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Bruce Clay: SEO/Google Caught Buying Links.

Gaming their own system? I think it’s time for me to blog on postcards.

SEO Training SW Launches Free Video Training System Called the SEO...

The SEO Roadmap online training is also perfect for the individual looking for a “Transform Your Life” opportunity. The program offers an opportunity to start a new career, a new business, in SEO...(PRWeb January 09, 2012)Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/1/prweb9089157.htm

3 Small Business SEO Tips To Help Harness The Power Of The Internet

The internet is a gold mine of opportunity for today’s small business owner looking to generate more sales. Billions of dollars are exchanged each year through e-commerce and other online business sites and small businesses are accounting for a lot of that cash. The internet has made shopping so easy, you don’t even have to [...]

Quick SEO Results Show Impressive Site Jumps In 30 Days

After discovering a large part of the Google algorithm, Quick SEO Results hires new 20 in-house Link Builders to meet the strong demand for their SEO services. In just the first 30 days of its...(PRWeb January 09, 2012)Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/1/prweb9083470.htm

Google’s Sponsor Review Campaign Shocks the SEO World

David Angotti wrote a great post on this on Jan 4th detailing that Google paid bloggers to post reviews; it’s a great post that describes the situation in detail. This news shocked my world a little bit and we had some clients raise some concerns. As an agency we execute sponsored post reviews for many [...]Follow SEJ on Twitter @sejournal

Top News: CES | Google & Bing & SEO losses | Out My Window

CES: Consumer Electronics show has 2012's hot tech trends. CES not always the greatest guide for commercial success. Microsoft at CES 2012: Nothing to see here? Search: 2011: The year Google & Bing took away from SEOs & publishers. Social Media: Warner Bros. to launch photo sharing social network called Out My Window. Mobile Computing: The critics rave … for Microsoft? Are Android tablets that [...]

Can Your SEO Clients Recognize Success When They See It?

We’ve all worked with a skittish SEO client before—the one that has been burned by a black hat firm in the past or doesn’t really believe in the value of SEO—and they are often the most challenging client an SEO provider can work with. How do you prove your value to someone who doesn’t really [...]Follow SEJ on Twitter @sejournal

Google Panda Update: Not In 2012 To Date [Exclusive]

Google was nice enough to let the world know in early December that there would be no Panda updates for the rest of 2011. Having faced backlash from webmasters over previous pre-holiday algorithm changes, namely the Florida update, Google has …

My Site's Ranking Dropped, It's Google Panda

This happens with every Google update - when a site owner feels their site was downgraded in Google, they blame the most talked about and recent Google update. Heck, I even see people blame the Google Sandbox for their site ranking issues. With Google Panda...

Understanding Panda and Google

It’s incumbent on all of us as information professionals to understand Panda and the changes to the Google Algorithm to address content farms and content spam.  As you can see from this posting, it’s a big game of whack-a-mole. Looking Back on the Year of the Panda: Google Algorithm Changes http://www.techipedia.com/2011/google-panda/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+techipedia+%28Techipedia%3A+Tamar+Weinberg+on+Social+Media+Marketing+Strategy%29 Top 10 Google Algorithm Changes of 2011 Jan. 28: Attribution Update Feb. 23: First Panda Update (Farmer Update) April 11: Panda update 2.0 May 9: Panda Update 2.1 June 21: Panda update 2.2 July 22: Panda update 2.3 Aug. 12: Panda update 2.4 Sep. 28: Panda update 2.5 Nov. 18: Panda Update 3.1 Dec. 1: Ten More Updates Announced See the details in the post: http://www.techipedia.com/2011/google-panda/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+techipedia+%28Techipedia%3A+Tamar+Weinberg+on+Social+Media+Marketing+Strategy%29 Each Panda update meant something different for each site. Some were hit hard by one update and others remained untouched. It is safe to say that the majority of sites have been affected by at least one of the Panda updates in 2011 in terms of where they appear in your search results. Stephen  

Stigmatter Improves Quality Assessment Model After Google Panda Update

Stigmatter article writing services has been providing high-end content solutions to the clients. Recently, they have improvised their quality assessment model after Google Panda Update to help clients with better quality of content.

Google Panda Update: Say Goodbye to Low-Quality Link Building

A while back, I wrote about how to get the best high volume links. Fast forward eight months and Google has made two major changes to its algorithm -- first to target spammy/scraper sites, followed by the larger Panda update that targeted "low qua...

Ardor Backlinks Explains the Effects of Google Panda Updates and...

Google’s first Panda Update was launched resulting in up to 12% of search results being effected as reported by Google. The update emphasized cracking down on thin content, content farms, sites with...(PRWeb December 27, 2011)Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/ardor2/backlinks/prweb9064733.htm

Top 5 Google Panda Update SEO Survival Tips

Google Panda 2.2 is looming to drop sometime soon, and with it, increasing levels of apprehension in the small business community on fears of further collateral damage to organic search traffic. As a speaker at SES Toronto this year, I had the dis...

Market Target Launches Service for Link and Trust Building

Market Target launches service for Link and Trust Building.(PRWeb January 09, 2012)Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/san-diego-seo/market-target/prweb9087987.htm

10 Hard-Hitting Link Building Tactics That’ll Boost Your Rankings

In early December 2011 I wrote a quick-and-dirty guide to modern-day link baiting. In case you missed it, here’s a snapshot: Infographics – perhaps one of the most popular forms of link bait, inforgraphics turn complex data into meaningful stories using graphics. Egobait – the concept behind this form of link bait is simple…appeal to someone’s ego. Think  Ad Age’s Power 150. Interviews – doing interviews with other bloggers and you’re going to get links, traffic and a growing audience. Micro sites – creating a micro site around an idea can go viral like The University of Victoria’s The Anything Project. Drawings – a good drawing can go viral and attract links and traffic to your site. Hugh MacLeod and FAKE GRIMLOCK are good examples. Videos – Jib Jab’s Elf Yourself or Rhett and Link’s FAIL Caption videos went viral, attracting links and driving traffic. Quizzes – Mingle’s The Blog Verbosity Test and The Moon Survival Challenge spread across the web as people shared and linked to each. Stories – If all else fails, then you can simply fall back on an old-time favorite…the story. Now that you are up to speed on link bait, let’s look at ten more ways you can build links to your site…giving a jolt your linking building campaign. Tactic 1: Collecting and sharing content There are a couple different ways you can collect and share content. The first way is one of the oldest: link love posts. These posts, which aren’t as common today since most people share links through Twitter or Facebook, basically takes a roundup of the best articles you read during the week and shares them in a post. Here’s how Copyblogger does it: The other basic way to collect and share content is to simply have a site devoted to aggregating content. This is basically what Drudge Report does. It’s not original content but it’s usually comprehensive. These sites become famous once they can be the first to break a story. Another simple but great example is Arts and Letters Daily. Three articles described in two sentences with a link are delivered each day: Takeaway: Collecting and sharing content will build a loyal audience of followers who look toward seeing what interesting stuff you can share. Naturally you’ll get links as they share the content with their audiences. Tactic 2: Getting business links This is a little time consuming, but it will get high-quality links to your site that will generate great traffic and authority. Basically you want to think about all the different ways you can get businesses or local sites to send you traffic. Here’s a short list Aaron Wall provided: Join the Better Business Bureau. They’ll link to you once you are a member. Join the local chamber of commerce who will likely link to you once you are a member. Get your city and the state governments you live in you to link to you by submitting your site to the relevant government sites. Get your library to link to you. Get business partners and non-competing business to link to you. Launch an affiliate program. When it comes to the affiliate links, you have to make sure the URLs don’t contain extraneous characters or else those may not count. Takeaway: Hunting down links that are related to business and from local sites is a great way to get high-quality links that have authority and tell Google and other search engines that you are trustworthy. Tactic 3: Collecting testimonials or opinions for an article Another way to build links back to an article on your site is to write a piece where you make a call for testimonials, stories and opinions. For example, say you are writing an article on blogging tools that pros use. During your research you’ll want to reach out to some influential bloggers and thought leaders and ask them for their recommendations. If you make it simple and remind them that they’ll get credit back to their site, most people will respond. Then you can use their testimonial or opinion, and when the page goes live, email them and let them know. Takeaway: More than likely they’ll link back to the page you created and share it with their audiences. If you’ve got ten bloggers sharing their opinions and just three of them link back, that’s huge! Tactic 4: Interviewing big bloggers Like the tactic where you ask for their opinions or testimonials, requesting an interview with an influential blogger will also help you build links back to your site. But you have to do it right. Bloggers are busy and while they may not get requests for interviews all the time, they are going to be selective to protect their time. So you need to present an interview that’s unique… Do they have a controversial stand on a topic that you think maybe they’d like to explain further? Do you have an audience that you think they’ll be interested in? Can you make them think or talk about something that is new or surprising to them? Takeaway: Snagging that interview with a big blogger and then publishing it on your site will lead to high-quality links coming back to your site when the blogger mentions it and his audience will start to share it. Tactic 5: Redesign your site with a good CSS design Do you have a beautiful design on your site? Do your website use CSS? If not, you can order a new CSS design for your site. If you have a beautifully designed site using CSS you can then submit your site to galleries like Best Web Gallery, CSS Elite or CSS Mania. Submission to these galleries is easy through the CSS Gallery List, which will submit to 100 galleries for $20. Or you can manually go to each gallery and submit your site for free. Takeaway: The benefit is obvious… if you get accepted to these galleries you’ll get a high-quality links back to your site. Tactic 6: Running contests Competition is a great way to generate activity with your audience that not only increases engagement but also increases the number of links coming back to your site. Designing a contest can be as easy as giving away a prize in exchange for a link or it can be as complex as having contestants write out a 1000 words essay. Or it could be for the best design or idea on a given topic. But don’t stop promoting link building when the contest is over. Show who the clear winner is and if you can post all of the entries. Each contestant is likely to link to it to share with their audience if they see their entry on you site. Takeaway: When you are running a contest make sure it is vote based. This way the contestants will blog about their entry and link to your website to convince their followers to vote for them. Tactic 7: Comparing competitor link data If you have a competitor ranking high for a term you’d like to rank high for then you need to figure out who is linking to their website. That means tracking them all down, putting them in a spreadsheet and then slowly working on attracting those links. To get those links you’ll probably have to email the webmasters and politely ask for a link. You have more control over the kind of links you get this way, although whether the webmaster agrees or not is another story. Takeaway: By scoping out your competitors you can uncover some gaps and missed opportunities in your own link-building strategies, while ranking for the same keywords they are. Tactic 8: How social media impacts search Social media impacts search rankings by the links that are generated from FB posts, tweets or LinkedIn. For example, we know that the more tweets a link receives the better it performs in search rankings. We also know that Bing gets social cues from Facebook while Google gets them from Twitter. These companies want to know what’s trending, what influences different social signals and where links are pointing. Start creating link bait that gets more retweets and Facebook shares/likes as that’ll boost your rankings. Takeaway: Don’t give up on your normal SEO strategies or link building tactics and think that social media is the silver bullet. It’s not, mostly because so much of exactly how it impacts search is unknown. But it can’t hurt to use it. Tactic 9: Re-purposing your content Coming up with fresh content all the time is hard. However, you can use old content and re-purpose it to create new stuff that will generate even more links for the same content. Here are some ways to do that: Turn a dozen or so posts into a PDF that you can then post on Scribd and Docstoc. Turn a series of posts into a slide share document. Submit your how-to posts to sites like eHow. Create a video of a series of posts and then upload to the top video sites like Vimeo and YouTube. Takeaway:  Re-purpose old content to create new content can give life back to your link building strategy, driving high-quality juice and traffic back to your site. Just make sure you double check if the sites you are submitting to are using nofollows as those links won’t count. Tactic 10: Write a meme-tracking and social bookmarking-worthy post Before you write a post, check out meme trackers like TechMeme and see what ideas are trending. Then try to write a post about that trending idea, using a lot of your own original content and submit it. Next have friends and your followers bookmark it with delicious or submit it to digg. These sties don’t have the same power they did a few years ago, but it’s worth leverage them as they still command millions of visitors and those visitors will link back to your website. Takeaway: If the post you write gains traction and becomes a trending topic, then you can expect lots of high-quality links driving traffic to your site. Conclusion If you want to create a site that’s got authority and ranks high, then you need to take your link building campaign to the next level by using these tactics. So give them a try and let me know how many links you get by using them. So what other hard-hitting link building tactics do you use?

Netmark.com Named Second Best Link Building Company by topseos.com for...

The independent authority on Search vendors, topseos.com has named Netmark.com the second best link building company for January 2012.(PRWeb January 09, 2012)Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/1/prweb9086356.htm

Netmark.com Named Second Best Link Building Company by topseos.com for January 2012

The independent authority on Search vendors, topseos.com has named Netmark.com the second best link building company for January 2012.(PRWeb January 09, 2012)Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/1/prweb9086356.htm

The Power of Using Lists for Link Building

Posted by Paddy_Moogan I used to spend a lot of my time plowing through Google to find potential link targets for client websites. I still do this a lot but I've changed my approach a lot of the last 12-18 months to try and become a bit more efficient. I've changed my approach so that the first point of call when looking for link targets is lists. Lists are awesome for link building because someone else has already done some of the hard work for you. If you can find good quality, curated lists of websites, then you can be reasonably sure that you have found sites that are good ones to get links from. You still want to run your own analysis and due diligence, but the end output is probably going to be a higher majority of quality sites than you would have gotten from pulling lists straight from Google SERPs. I like to put link building techniques into processes which makes them easier to follow and easier to scale if you need to automate parts of it. The process I use can be broken down into the following - Find your lists Scrape together your master list Filter and prioritise I'll go through each of these in more detail to explain the steps for each one. 1. Find your Lists There are multiple ways of doing this and there are probably more places to find them than you think. To make things a bit clearer, let's think about these "types" of lists, they are roughly in order of personal preference - Curated lists found on other websites Top x type lists found on other websites Public Twitter lists Good quality directories There are more, but just these ones alone with give you enough link targets to keep you busy for a long time! Curated lists found on other websites For me, these are the best types of lists to find. They are hand curated which means that the quality of the list should be pretty good, usually they have also been curated by a subject matter expert who knows the sites in their industry well. I always try and find these first because they tend to give me the higher quality sites - albeit in low quantities. My main method for finding these sites actually starts off very simple, it will be something like - It really does start off that simple. This can give me lots to get started with, just this search alone gave me a list of seven blogs curated by The Times, a list of ten law blogs from Cision and a list of employment law blogs curated by a professional lawyer. This was only taking a few from page 1 of the search results too, there were many, many more. You can of course vary the types of searches you do, then you can go a bit deeper with some advanced search queries. Here is a quick example - This search gave me some great results including this list from the Inner Temple and this curated list from a law firm. Here are a few more that you can use - "list of * blogs" "uk law" "list of * websites" "uk law" list of uk law blogs inurl:resources Garrett French also lists his method for link building with lists and some advanced queries on Citation Labs. When I've found very high quality sites, I also tend to keep a note of them in my Chrome Bookmarks so I can easily find them again in the future - You could use anything you want to do this really, for example you could use something like Evernote and attach the list to a project. At Distilled we also keep a record of link targets in Buzzstream which means they are easy to find again in the future for follow up or other projects. Top x type lists found on other websites This is a personal favourite, the quality can sometimes be a little dubious, but overall you will find pretty good quality websites. The great thing about these ones too is that they tend to be refreshed every year so lots of these lists exist. Similar to curated lists, finding these can start off with something simple - These returned lots of great results, one of which I'd class as a curated list from The Telegraph. You can of course go a bit more advanced again and use some of the following - top * food blogs best * food blogs best food blogs inurl:links There are so many of these it's unreal. I'd like to think they were slow down as people get bored, but quite frankly, they still work well for things like link bait! Public Twitter lists You need to do a bit of extra work to pull the websites out of these ones, but it's worth the extra effort and much of this can be automated. You can actually find these a number of ways. One of my favourites is this advanced query in Google - Once you have found a list, you want to click on the "following" tab which brings up the people on the list rather than their tweets - This brings you to a URL such as this one which (if you wanted!) you could scrape the usernames of the list members from. You could then scrape their profiles using something like Google Docs with Xpath and pull out their websites if they have them. To help you with this task, I knocked together a very quick and dirty scraper in Google Docs which you can get a copy of here. It's not that robust but will do the job on up to 50 usernames quickly and easily. Make sure you are logged into your Google Account then click "Make a Copy" from the File menu. Another easy way is to use something like Listorious which has a nice clean interface and pulls back Twitter lists based on your keywords - As I said, there are loads of ways to find these lists. I tend to find that just searching for my keywords in Twitter search and finding influential people often leads me to lists of some sort.  Good quality directories I had to mention the D word at some point :). Being honest, I don't use this one that much but it can be useful in some very niche industries where there may not be that many lists created by individuals.  Luckily, it's super easy and quick to find a list of sites in some of the better directories. My first point of call is usually Dmoz. I try to ignore the fact that many categories these days are controlled by SEOs! You can find some really good niche sites on Dmoz, for example did you know there was an association of tea drinkers with a directory of member blogs? I found this via Dmoz! There are a few other directories out there which are decent quality, but you'll probably find you get a lot more commercial and lower quality sites in the lists and will have to do some filtering later.  A few more directories I'd take look at - Best of the Web Blogs Yahoo! Directory Please don't dismiss the Yahoo! Directory without taking a look, there are some decent sites on there, for example on this list of photography blogs, which is quite extensive. RIght, so now we have a number of places we can find lists. Next up is to collate these into our own master list so we can filter and sort to find our final list of link targets. 2. Scrape together your master list Hopefully I don't lose too many of you now, I'm not going to ask you to build your own tools to do this. Whilst we are big believers in hacking together your own tools for various SEO jobs, there are some very simple plugins that can do this job for you. Having said that, if you can build your own scraper to pull in link targets - go for it! Here are a couple of ways of pulling link targets from a page very quickly without building a tool. Multi-links for Firefox I love this plugin. It's a very handy tool for loads of stuff. In this case, we're going to use it to pull the URLs of the link targets in our lists into a spreadsheet.  Lets use one of the examples I linked to above, say you wanted to pull the URLs of the websites in this list on The Telegraph - Using Multi-links, you simply right click just above the first link, then drag the cursor down so all the links you want are within the red lines - Keep pressing the right click button, then press the left click, then select "Copy URLs" - You can then just paste it into your spreadsheet. Much quicker than going to each site and copying the URL!  Extra Tip - this tool also allows you to open highlighted links in other tabs which can be very useful for link prospecting. However be careful, if you do not want this, make sure you keep hold of the right mouse button! If you release it, all tabs will open at the same time. Opening loads of tabs in Firefox at the same time can slow it down a lot - I've done it with over a hundred links before and crashed it. If you are looking for something similar that works in Chrome, take a look at Linkclump. Scrape similar plugin for Chrome This nice little plugin takes away a lot of the hassle of learning things like Xpath and allows you to grab elements of a page which are similar to each other - such as links. Lets use the same example as above and scrape the links from The Telegraph again. I simply right click on one of the links in the list and click on "Scrape Similar". I get the following list which looks accurate to me - I can then export to Google Docs in the bottom right corner, easy! For a more detailed look on using this plugin for link building, go and read Justin's post which gives a great step by step guide. 3. Filter and prioritise At this point we should have a spreadsheet of link targets, which we have gathered pretty quickly using some simple search queries and a few plugins or tools. Now we need to filter, sort and prioritise. Chances are that you have ended up with a pretty big list of potential link targets, so you need someway of knowing where to start to give you a good return. I know some of you will prefer to use Excel at this point, some will prefer Google Docs. So I'm going to cover both and show you how to quickly prioritise your link targets using some simple tools. Filtering using Excel This became a lot easier recently with the discovery of these SEO tools for Excel by Niels Bosma. There are loads of features you can use which are for onpage SEO analysis which you should definitely take a look at. For the purposes of this post, I've taken the following screenshot of metrics for link building which you can get - For those of you who have never seen it before, here is a very quick snapshot of just a few of the other elements you can gather with the plugin - Richard Baxter did a great post on the plugin and all the different features you can use, it's well worth a read over on SEOgadget. Once you've gathered these metrics, you can start to filter and sort by whichever metrics matter to you. I tend to look for large numbers of social shares and then look at PageRank as a rough indicator. Whilst PageRank isn't perfect, it's still useful for filtering large sets of data. Filtering using Google Docs As much as I love SEO tools for Excel, I think I still prefer using Google Docs for gathering metrics on the fly. There are loads of posts for hacking together Google Docs to do various things (all with free downloads of the tools themselves) so I'd advise you go and take a look at those. For this type of work, I tend to use a Google Doc which looks like this - You can add loads more into here if you wanted, but I want to keep it simple for now. I like being able to pull Domain Authority straight into my spreadsheet which you can do with the free version of the SEOmoz API key. Again, once you've got all your metrics, you can filter, sort and prioritise based on your key metrics. Then it's a case of starting to contact each site and giving them a good reason to link to you! Final Important Step Go and do something with this list! Importantly, ask yourself the following - What reason can I give these people to link to me? or Why should these people give a sh*t about my site? If you can answer these questions confidently, you have your hook ready to go and do your outreach. That's about it for this post, I'd love to hear your feedback and comments below or feel free to tweet me if you have any questions or feedback. Do you like this post? Yes No

Instant Linkerati Announces 2012 Link Building Promotion

(MENAFN Press) (EMAILWIRE.COM, January 06, 2012 ) Houston, TX -- Brian Horn, CEO of InstantLinkerati.com, announces a limited promotion of one month of his fusion link building service. The cost ...

del.icio.us socialmedia: Did You Graduate From Link Building High School Yet?