How to deal with bad inbound links

Official Google statement: how to deal with bad inbound links

Many webmasters think that low quality links or links from spammy websites can have a negative effect on the ranking of their websites on Google.

The problem with links from spammy websites is that it is very difficult to do something against them. For example, a competitor could add your website to a link farm network or the competitor could spam with your URL.

Google statement

Google has released an official statement about spammy links

This month, Google published an official statement about low quality links in their webmaster blog. Here are the main statements:

1. Linking is a significant factor in Google's ranking algorithm but it is just one of many factors. Other factors are the content of your web pages, the site structure and the appearance of a keyword in the different web page elements.

2. If you have a high quality website and get links from spammy websites, try to contact the website owners and ask them to remove their links. Google will not help you with that.

3. It the webmasters of the spammy website are not cooperative, don't worry and focus on the links that are under your control.

4. Google recommends to optimize the many factors than influence indexing and ranking. The top 10 optimizer in our website optimization tool has been designed for exactly that task.

It analyzes dozens of factors that influence the position of your website in the search results and it shows you what exactly you have to change so that Google will list your website on the first result page.

5. Google says that low-quality links rarely stand the test of time and that they may not be considered by Google's ranking algorithm.

6. If you want to make sure Google knows about the spammy links and is valuing them appropriately, you can report them to Google with their spam report or paid links report forms.

What does this mean for the rankings of your website?

Low quality links are usually links from low quality websites. These website usually have low Google rankings and they cannot pass much ranking power to other websites. For that reason, you shouldn't worry too much about links to your website that you cannot control. Better focus on the following:

* Create high quality web pages with a good website navigation and optimized web page content. Make sure that all web page elements contain the right information so that Google will list your website for the right keywords.

* Try to get high quality links to your website. The more high quality links your website has, the less impact have links from spammy websites.

To get an overview of the websites that link to your website, select IBP > Links > Add sites > Find existing backlinks to your site in our SEO tool IBP. IBP will show you the URL of the web page that links to you, the anchor text, the PageRank, TrafficRank and IP address of the linking pages and more.

IBP will also show you the websites that link to your competitors, blogs that could link to your website and much more.


View the Original article

search engine optimization seo sacramento

The abstract of the publication shows that PageRank was meant as a way to fight web spam:

"Web spam pages use various techniques to achieve higher-than-deserved rankings in a search engine's results. While human experts can identify spam, it is too expensive to manually evaluate a large number of pages. Instead, we propose techniques to semi-automatically separate reputable, good pages from spam.

We first select a small set of seed pages to be evaluated by an expert. Once we manually identify the reputable seed pages, we use the link structure of the web to discover other pages that are likely to be good [...]

Our results show that we can effectively filter out spam from a significant fraction of the web, based on a good seed set of less than 200 sites."

Today, all major search engines use some kind of TrustRank

Although Google does not use the official term, most professional search engine optimizers are quite sure that Google and all other major search engines use the same concept to improve the quality of their search results.

That means that it is not enough to get as many links as possible. It is also necessary that your website gets links from the right kind of websites and that search engines trust your site.

Trust

How to become a trusted website

There are a few things that you can do to show search engines that your website is trustworthy:

1. Get links from seed sites or from websites that are linked from seed sites

Seed sites are websites that are manually marked as trustworthy by the search engine owners. For example, if Apple.com has been chosen as a seed website by the search engine a link from Apple.com will have a positive effect on the TrustRank of your website.

If Apple.com links to website X, website X links to website Y and website Y links to your website then your website will still get a good TrustRank.

2. Get an old domain name with a good domain history

The older your domain is, the better. If your domain has been online for several years, this is a signal that the website owner is serious about the site and it's less likely that the domain is used for spamming purposes.

Your domain name should not have changed the owner too often and it should not have been used for many different topics. Of course, it also should not have been used by spammers in the past.

3. Get links from related websites

Does your website get links from related websites and does it link to other related websites? Is your website a lonely island with no links from and to other websites or is it integrated in a network that deals with a special topic?

4. Don't link to spam websites

You should not link to websites that are known spammers or to websites with dubious quality. If you link to such a website, you show search engines that you support them and that your own website should not be trusted too much.

5. Get many links from social networks

The more often your website is mentioned on social media websites, the more likely it is that your website is a trustworthy high quality website. The more votes your bookmarks on social media sites get, the better.

6. Offer good content and stay away from certain topics

It is not likely that a website that consists of only one page is an authority website. If your website has many pages that contain great content about a special topic then it is much easier to get a good TrustRank.

If your website deals with a special topic, then it's likely that it never will get a high TrustRank. These topics are the topics for which you receive the most spam emails.

If search engines trust your website, it is much easier to get high rankings.

View the Original article

Google's human reviewers: real people judge about your Google rankings

Google's human reviewers: real people judge about your Google rankings

Most people think that Google purely ranks websites by using mathematical formulas. Google even has an official statement about the way that search results are calculated: "A site's ranking in Google's search results relies heavily on computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page's relevance to a given query. Sometimes subtleties of language cause anomalies to appear that cannot be predicted." Not everything is done by software robots at Google If you read the above quotation carefully, you'll see that Google relies "heavily" but not fully on computer algorithms. In a recent interview, Google's Engineering director Scott Huffman explained that a lot of human reviewers (probably 10,000) manually review Google's results: "Every day, we are looking at a random sample of grades that we think represent the queries we get from users. Evaluators look at the quality of each result relative to those queries." Real people take a look at Google's search results and they tell Google which websites they don't like. If your website looks spammy, it might be reported to Google by these people. Google's algorithm is constantly changing Google constantly updates its algorithm based on the feedback of the human reviewers: "The evaluation site ratings that we gather never directly affect the search results that we return. We never go back and say, 'Oh, we learned from a rater that this result isn’t as good as that one, so let's put them in a different order.' Doing something like that would skew the whole evaluation by-and-large. So we never touch it." That means that a website won't be automatically removed from the search results if a human reviewer finds it inappropriate (unless it is an obvious spam page). It does mean that Google's algorithm is constantly changing and that you have to keep your website up-to-date with Google's latest algorithm. You have to keep an eye on your website rankings A website that has high rankings on Google today might lose these rankings tomorrow based on Google's ever-changing ranking algorithm. As a rule of thumb, websites with many inbound links and good content that is related to the searched keyword will remain much longer in Google's search results than websites that obtained their high rankings through tricks. If you use spammy SEO methods, you can quickly get high rankings on search engines. Unfortunately, Google will completely remove your website from the search results as soon as they find out that you use these methods: Spammy websites can be detected by Google's human reviewers and your competitors can report your spam website to Google. If you use ethical SEO methods, it will take longer until you get high search engine rankings. However, your rankings will grow steadily and you'll get a much better performance in the long run: Do not use spammy SEO methods to increase your rankings on Google. It will backfire on you. If you want to get lasting rankings on Google, you have to keep an eye on Google's changing algorithm. You should check your website regularly to find out if it is compliant to Google's current algorithm. If you create a website that is compliant to Google's algorithm and only use ethical SEO methods then your website will get page one rankings on Google and it will keep these rankings as long as possible.

View the Original article

Reciprocal links: are they great, crap or something in between?

Reciprocal links are discussed controversially among search engine marketers. Some think that reciprocal links are great, others think that they are a waste of time, another group thinks that reciprocal links work to some degree.

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

View the Original article