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In Google’s continuing war on spam sites “cluttering” their search results Google  has partnered with GoDaddy to gather more information on webmasters and their domains.

As covered on Search Engine Journal

Google recently filed United States Patent Application 20050071741. As part of that patent application, Google made apparent its efforts to wipe out search engine spam, stating:

‘Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith.”

Domains registered for longer periods give the indication, true or not, that their owner is legitimate. Google uses a domain’s length of registration when indexing and ranking a Web site for inclusion in their organic search results.

So to prove to everyone that your site is the real deal, register for more than one year and increase your chances of boosting your search ranking on Google.

This is very interesting news that I see as continuing to be a consideration for webmasters and SEO’s as Google continues to partner with or buy other domain registrars in the future.  If Google sees a registration for only a year or so they will very possibly consider it to be spam and not display the page or site very highly in the search results.  This is a big deal for new websites and, in particular, non-spam sites, such as ecommerce sites.

Lesson learned: Register your domain for as long as possible to increase your likelihood ranking well with Google both in terms of PageRank and the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

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Buying Text Links; Good or Bad?

There are many questions and at least as many answers to buying text links. Will it help your search engine rankings? Will you be banned by Google? Will it increase your PageRank? Will you receive targeted traffic from these links? These are the questions on search optimizers’ and search marketers’ minds lately.

There is nothing wrong with advertising on a website that links back to your website. Advertising your site is a good thing. Advertising on major sites where your market hangs out is even better. After all, the idea is to bring targetted traffic to your site. Just any visitor won’t help if they are not the ones that are buying your products or clicking on your ads (Adsense or others). Your advertisements on other sites are really none ofGoogle’s business and should not get your site banned or penalized.

So what’s the problem?

Well, many of ads that are bought on websites are not necessarily purchased for the targeted traffic they may bring, but instead is an attempt to influence the link popularity of your site via the backlinks.

Google has made it clear that they do not like the practice of purchasing links. They want good, well-liked content to attract visitors. They also want webmasters and advertisers to by their form of text link known as Adsense.

To the various search engines, a link is supposed to mean that someone thinks the site or a specific page is useful or interesting and wants others to be aware of it. In and of itself this is very true, however Google (and Yahoo at one point with WebRank) made it obvious to webmasters and marketers that, if they want to be found via an organic web search, they may need to increase their PageRank. One big way to do this is via backlinks, which is a link back to your site.

Unfortunately, a link could mean many things in this day and age. It could be that the webmaster wants to advertise, link to something interesting, trade links with another website, or even point out something negative about another site. How is Google going to know why someone links to something? They really cannot. They can tailor and improve their algorithm and what the spiders follow, but they still are relying on people to investigate and report “violators”, in other words, those who buy or trade links or other “schemes”, as they put it.

The good news for Google and the like (and perhaps the bad news for test link brokers) is that most text link ads and the sites that sell them can tend to leave a noticeable identifiers behind in the code. It would not be any trouble for a search engine to look into the latest identifiers are, find all pages with them, and not allow them to pass any link popularity. This is not a penalty necessarily. This would be a way for the search engines to count only “votes” and not ads or purchased links. The ads would still be worth your effort for the traffic they bring, but not for providing you any link popularity. With that your rankings could drop if it was heavily dependent upon the link popularity of the purchased links or advertising.

It’s not a matter of ‘if’ this will happen with paid text link ads, but ‘when’. For now, if you’re buying text link ads, keep in mind that when the time comes that Google no longer allows these links to pass “link juice”, your rank could be negatively effected. The biggest losers will likely be those that sell text link advertising. If you just focus on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) and not on the PageRank, you will be fine.

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What is the rel=”nofollow” html tag?

The rel=”nofollow” html tag that was incorporated by Google in late 2004 or early 2005 is and was meant to discourage spamming, particularly for bloggers. From Google’s official blog posted on 1/18/2005 “From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.”

It is used as <a href=”http://www.example.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Visit my super cool porn site</a>

Adding the nofollow attribute to hyperlinks will not pass any “link juice” to the receiving site. Unfortunately, By removing the PageRank value of links that Google pioneered, people have far less incentive to contribute. The concern is that with less incentive to contribute comes a more stagnent website and therefore world wide web in general. This perception may or may not have merit, but the growing response has been toward “dofollow”, which is not an attribute, but the name of a movement toward allowing the link juice or link love to be passed along.

The method of preventing spamming of the comment fields has been leaning toward such things as the Akismet plugin for blogging software, such as Wordpress.

The following shows the value placed on this attribute by the major search engines.

You may have noticed Google, Yahoo, and MSN showing different links to your site, known as backlinks. The above would explain why there is a difference as to what is indexed. Google does not index sites coming from a nofollow link, but Yahoo does.

What are the best methods to show if a link uses the rel=”nofollow” attribute?

Use the Firefox browser and install the SEO Quake plugin. It will highlight every nofollow link in a pink color. There are many other valuable tools available for Firefox. You can find them on Firefox’s plugin page by typing in ‘SEO’ or ‘pagerank’.

In conclusion

I do not believe that the nofollow attribute is the answer and only stifles the growth of the internet, particularly blogs. The best answer is to use Capcha Turing, blacklists, and approval of comments.

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SEO experts dedicate much of their time doing their search engine optimization  for Google and, to a degree,  one or two of the other main search engines. There is not anything against it and it is very  logical, believing that being at the top of  Google’s SERP  is the lion’s share in Web popularity but quite often, no matter how you proceed, being toward the top of Google does not happen. Or sometimes, the price you need to pay (not only literally, but in terms of effort and time) to be at the top of Google SERP’s and stay there is too high. Perhaps we should state here the biggest SEO horror - being banned by Google, in which you simply cannot  use Google and no matter whether you like it or not, you have  to have a look at other possible alternatives.

What are Google Alternatives?

The first alternative to Google is quite obvious - optimize for the remaining main search engines, if you have not done so already. Yahoo! and MSN can bring you enough new visitors, although sometimes it is virtually impossible to optimize for the three of them at the same time because of the differences in their spider algorithms. You could also optimize your website for (or at least submit to) some of the other search engines (Lycos, Excite, Netscape, etc.) but keeping in mind that they barely have over 3-5% of the Web search traffic, so do not expect much.  They may not provide much value to SEO

Another alternative to increase your SEO results is to submit to search directories (often known as Web Directories) and/or specialized search engines.  Submitting to the optimal directories might prove better than optimizing for Live (MSN), for example. Specialized search engines and portals have the advantage that the audience they attract often consists of people who are interested in a particular topic and if this is your topic, you can get to your target audience directly. It is true that specialized search engines will not bring you nearly as many visitors, as if you were at the top of Google SERP’s, but the quality of these website visitors will be extremely high.

We cannot forget other SEO options like posting to blogs and forums or paid advertisements.

Web Directories
What is a Web Directory?

Web directories (or as they are sometimes known - search directories) existed before the search engines, especially Google, became popular. As the name implies, web directories are simply directories in which different resources are gathered. An example of this would be Yahoo in its early days, although Yahoo and Google both have their own directories.  Another would be the DMOZ, although it can be quite a challenge getting listed.  Web directories are just huge collections of links to web sites, arranged into different categories. The web sites in a Web directory are listed in some specific order (most often alphabetically) and users browse through the categories.  Some are based upon a bid process or for paying for featured listings for a period of time.  Although many Web directories offer a way to search , search directories are fundamentally different from general search engines in the two specific ways - most directories are edited by humans and URLs are not gathered automatically by spiders but submitted by the site webmasters. The main advantage of Web directories is that no matter how smart spiders may  become, when there is a human toreview and check the websites, and there is less of a chance that pages will be listed in the wrong categories. The problems with the first difference are that the listings in web directories are sometimes out of date, if no person was available to do the editing and checking for some time and that sometimes you may have to wait as long as a half a year before being listed in a search directory.

The second difference - there are often no spiders - meaning that you must go and submit your URL to the search directory, rather than wait for the spider to come to your site. Fortunately, this is done only once for each directory, so it is not that bad.  Also, there are programs and tools to automate the entering of data into the forms on these web directories.

Once you are included in a particular directory, in most cases you can stay there as long as you wish to and wait for people (and search engines) to find you. The fact that a link to your site appears in a respectable Web directory is good because first, it is a backlink and second, you increase your visibility for spiders, which in turn raises your chance to be indexed by them.

Examples of Web Directories

There are hundreds and thousands of search directories but undoubtedly the most popular one is DMOZ. It is a general purpose search directory and it accepts links to all kinds of sites.  The Best of the Web is one of the oldest Web directories around and it still keeps to high standards in selecting sites.  There is a fee to being listed in many of these well established web directories.

Specialized Search Engines

What is a Specialized Search Engine?

Specialized search engines are another  tool to include in your SEO tool bag. Unlike genera search engines, specialized search engines index the pages for specific  topics only and very often there are many, many pages that cannot be found in the genera search engines but only in the specialized ones. Some of the specialized search engines are huge sites that actually host the resources they link to, or used to be search directories but have evolved to include links not only to sites that were submitted to them. There are many specialized search engines for practically every  topic and it is always good to be aware of the various specialized search engines for your genre.

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Here’s a clever tool from Webconfs.com . It’s called the Backlink Builder and searches for sites that may backlink with you.

“This tools searches for websites of the theme you specify that contain keyphrases like “Add link”, “Add site”, “Add URL”, “Add URL”, “Submit URL”, “Add Article” etc. Most of the results could be quality potential backlinks.“

Feel free to use it as much as you like.

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1. Write Eye Catching Headlines

Headlines are the most important aspect of blogging and writing articles both from an SEO standpoint but also from a reader standpoint . Make taking the time that it took you to write the article worth it by coming up with a headline that will pop

2. Write Fun Articles or Blog Entries

Take the time to write good, interesting posts in your blogs and articles. Short, 200 word posts will not garner much attention or interest from readers. Content is king!

3. Visual Content

Visual display of the article or blog is to blogging like curb-appeal is to real estate. Make sure your theme and general layout of your blog or site will keep the person looking around and wanting to come back. Use imagery and videos too! It also helps to attract links to your site.

4. Converting a New Visitors to your Blog or website into Regular Readers

Getting new visitors is not enough. You need your visitors to stick around. Give them a reason to come back and, even better, tell their friends about your site.

5. Linkbaiting, good or bad?

Linkbaiting is an art in itself. It may be considered blackhat by some, but it is the reason people backlink in the first place. Who would want to link to something if there is nothing worthwhile to link to. Write catchy news articles, sensational thoughts, list jokes or images that will give the reader a reason to link to you.

6. Keep Blogging and Writing on Your Site

There’s nothing worse than old, no longer up to date content. Keep writing, find someone else to write or find another hobby or business.

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