How Back-Link Profiles Have Changed Since Google Penguin
Google’s Penguin update was designed to clear out the websites with over-optimized back-link profiles.
A back-link profile is an overview of all your inbound links. For 8 years, up until the birth of the Penguin algorithm, the way to get your website to the top of Google was to include your keywords in all the key indicators on your page, and then build lots of links from the best Google PR pages you could find, using the exact match keyword as your anchor text.
This works very well. Too well in fact, so Google set about devising a better algorithm that would measure websites for nature linking behavior, rather than rewarding artificially promoted sites.
Google's New Algorithm - Simplified
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A competitive link analysis is a great way to see how your link building efforts compare with those of your top competitors. It's also incredibly useful for identifying any link building opportunities that you may have overlooked. What industry sites is your competition a member of? What blogs are they guest writers for? What sites are picking up their PR? Looking at the competition's link building efforts can help you identify the holes (and opportunities)...
In terms of search engine optimization (SEO), there are three categories of tasks that every website owner must complete if they want their site to be found at the top of a Google or Bing search engine results page. These task categories are:
On-site optimization, such as writing a proper HTML title tag, a good META description tag, ensuring that your site can be crawled, etc.
Creating great content, because no website can achieve long-term SEO success...
Although their relative importance is likely to decrease over time, citations – defined as “mentions” of your business -- are still the bread and butter of local SEO. In David Mihm’s comprehensive list of Local Search Ranking Factors, citations come in at number four, surpassed only by having a physical address in the city of search, manually verifying your Google Places page, and designating proper category associations. Needless to say, most agencies that provide...
As of mid-April, algorithmic rollouts by Google’s Webspam team have impacted webmasters who have either built low-quality links, or had links directed at their sites using low-quality methods. Around 700,000 warning notices have been sent via webmaster tools, with penalties ranging from the loss of a few places in the rankings, to being de-indexed altogether. These recent penalties have led some to question whether there will be a resurgence in previous Black hat techniques being...
Anchor text is a hot topic amongst SEOs and link builders who continue to debate around the perfect formula for ranking success. Is it best to build ‘partial anchor text’? Should we aim for a bulk amount of exact match anchor text links? Or is it better to just build branded links and let the on page factors carry the relevance?
The truth is none of these approaches is the best way, but they all...
As we all know, link building is a huge part of search engine optimization and also one of the hardest things to do right. With so many techniques and search engine algorithms changing frequently, sometimes it is hard to come up with the right strategy. However, if you incorporate different highly effective techniques in your overall strategy, you will increase its efficiency to the maximum.
A technique that I have discovered recently is event blogging. For...
Internet marketing is a constantly changing world, so the best thing anybody can do is stay up to date on the latest strategies and techniques if they really want to make an impact in their business. Some of the best internet marketing strategies that were around five years ago aren't worth anything these days, but for every technique that falls out of style a new one takes it place. These are some of the current...
Many people believe that the purpose of getting external links is to drive traffic directly from site to site. While this possibility shouldn't be overlooked, it's also important to understand that search engines look to the number of links pointing to a site as an indicator of how much "authority" or "trust" they should give the site.
Link popularity helps search engines determine the relevance of your site. They look at not only the number of...
When it is all said and done, there is only so much you can do without the help of others. The most successful websites may start with an aggressive initial push to obtain links, but afterwards it is inevitably the case that those sites retain authority because people willingly link to them. The challenge thus becomes to find influencers and readers who are genuinely interested in the information you provide.
Link building can be a difficult,...
