There’s been some controversy in SEO land this week. Matt Cutts, Google’s mouthpiece for linking policies, stated publicly that websites heavily involved with paid links are considered high risk. Many of the SEO pros in the blogosphere took offense to this and feel that Google is profiling search engine optimized websites unfairly.

The issue of contention revolves around paid links – buying or selling links for money. Google often discredits these links because it does not see them as valuable or quality based. Anyone that has the money can buy links to their site, in the hopes that it will boost their rankings in Google searches. Google doesn’t want this, however, because this type of linking is not based on quality and occasionally pushes the envelope of black hat.

The paid linking penalty would probably be somewhat less offensive to SEO professionals if Google itself didn’t use paid linking strategies. Google does indeed use money and giveaways, such as free Android phones to bloggers, in an attempt to gather links and positive publicity.

They both have a point. Most of the paid link sites out there are shady in some way – their sites do not boast the highest content quality available. On the other side of the coin, Google is being hypocritical by punishing quality websites for using free product giveaways and surveys to get links when they do the same thing.

Google could probably do well to revisit how exactly it determines paid links. If a site is doing a free product giveaway and collecting reviews in the form of links or comments, that isn’t black hat SEO, that’s just traditional marketing. Relaxing the barriers slightly could help.

My solution to the problem is to stay classy. Unlike some of my more excitable blogging counterparts, I do not believe that Google is saying that any and all SEO efforts will be penalized. SEO in itself is not a dishonest activity. SEO is a way of improving your website to be more relevant and consumer friendly. As long as SEO companies stay focused on the client and stay away from questionable activities such as buying links from link farms, I don’t see why there should be a problem. Links collected to or from your website should be from credible sources, regardless of what Google is saying or doing.

-Rachel

More and more recently, we are seeing SEO clients who are utilizing non-SEO friendly menu systems for the primary navigation on their websites.  While the menu may perform great functions and/or be easy to create through Dreamweaver or some other website editing program, the effects of the menu on their organic search engine traffic could be devastating.  The worst part, is that the business/site owner has no idea that they are limiting their SEO capabilities by using the menu.

So how do you know if your menu is not search engine friendly?

Read more »

Most, if not all, reputable SEO companies tout the benefits of social linking for a website. If you’ve ever wanted to see some proof – or a breakdown of what exactly social media will do for you – I have just what you’ve been looking for.

MarketingSherpa (a reputable research organization that specializes in tracking marketing trends and has been praised by The Economist and Entrepreneur.com) recently conducted a case study on the effectiveness of social media in a couple different arenas. As anyone familiar with social media and search engine optimization would expect, the results put a very positive spin on social media and the value of linking.

Social Linking Effectiveness Breakdown

As you can see in the chart, social media has been shown to influence brand reputation by 39% and increase brand awareness by 37%. Social media helps improve search engine rankings by 38%. In all instances, social media was considered at least somewhat effective.

Social media can incorporate blogging, posting websites and information on networks such as Digg and StumbleUpon, directory submissions, issuing press releases and more. It increases your website’s visibility and presence on the internet, making it more likely for your site to rank well in search engines. Naturally, increased visibility and presence means increased website traffic as well.

Qualified SEO companies will help you strategize and develop a social media campaign that specifically targets your market audience and best publicizes your particular service or product. 

On November 7th LinkedIn announced that they are launching a new feature: LinkedIn Events. This feature combines social networking and search with a unique twist for business professionals to find events that may be most beneficial to their networking endeavors.

How it Works
Members will receive notices on their Events home page about events that are recommended based on their interests (preferences already established with the creation of a LinkedIn account). Events can also be searched for by location, date and even specific industry.

Why it’s Useful
Even with a valuable tool such as this, it wouldn’t be social networking without providing the capability of a somewhat “mass appeal”. Therefore, LinkedIn also allows users to see who will be attending a particular event. Users can additionally indicate their own attendance status - basically a social RSVP.

Those who indicate interest for a particular event can keep track of updates. Plus, after the event, can check back to see all that took place up to the event: those in attendance, discussions, etc.

Overall, the LinkedIn Events feature benefits the target audience of LinkedIn users: business-oriented individuals looking to do some professional social networking. The site, founded in December of 2002, has more than 30 million registered users and spans 150 industries. With such an “in-demand” audience, LinkedIn is sure to create even more exponentially helpful tools and features like LinkedIn Events real soon…entrepreneurs (and business-minded professionals alike) take notice!

For more information on social networking (or linking) check out our Social Media Marketing blog category or visit us at MorePro.com to learn more.

Brittany Passante

PageRank has been pretty dependent on linking for a while now.  It’s well known that the more incoming links you have pointing to your website, the higher the authority Google assigns to it.  Linking has progressed to be more detail oriented in relation to Algorithms.  In fact most of your page’s ranking on Google is not just dependent on the amount of quality links pointing to your website, but how it is linked.

Google now takes into account several attributes which include, but are not limited to:

• Authority level
• PageRank
• IP class

In order to procure several good quality inbound links to pages on your website, it is imperative to have a dynamic strategy to your approach.

Blogs
Blogging is a very effective way to acquire quick links.  A good strategy is review related website blogs and comment to promote your own website.  There are several websites out there that offer professional blog reviewers for hire, or you yourself can commit your personal time to accomplish similar goals.

Search Engine Optimized Articles
Writing good quality articles with keywords strategically placed is another great way to get high quality inbound links.  Obviously you’ll want to stick with content related to your website. Submitting them to article directories provides a very speedy way of obtaining those links.  Adding these articles into your newsletters will add to the incoming links as well as keep your reader/client/customer involved with the presence of your services.  To top it off, it establishes you as an expert in your field.

Good Old Fashioned Reciprocal Linking
There is an ongoing debate whether or not reciprocal linking is as effective as it once was.  Obviously, a good, organic one way link from an authoritative site to your own is definitely the best link to procure, however just not easy in multiples.  In my own 4+ years of experience with-in the field, I have found that reciprocal links continue to offer great value.  Not only have I seen PageRank increase because of reciprocal linking, but it also introduces all kinds of other advertising opportunities.

(Reference: http://www.sitepronews.com/2008/07/29/top-3-google-seo-linking-strategies/)

Jennifer Kaufman
Linking Strategist

One of the easiest automated methods of acquiring links these days is using software to auto-fill comments on related blogs, forums, Pligg sites, etc. (Note: MorePro does not use automated methods of building links; we build all links manually).  There are many blog commenting tools to choose from, including Comment Kahuna, which has a pretty simple interface and good reporting tools.  Kahuna is not an auto-filling blog comment tool, but it does walk you through each blog step-by-step as you attempt to build incoming links to your website.

The problems that occur, of course, are that most of the blogs that get identified are using “nofollow” tags in their commenting systems.  To some, including the creator of the Kahuna program, links are valuable regardless of where they are placed or if the nofollow tag is being used.  While I have some belief that this is accurate, I don’t feel that submitting to nofollowed blogs is a good use of time & resources.  I believe that all references to a domain, nofollowed or not, can help to build the authority of that website (or author) and that at some point, the authority may help factor into the site’s rankings.  But in the interest of client’s money and the work that we complete, our intentions are always to target high-quality, relevant links.

The argument also exists that commenting on blogs with the nofollow tags enabled will help drive additional traffic to your website (via browsing readers).  While not completely far fetched, the amount of traffic you could get from something like this is minimal at best.

Ultimately, the process of acquiring good blog links (comments or other) boils down to participation and community involvement.  If you add value to an existing conversation and slowly build yourself up as a contributor, it becomes more likely that links you include in your comments and/or relationships you build with the blog owner will develop into something tangible.

Cory Howell
SEO Strategist