid Google Filter Trap as Google tend to catch the uniformity in patterns of incoming links and it tends to reduce the weightage you should be getting of each campaign.
This founding has made us launch a new package of thematic links (irrelevant of PR) as well as update our existing packages to match with Google requirements. We have now included the following in all our packages – 1. We offer deep links in each campaign (acquiring links for inner pages with home page, targeting keywords for their related pages only).2. We offer rotating anchor texts (a set of couple of link details is used to make sure that Google does not identify a similarity in anchor texts for all back links).3. We offer a mixed PR links in the final report.4. We create links slowly and do not get all links created in a day or 2, so as to make it look natural for Search Engines.
These are not the only quality benchmarks but are only a few of those which are always taken care of while creating links for a project site. Still, if you find any link below the quality expected for genuine reasons, we replace it immediately without asking a second question (the first one will be the reason for which it was rejected).
We realize how important it is for many companies to outsource their business to other reliable companies and therefore to choose the Right Outsourcing Partner. Most companies overseas have achieved a significant amount of savings by outsourcing either complete or part of their Link Building, SEO or designing/development projects to India not only to cut the costs but also to ensure guaranteed results.. Thanks to the IT talent and cheaper labor costs in India.
With all our campaigns we assure you – -> Links will produce an organic traffic at website by doing ethical link building-> An appreciable improvement to current SERPs (search engine result position) at targeted keywords and keyword phrases.-> Balanced mechanism to prevent Google Filter trap.-> Goal oriented strategies for cost and time effective end product i.e.-> Complete return on investment ( ROI)
The methodologies we use to build links are —>Article posting – well written and preapproved by you, articles are submitted to highly reputed article directories.–>Link Popualrity – One way links are created by getting links on other theme related websites.–>Directory listings – Links are placed on relevant categories of a few highly reputed directories.
Please note that we can do all or a few selected methods to create links on the basis of your choice. We have a few packages for each of these.. with base package starting @ $5 per link. Please feel free to let us know for more details on quality, process or pricing.
Minimum order quantity is 100 links. We provide links @ 25 links/week.”