Reviewer of Sites

There are two great ways to build links while providing comments on blogs.  One is called CommentLuv and the other is Top Commenter.  As you will notice, I have added both to my blog to encourage thoughtful blog posts.

CommentLuv, which is a Wordpress and Drupal plugin that allows you to comment and then have your most recent blog post or RSS feed post to be included at the bottom of your comment.  To have this work, just type in your URL into the appropriate URL or URI field.  Once the comment is accepted then you would see a link.

This works very well for any web page, blog, and other sites, such as Squidoo.

The other is a Widget for Wordpress blogs that is called Top Commenter.  It allows the blogger to display the most prolific commenters on the blog, over a period of time, often a month.  In the case of my blog, Top Commenter is only on the front page, so the link value is not diluted throughout the site.

Both can be set by the blogger to be dofollow (meaning your link will include the linkjuice from the search engines), which includes this blog as well.

How to Find Commentluv and Top Commenter Blogs

There are various linkbuilding programs out there, free and otherwise:

• Fast Blog Finder *Recommended
  
• Real Link Finder
• Comment Kahuna
• Traffic Kahuna (same author as above)

In addition there are great online search tools and listings:

• Do Follow Diver – Allows you search through a listing of more than 700 dofollow blogs, including many with Top Commenter and CommentLuv.
• A list of over 100 blogs using CommentLuv.
• The official CommentLuv active sites list.

Don’t Spam!

The important thing here is to not abuse these sites.  Spamming hurts everyone and if a blogger finds too many spammers coming from a certain region of the world easily can block an entire IP range.  Also, both of these widgets/plugins allow the blogger to block certain people automatically.

In addition, the spam-blocking plugging known as Akismet and the process of manually authorizing each blog post will eliminate any post deemed as spam.  The important part when posting on blogs using either or both is realizing that its simply not worth taking the time to spam, as your comments will assuredly not be allowed.

Tags: Link Building, Traffic, squidoo by reviews
157 Comments »

Google recently announced that they can now crawl data submitted via forms.

The other part that I found interesting is that they apparently can “scan” javascript and Flash to find links. Previously, spiders were not able to crawl javascript, but this “scanning” now allows for data retrieval. That’s big news! All those links that I thought were useless because they were displayed via javascript may count for something now!

Google is constantly trying new ideas to improve our coverage of the web. We already do some pretty smart things like scanning JavaScript and Flash to discover links to new web pages, and today, we would like to talk about another new technology we’ve started experimenting with recently.

In the past few months we have been exploring some HTML forms to try to discover new web pages and URLs that we otherwise couldn’t find and index for users who search on Google. Specifically, when we encounter a

element on a high-quality site, we might choose to do a small number of queries using the form. For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML. Having chosen the values for each input, we generate and then try to crawl URLs that correspond to a possible query a user may have made. If we ascertain that the web page resulting from our query is valid, interesting, and includes content not in our index, we may include it in our index much as we would include any other web page.

Tags: Google, Link Building, SEO by reviews
No Comments »

SEO – Regional Targeting for Geographically Specific Traffic (geotargeting)

How does one target a specific geographic region/country/city?

There are a few areas of SEO and marketing that you can do to improve your site ranking within a particular region, known as ‘geotargeting’. The biggest challenge would be ranking well in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) across a range of regions. It would probably require several regional campaigns.

1. Domain TLD: You can register your domain with a country specific TLD, such as “.co.uk”. This should help you rank better in the UK. The same can be done for other countries.
2. Hosting: This is a major factor, if web host server is located in France, then you are likely to rank well in France. Unfortunately, you may not rank well for search engine users in other countries. You should look around for webhosts from that area, for example: you can be hosted on a Maui server, if you are targeting a Maui audience.
3. Languages: If your site includes more than one language, you will have a better chance of ranking well within countries where that language is spoken.
4. Keywords Usage: If your website has too much content for “German”, as apposed to the “UK”, then the search engines may perceive this as the website is targeting the location mentioned in the content. I do not believe in keyword density as being of any value, but I do believe that including the keywords within the content would be relevant.
5. On page/site SEO: Create individual pages or sections of your website for the area you are targeting. Your efforts should then focus the traffic to these pages/areas. This includes link building, advertising, and other means to direct traffic and improve your rank in the SERPs.
   
6. Localized Link Building: Find local bloggers and websites (government city, state, country too!) and see if they’d link to you. Even better, see if they would write an article or two about your site or services.
7. Create a network: Buy domains and host them on localized webhosts. Create original, good content and point them to your main site. You may even get some referral traffic from them as well.
8. Google Local Business Center: By using the Google Local Business Center, you are also narrowing your site down to local areas.
   

   Use the Local Business Center to create your free listing. When potential customers search Maps for local information, they’ll find your business: your address, hours of operation, even coupons to print out and bring to your shop. It’s easy, free, and you don’t need a website of your own.

[Read more →]

Tags: Advertising, Link Building, Marketing, SEO, Web Hosting by reviews
20 Comments »

Google Alerts: How to Use it to Track Backlinks

If you’re not using this, it’s worth giving it a try. The purpose for this is to have notification when new links to your site are found by Google. This can be very good for any linkbuilding campaign.

Click Here: Google Alerts

The search terms should be similar to any one or all of the following:

link: http://www.example.com <— notice the space between link: and http?
link:http://www.example.com
link:www.example.com
link:http://example.com

The question has been asked, “what does the space do?” It’s strange, but it does bring up different results of backlinks, so it’s worth using this modification. Why there is a difference, I have no idea.

It’s very handy for watching progress of Google picking up new links to your sites.

You can set the frequency to:

• as soon as it happens
• once per day
• once per week

Also, it can be set it for Blogs, news, web, etc.

What is the maximum number of alerts I can create?

You can create up to 1000 alerts. To create more alerts, you can either delete any existing alerts or request alerts to be sent to a different email address. Please remember that you can only have up to 10 unverified Alerts at any given time.

Tags: Google, Link Building, Marketing, SEO by reviews
13 Comments »

Other Ways to block search engine spiders from crawling

Actually, NoFollow does not “stop” the search engine spiders (robots) from crawling, but instead Google and others simply do not pass “link juice” to the backlink.

However, as Geoland points out so well, there are other ways to block the crawling of links. The other methods are much more limiting than rel="nofollow", because at least NoFollow still allows the crawling and indexing.

Normal methods to check for NoFollow will not show you if a link is truly crawlable (including SEOQuake, right-clicking on a link and looking at properties, etc). In other words, “what you see is not always what you get.”

Robots.txt

One method is to use Robots.txt to control the crawling of spiders. Robots.txt is kept in the top level of the domain.

Examples

Blocks all robots

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

Blocks all robots from crawling specific directories

User-agent: *

Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Disallow: /images/

Disallow: /tmp/

Disallow: /administrator/

Meta Elements

The robots attribute is used to control whether or not the search engine spiders are allowed to index a page and whether or not they should follow links from a page. The NOINDEX value prevents a page from being indexed, while the NOFOLLOW prevents links from being crawled.

The robots attribute is supported by all of the major search engines. In addition there are several additional values for the robots meta attribute that are relevant to search engines, such as NOARCHIVE and NOSNIPPET, which are meant to tell search engines what not to do with a web pages content. Meta tags are not the best option to prevent search engines from indexing content of your website. A more reliable and efficient method is the use of the Robots.txt file.

NOINDEX tag tells a search engine not to index a specific page.

NOFOLLOW tag tells a search engine not to follow the links on a specific page.

NOARCHIVE tag tells a search engine not to store a cached copy of your page.

NOSNIPPET tag tells Google not to show a snippet (description) under your a search engine listing, it will also not show a cached link in the search results.

Example

<html>

<head>

<title>Create Backlinks to My Site</title>

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

</head>

Javascript

Any link written in javascript is not crawlable by search engine spiders. It will look like a normal link and will not be lined through (SEOQuake addon) or highlighted (Search Status addon)

Dynamic URLs

Some spiders may also avoid crawling any url that has a “?” in it (dynamically produced) in order to avoid spider traps which may then cause the crawler to download an ‘infinite’ number of URLs from a Web site. Thus it would probably prevent links on these pages from being crawled.

Tags: Google, Link Building, SEO, Yahoo by reviews
12 Comments »

First, what is linkbait?

Linkbait is simply creating something that sparks peoples’ interest enough that they would create a link to you or use something that you offer, such as an image or a tool. They may knowingly or unknowingly create a backlink to your site.

With Google’s Matt Cutts doing a writeup of linkbait recently and an older one, it made me think more about it. The real thing always serves as the best example, rather than just explaining it. This seems to be an acceptable way of getting links, according to Google.

Here’s his definition: “On a meta-level, I think of “linkbait” as something interesting enough to catch people’s attention, and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. There are a lot of ways to do that, including putting in sweat-of-the-brow work to generate data or insights, or it can be as simple as being creative. You can also say something controversial to generate discussion (this last one gets tired if you overuse it, though). Sometimes even a little bit of work can generate a reason for people to link to you.”

Examples of Linkbait

www.stclaire.com – PR4 – Links 2,630



Matt Cutts used this “Technical Communications” site that had a clever sign making section.

[Read more →]

Tags: Link Building, Marketing, SEO, Traffic by reviews
5 Comments »

DoFollow Social Bookmarking Sites

The following are Social Bookmarking Sites that provide dofollow backlinks to your site. As always, it is important to provide good content to these sites, as well as being relevant content to yours. Most importantly, we should not abuse or misuse these Social Bookmarking sites.

Are these really “DoFollow”? Read this to see other ways of blocking the spiders.

Ok, as I add new ones (or take away bad ones), then the number changes.

• Slashdot PR9
• Mister-Wong PR7
• Furl PR7
• Bibsonomy PR7
• Spurl PR6
• Unalog PR6 – Registration not currently available (thanks dauclair)
• Jumptags PR6
• Searchles PR6
• Plime PR5
• BlogHop PR5
• MyLinkVault PR5
• A1 Webmarks PR5
• ClipClip PR5
• Diigo PR5
• Listible PR5
• MyVmarks PR5
• Complore PR4
• OnMyList PR4
• Kapely PR3
  
• info4it PR3
• MyPIP PR3
• SyncOne PR3
• Yattle PR2
• Faves PR0
• UPCHUCKr PR0

NoFollow – How the attribute is being interpreted differs between the search engines. While some take it literally and do not follow the link to the page being linked to, others still “follow” the link to find new web pages for indexing. In the latter case rel=”nofollow” actually tells a search engine “Don’t score this link” rather than “Don’t follow this link.” This differs from the meaning of nofollow as used within a robots meta tag, which does tell a search engine: “Do not follow any of the hyperlinks in the body of this document”.

What is a good way to check if a link is Nofollow? Download Firefox

Install the Firefox SEOQuake Plugin from the tools page.

You may also like the DoFollow Forums List
*If you notice any changes or possible additions, please post a comment.

Tags: Link Building, Marketing, SEO, Social Bookmarking by reviews
20 Comments »