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Answers by SEO Consultant Nick Stamoulis #2

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SEO Answers #2

This is the second part of my SEO series, I hope you’ve enjoyed the first SEO answers post, and thanks again for submitting your great search engine optimization questions. In this post I am going to answer some of the other questions I’ve got, and will publish the final part soon.

→ Question #6

Which of the following is more powerful in optimization

  • web 2.0 properties
  • article submission
  • wiki content
  • profiling
  • social bookmarking
  • high PR blog commenting
  • directory
  • press release
  • forum

Granting the PR and relevance are the same. → by John

Answer:

John,

Thanks for taking the time to leave a comment today.

To answer your question, no one form of link building is more powerful or valuable than any other. In fact, it’s good to take a diversified approach for numerous reasons.

First off, you never want to put all your eggs in one basket. If Google decided tomorrow that all blog comments were black hat and blog comments made up the bulk of your link portfolio, you’d be in serious trouble! Secondly, the search engines like to see a slow, natural approach to link building because it’s a sign that you aren’t trying to game the system and trick the search engines. A site that goes from zero links to 10,000 links overnight probably isn’t playing by the rules.

Keep in mind that a link building campaign is going to be different for every site based on industry, life cycle, objectives and so forth. Some sites might focus more on online PR over social bookmarking because that makes sense for them. The thing to remember is to focus on quality, not quantity.

→ Question #7

I have a question on the way Google indexes the backlinks compared to Yahoo. When you look in Google for “site:www.xxx.xxx”, versus Yahoo Site Explorer the indexed backlins are significantly lower in Google. Is there a stricter criteria Google looks for over Yahoo? → By Mohamed Osam

Answer:

Hi Mohamed,

Since Bing now powers Yahoo search, I’ve stopped using Yahoo Site Explorer. I would recommend sticking with the Google Webmaster Tools for a more accurate link audit. You can also compare the link you find there to some 3rd party link audit tools like SEOMoz and LinkDiagnosis if you’re worried you’re not getting the complete picture.

Thanks for stopping by.

→ Question #8

My question would be, is getting a backlinks from a (PR0) inner page of a… lets says PR5 domain is more powerhouse than a backlink from an inner page (PR0) of a domain with lower PR? → By Satrap

Answer:

Hi Satrap. Thanks for the question.

PageRank is an important factor to Google, but it shouldn’t be the deciding factor in whether or not it’s a good site to get a link from. In my opinion, PageRank isn’t the end-all-be-all measurement of a site’s value anymore. I think it’s more important to look at the site and ask yourself if you think you could get targeted traffic from it. You might end up missing out on some really great links because you were looking for sites that had a higher PageRank.

Hope that helps.

→ Question #9

Greetings! I actually do have a question in mind for which I’ve gotten many responses and would like your opinion. (being who you are!).

I heard that when google “sees” 2 identical articles on different blogs, the second one written is sort of penalized and by that I mean that it won’t show up in the searches or something like that.

Anyhow, I was wondering: I usually post half of an article that I have on my blog, on other sites in order to backlink to mine and get them to visit my site. Am I in any way penalized for the fact that the same article (or half of it at least) shows up again and again on different sites/blogs/forums?

Thanks in advance. → By Jonathan

Answer:

As long as you aren’t posting pieces of your content on other sites that YOU own to drive traffic back to another one of your sites, you should be ok. Industry sites, social networking sites, social bookmarking sites and so forth thrive on content that was published somewhere else. The search engines are smart and can tell the difference between an article that has been published on a dozen spam blogs and a great piece of content that is getting shared and passed around.

Thanks for stopping by.

→ Question #10

How can one remove the unwanted crappy inbound linking done by a previous SEO company for a domain if it is reflecting in the WMT as external links. → By Wasim Ismail

Answer:

Good question Wasim, and one that I get asked a lot.

Before you start worrying about how to get rid of crappy inbound links, you need to assess the situation. Do you currently have a penalty? Does it look like a penalty could happen in the near future? What percentage of your inbound links is coming from low quality sites? If your site has 10,000 links and 20 of them are bad I wouldn’t be too worried; your portfolio is strong enough to handle them. If you only have 100 links and 20 are crappy, that’s a whole different story. You need to determine how important it is to get those links removed and if it’s worth the time—mostly because there is no quick way to do it.

If you were working with an SEO company and they were responsible for your link building, I would reach out to them and ask them to remove the links you don’t want anymore. If it’s a black hat company, some of the links may be coming from a link farm that they own and use for their own clients. Keep in mind that if you are no longer their client they aren’t going to put a rush on your request.

You can also manually reach out to the site owner of every site you don’t want an inbound link from and ask them to remove it.

It’s unfortunate, but sometimes you are going to be stuck with crappy links. Focus on building up the rest of your link portfolio to make up for it.

Best of luck.

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SEO Series

About

Nick Stamoulis is the President and Founder of Brick Marketing. With over 12 years of experience Nick Stamoulis has worked with hundreds of companies small, large and every size in between. Through his vast and diverse SEO, search engine marketing and internet marketing experience Nick Stamoulis has successfully increased the 
online visibility and sales of clients in all industries.

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{ 11 Responses }

  1. AstroGremlin says:
    Nick, appreciate the guidance. A boom in link building could flag that one is not playing by the rules. I do all mine by commenting these days so the pace is not alarming. I was wondering if a burst in traffic could have a negative effect? When I "discover" one of my posts in Stumbleupon, I get a tremendous burst in traffic and then it wanes in a matter of hours. Curious about why this happens and how it is perceived by algorithms.
  2. sudha says:
    Once your product is approved you have to work on the promotion of the giveaway event itself. This can be a puzzling request if you’re in the situation of having a small list… but you can always resort to traffic exchanges, forums, or even the good old classified ad sites to let other people know. You might not get a horde of subscribers the first time but remember that one-by-one is how to build your list!
  3. Louis says:
    I'm agree that PR isn't the deciding factor of a website's ranking or number of visitors. There are hundreds more only Google knows.
  4. Mohamed Osam says:
    Thanks Nick for your answer. True, Google is definately more important than any other search engine, 95% of my search referrers are coming from Google.
  5. Jarret says:
    Hey Nick, Good thoughts! when I first launched my multi-author site, it was impossible to get guest authors because the site had few if any inbound links and zero page rank. At the time, though I didn't put all of my eggs into one basket, most of my link building efforts ultimately went to waste relative to effort/results. I used lots of now defunct do follow sites like propeller :( Comparatively, guest blog posting has been a far more effective strategy (with 20/20 hindsight) though even still some of the better articles that I wrote are no longer indexed because the sites that I submitted them to are no longer live. On that note, my advice for anyone link building is to keep that in mind in terms of the time/effort invested in building links (i.e. writing a guest blog post or submitting multiple links to a single site) with consideration of the longevity of the site you're submitting to! It's a crappy feeling to see lots of hard work go down the drain when a site you've used shuts down.
  6. dhanna says:
    I've learned a lot. Now,I'm actually enlightened on how to do SEO and where to do it, don't care if it's NF or DF. Google wants people who works fairly and naturally. Thanks. Hope to read more post about internet marketing's latest trend.
  7. Pritam says:
    Hi Nick, Its really a great question answer session on SEO. I liked the last question which I was asking myself from long time. Yes, you are right that we don't have complete control on the links created by 3rd person. Its very difficult to remove those lower quality backlinks. I would love to check previous 5 question and answer page link.
  8. Ivan Walsh says:
    Hey Nick, Do backlinks from social media sites have different values? ie weights in Google index?
  9. JohnC says:
    I usually ask these questions specially the SEO part. It gave me complete answers and I'm contented about it.Thanks. It's worth my time reading your article.
  10. طراحی کاتالوگ says:
    It is apparent that they discounted alot of links after 26 SEP 2011 Panda Update. My rank tanked for a few competitive keywords but I ranked for non competitve keywords. Totally my visitors got increased after panda update.
  11. Darren says:
    It's interesting that people are interested in getting rid of backlinks. Despite Google always claiming that negative SEO doesn't work, it must if people want to remove low quality links to their websites.