Yes, I’ve been neglectful here. I’ve been devoting my time to the Self-Publishing Review, which is growing steadily. Also I’ve been devoting time to two new sites where I’m doing pro blogging and/or promotion work:
BankLoans.com - A very high-quality site with an amazingly strong URL for a new site.
biOasis - Blogging for a biotechnology firm involved in Alzheimer’s Disease research.
Neostead - SEO Web Design and Internet Marketing
Check them out.
Given the fact that I offer a manual directory submission service, it might not show the greatest business sense to link to this service, but it’s useful if you want to save some money on directory submissions and save time on going from site to site making separate submissions. Easy Submits is kind of like a Social Marker for directory submissions. I say kind of because it’s not perfect by any means. What’s missing from Easy Submits is the “Next” feature that makes it so easy to scroll through social directories at Social Marker.
Then again, Social Marker doesn’t always work perfectly either. Sometimes it can quit on you. Not the worst thing to have to reload, and one shouldn’t complain too much about a free service. Easy Submits works by the same principle: you write in your -
The last one is the most important because it will submit the same relevant category to each directory. This is what makes manual submission so tedious – having to scroll through the directory list at every site and finding the correct category, or even figuring out which site needs you to select a category, let alone which site requires a complete registration and verification process.
So being able to do this all in one site can save a lot of time and headache. The site is for real: you’re going to receive submission emails back just as if you submitted your site on the directory itself. The ability to input information on one form makes it much easier to mix up your titles and descriptions – vital for SEO. Submit to 50 sites with one description, input another description, then submit to 50 more.
On the downside, the engine is not as efficient as it could be – and the site can run very slow in between sites. It would be helpful if sites were listed by page rank. As it stands now, you need to click the page rank button and the scroll through pages upon pages of low-ranked sites before you reach the 3’s and 4’s and above. And I’d like to ignore that on the main page “Free Directory Submission have never been easier” should be “has never been easier.” But those problems aside, directory submitting is a pain. And it’s still important for SEO. I was able to take this site to a PR 3 in little over a month using a moderately-aggressive dofollow comment strategy, forum comments, and directory submissions – not much more. So directory listings can be effective.
Also, I got a fair number of those submissions accepted in a short period, which did not damage the site’s rank. Most directories will take weeks or even months to approve your site, so your approvals will happen over time even if you manually submit the sites all at once.
Site note: I was informed that my dofollow comments were no longer showing up dofollow. I’m running the plugin, so no reason that should be. I went into the plugin, saved the settings again, and dofollow was restored. Just be aware that plugins aren’t perfect and things like this can happen.
Google may be like God, but Google is also imperfect. So imperfect that Google spiders can’t differentiate between the original source of an article and some spam site that picks it up. What can happen in this case is that your own site is docked for the duplicate content and the thief gets to receive the index. That’s spamming 101: spammers don’t do it just to be a nuisance but because spamming works. Even if the site doesn’t receive indexing for a page, it still fills up the site with content, giving the site the appearance of having useful information to anyone who surfs by.
So all in all you need to be very careful – if not downright paranoid – about duplicate content. It happens to everybody: not just huge sites that get a lot of traffic, but small start-up blogs as well. The bots that roam around looking for content and bots don’t care if you’re big or small – it just wants the content. And smaller bloggers are going to be less vigilant about looking out for duped content, especially since it can be an extra expense to catch bots in the act.
There are other cases where duplicate content could be a problem as well: hiring a content writer. Anytime you hire a copywriter to generate content, you should check to see if that content hasn’t been placed somewhere else online. If you’re at the level where you can pay for content, you can certainly pay for plagiarism software. You can see offers for dirt cheap content all over the web and you wonder how they do it: well, they do it by writing content once and selling it as many times as possible. Look out for this. And hire me instead ; )
Checking for Online Plagiarism
There are some basic steps you can take to spot plagiarism. The most obvious and easiest thing to do is to put the content into Google with quotes around it and see if it turns up somewhere else. However, this does nothing to actually monitor the current content you have on your site, so you should use a monitoring software program: I won’t go into all the plagiarism software (at least not here) because you really can’t do much better than Copyscape. Though you can use Copyscape for free to check certain web pages one at a time (useful), if you’ve got a growing website, it’s virtually impossible to check each page by hand, every day. The Copysentry program (not an affiliate, linking because it’s good) will monitor the web for duplicates. To my mind this is as important a program as anti-virus and anti-spyware.
Hint: You can download buttons for your site showing that it’s copy protected even if you don’t buy the software. This will do nothing to stop bots, but it looks nice:
Another method to spot plagiarism is to use Google Alerts. This is like a free version of Copyscape, where you can plug in some text (up to 30 words) and Google will inform you if there’s another version of the same content. Note: use quotes around the text or you’re going to be getting alerts for every site that uses the words “the” or “and.” Drawbacks: it’s only thirty words so it could miss parts of your content being scraped, but the first sentences are usually good enough to catch plagiarists. Drawback 2: if you’ve got an existing large site, creating an alert for every single page is…worth it to buy a subscription to Copysentry.
Catching Online Plagiarism
Those methods only deal with part of the problem. What do you do if you find
plagiarism online. There are a couple of steps you should take:
Preserve the evidence. This is an illegal act, remember, and if you want to take action you’ve got to have as much to prove your case as possible. Take a screenshot, use Google cache, or go to Archive.org.
Contact the webmaster. Easy enough – if it’s a personal site, contact the webmaster and see if the person responds. If he doesn’t, that’s why you have gathered your evidence. If it’s on an article site like Goarticles, contact that directory’s webmaster. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to find some plagiarists who use bots and then place the content on a free blogging platform that uses a shared server. Otherwise, you can use a tool like Domaintools.com to find who owns a domain or Whoishostingthis to see where the site is hosted – if it’s a non-generic domain (a cool tool, recommend you take a look, if only to see who hosts Drudgereport or something else).
Next: contact Google. You want to contact every major search engine, but start with Google. One of the great advantages of using Google Alerts is that you have built-in evidence and it will easier to have something cleared. Filing a complaint with Google can be a hassle – it needs a handwritten signature, it can’t just be done through e-mail, and it takes time, so you want to avoid this process whenever possible.
Two meta posts in a row. Apologies for the dearth of posting, holidays kept me busy. I’ve also been pouring my time into a new niche blog, the Self-Publishing Review. I’ve self-published in the past. This would be a good time to reveal my secret identity. I’m this guy. I write fiction and songs. Part of me didn’t want to reveal who I am because the stuff I impart here is VERY different than the fiction I write, as I tend to write books about crazed psychopaths. Doesn’t really scream, “Search Engine Optimization.” But there it is.
I’m excited about the prospects for the new litblog site. It’s an open niche – a magazine covering every aspect of self-publishing. As a person who’s self-published (and traditionally published here and overseas) it’s a tough road to promote a self-published book and get it taken seriously. So my plan for this site is to legitimize self-publishing and show there’s some good writing out there that doesn’t find a traditional publisher. My own novel, North of Sunset, got listed as the #1 novel in Entertainment Weekly and won the Hollywood Book Festival Grand Prize, so there’s a growing audience for these books.
On the SEO front, the Self-Publishing Review is already getting decent search engine traffic for vital keyphrases (love the URL!) It’s a site built for backlinks because there are so many author and blogsites willing to link to it. So I’ve got high hopes for it.
But how does a person like Garry Conn do it? Have a cadre of niche blogs AND caretake his own blog (what are his niche blogs anyway?) I’ve completed the initial set-up process so I’m confident I’ll be able to handle both now. If you’ve ever self-published in the past, please contact the site to become a writer/reviewer – you can use it to promote your site or book. This includes non-fiction ebooks, as the site intends to review all genres and formats, fiction and non-fiction.
So that’s the latest news, along with the fact that SEO Wordsmith now has a PR 3 after Google’s New Years’ update. Nice:
SEO Wordsmith brings you holiday greetings. Nothing could make your holiday season more special, or have you screaming in terror, than the Star Wars Christmas special. As one of the commenters says on Youtube, it’s still better than the prequels.
To throw around some Life Day cheer, here are the two people who have commented most since the inception of this blog:
Dennis from Direct Sales Web Marketing
Mark from Backlink Tactics
And in the spirit of Dennis Edell’s post about link love posts, here are a few sites that I haven’t gotten around to linking to yet, but deserve it:
JR’s Internet Marketing Strategies: 15 Great Wordpress plugins. JR’s site is a good model for anyone looking to start an internet marketing blog. Thorough posts on everything related to marketing – and she actually makes a living at it. I’ll have my own post upcoming about Wordpress SEO plugins.
Inline SEO has an amazingly thorough post on maximizing landing pages. You’re not going to find a better post on the topic. Every one of their “Module” posts is worth a read and worth linking to. And Inline SEO is dofollow so comment away.
A nod to Average Gal, who recently featured me in a link love post.
As always, Happy Life Day!
Update: Happy New Year!
You’ve probably heard that Google has a new social networking service – similar to the network widgets of Mybloglog and Blog Catalog. I’ve chosen not to add the widgets to my sidebar because I want to save real estate and attention for affiliate links – truth be told. The Google Friend Connect widget really does have the feeling more of a fully functioning network – i.e. something other people will click on more often and explore, rather than a place where bloggers themselves can monitor who’s visiting the site.
The main reason this is so is the drop down menus of Google Friend Connect. Rather than taking you to a different web page, Google Friend Connect reveals the other networks the person belongs to, their Google reader page, and other tools along the Google network. In this way, Google reader appears more like a place where you can add a legitimate link to a site. In contrast, adding yourself to a site’s “community” in Mybloglog gets lost in the wilderness of that community very quickly, especially for a large site.
It could be a case because Google Friend Connect is new and people are eager to try it out, but I’ve seen significant results from GFC already. For instance, I joined Mashable’s Friend network and saw a flurry of traffic (before my icon scrolled off the page a few hours later). The way that some blogs are using Google Friend Connect is much more prominent than Mybloglog and Blog Catalog widgets. A good example is the Raven Tools Blog.
There are also new services opening up, such as the Friend Connect Directory. Not a lot there right now, but its existence shows that marketers are going to be using this as a way to add links to sites that would never link back otherwise. These links don’t offer any page rank benefits, but all marketing isn’t about rank.
The flurry of interest and implementation of Google Friend Connect may just be because it’s a new tool – but because of this it’s important. Blog Catalog is getting a little grey – broken links, populated by spam sites, many users just adding themselves to a blog’s community without even visiting the blog. Blog Catalog sort of feels like Myspace: a few years ago, people actually paid attention to the people who were adding them. Now people are just looking to improve their friend count. Mybloglog is better, and the fact that links on Mybloglog are dofollow (they aren’t on Blog Catalog) is an added bonus.
How to Promote with Mybloglog, Google Friend Connect, and Blog Catalog
Unlike Mybloglog and Blog Catalog, Google friend connect offers static links – which is why it feels more like adding yourself to someone’s blogroll. With Mybloglog and Blog Catalog, your avatar will scroll off with new visitors. Of course, if a site gets a lot of visitors, like Mashable, your Friend Connect avatar is going to scroll off quickly – but there are sites that get a fair amount of visitors that have fewer Google Friends than they do Mybloglog visitors, so your Google Friend Connect avatar is going to remain on the main page for longer.
It’s really a different process using Mybloglog and Google Friend Connect. On Mybloglog, you surf around on the Mybloglog site itself, looking for new contacts and new communities to join. Same goes for Blog Catalog. This opens it up to a greater degree of spamming, as people just surf through Mybloglog adding sites at will without any regard for what they’re adding. Google Friend Connect is more of an on-site tool - meaning you have to visit the site and it will be more likely to be in your site’s niche. If you see the widget on the blog itself, click join and be an instant part of the site’s on-page content.
In all cases, I would recommend staying away from the picture avatar. Widget avatars are small enough already, and just putting up a picture of your smiling face is not really going to stand out from all the other smiling faces. If you’ve got another type of avatar, use it. I use this for the time being (which I stole):
I’d recommend also that you use the same avatar for each social network because over time people are going to come to recognize your stamp and be more likely to click on it. The widgets really inspire blog surfing because your avatar will register on the site whenever you visit. Which means if you’re really serious about bloglog/catalog/friendconnect marketing, you could bookmark popular sites that use the widgets to make sure that you always stay in the top results on the site’s widget. I see a post in my future: popular blogs that use social networking widgets. Look for it in the new year.
The dofollow movement, which I agree with, might make it seem like nofollow is the enemy and should never be used. Actually, nofollow can be useful for funneling page rank throughout a site. While I think dofollowing comments is a good way to inspire commenting and increasing e-Karma™ - even if it does drain page rank from your internal pages – there are times when nofollow can help increase the page rank flow throughout your site and help important pages rank better.
Remember, page rank is divvied out to each link on your site. So if you have 10 links on a site, each link will get 1/10th the page rank of the linking page. The more dofollow links you have, the less rank each link’s going to get. So you want to control this flow whenever possible. One last thing: Google doesn’t frown on nofollow. People worry that you might make your SEO plan transparent to Google, but Matt Cutts himself has remarked that Google is fine with using nofollow sporadically within a site – even to sculpt page rank. Given the number of high-profile sites that use nofollow, it is not likely that these terms will change.
Here’s a nofollow checklist:
1. Use nofollow when linking to affiliate programs. There is a myth that Google will dock you for having affiliate programs and this is why you should use nofollow for affiliate links. This isn’t the reason: having affiliate links on a page is fine, so long as you have a good amount of content so the site doesn’t come off as an affiliate farm – a variant on a link farm. It’s been recommended that you keep affiliate links below 25 links per page. One way around this is to nofollow affiliate links. More importantly, though, there’s no reason to send affiliate programs your page rank. Your affiliate links aren’t going to convert any worse or better if they’re dofollow. And affiliate programs don’t add important authority to your site, especially if your linking to other non-affiliates throughout your web content.
2. Nofollow any site that uses questionable linking tactics. Of course, you’d be better off not linking to them at all. But suppose an affiliate program has a great payout rate and also uses black hat. You’ll want to nofollow the link so you’re not docked for someone else’s unscrupulous methods.
3. Nofollow unimportant pages on your site. The importance of dofollow is to send rank to your important content-rich internal pages so they’ll be adequately ranked. Your copyright page, privacy policy, login page – basically any page where there’s no marketable content – does not necessarily need to rank in searches. However, your “About Us” or even your privacy page could potentially bring in searches so you want them indexed. It depends on the nature of the content on the page.
Generally, I would recommend focusing your nofollow structure on outbound links, not pages on your own site, because it’s good to have you site fully indexed. Check both your keyword analytics for internal pages and bounce rates to determine if a site requires indexing.
4. Nofollow links when you’re linking to a number of different posts in a post – like 175 blog resources type posts. It’ll be tough for your own page to rank when you’re linking out to all those other sites.
5. Nofollow category and tag pages: this falls into the “maybe” category. And that’s an extreme “maybe.” Most often, people use robots.txt to manage the duplicate content found on category or tag pages. Take a look at one of my category pages. Each category only links to a short description of each entry, rather than the entire post for that entry. So this structure avoids possible duplicate content penalties for this content. I’d recommend using this structure rather than messing with robots.txt. This robots.txt plugin is useful for sculpting using robots and will help ensure that you don’t overuse robots.txt so your entire site doesn’t get indexed (been known to happen).
You could also use a Wordpress plugin to put a “Read More” prompt on your homepage to avoid duplicate content. Personally, I don’t like this because people are more likely to read more if the content is right in front of them. People argue this does inspire click-throughs and interaction, so it may just be a personal preference. Another method would be to use Andy Beard’s NoFollow Those Dupes – which adds nofollow to cases where there may be duplicate content.
6. Nofollow your Feedburner feed, as a Feedburner page can have the same on-page attributes as a category page.
7. Finally, nofollow VeriSign or HackerSafe seals. Discussion about this can be found on Web Pro News, which has a good debate about this whole topic – whether it’s useful or whether it’s dangerous.
Is sculpting page rank the possible ranking goldmine? No – nothing in SEO really is, short of getting an in-content link from a PR 8 site. Mostly, SEO is about doing a lot of little things to improve rank, and these tricks should improve the rank flow within your site. And the evidence points toward PR sculpting as being better for huge 10,000-page sites, not smaller sites. Like all SEO tactics, page rank sculpting is likely going to be overused, which means Google’s going to change its algorithm in regards to follow tags. So long as you don’t go overboard, you’ll be in safe territory.
(Dofollow this! A review of SEOmoz @ the SEO Marketplace)
I am now offering a manual directory submission service. Check out the link for more details – submissions to up to 2000 directories plus deep link submission of internal pages to high page rank directories. Up to 50 titles/50 descriptions for maximum SEO benefits. Avoid the tedium of directory submissions and let someone else do it.
There may be some confusion about buying links to increase page rank and paying someone to add links to directories. Even though you are in effect paying for directory links, this is a far cry from what is commonly referred to as buying paid links to increase SEO.
In the case of paid links, people buy in-content or sidebar links on a high-pr page – a much different, and more frowned-upon, process than hiring someone to add links to a directory. With a sidebar link, the link will show up on every page on the site - potentially thousands of pages - which is why people are interested in this type of linking. Directory links, on the other hand, consist of one link deep within the directory. As sidebar links do not have the same ranking capability, even if they’re legitimate, buying a paid sidebar link is not the best linkbuilding strategy.
How to Not Get Caught Buying Links
Google is continually updating its algorithm to snare these type of links, but truth be told it’s difficult for Google to pinpoint some of these paid links, which is why the black hat practice isn’t going away. If the link is related to the content, it’s hard for Google to identify the link as paid or not – it appears as a wholly legitimate link. But Google is penalizing sites that buy paid links that are easily-identified as spam, such as being in a totally different content category or in the sidebar, clearly marked as a “sponsored link.” So you’ll see links to Viagra and gambling on a college newspaper’s webpage. Pretty obvious.
A paid link will be less likely to get caught if it’s:
Paid Links for Sellers
If you’re selling links, on the other hand, you could add a nofollow direct on links so your own site doesn’t get flagged. However, most webmasters who are buying links are most likely after the page rank benefits, not just the traffic, so using nofollow will seriously cut down on your paid link offers. But this is a way of getting around Google’s guidelines for paid linking. Google’s more concerned about selling page rank than selling traffic.
Keep in mind that Google’s cracking down most on the sellers of paid links, not the buyers, so if you’re selling links you’re in the greatest danger of getting flagged. Google absolutely hates paid links and has set up a vigilante network to catch link sellers. So tread carefully if you’re trying to make money in this way. To my mind, selling a legitimate, content-appropriate link should not be frowned on, as this is just another form of advertising, no different than a banner ad.
Google likes to flex its muscles about paid links and they have significantly cut down on the marketability of paid links, but if a link is sufficiently “cloaked” then the link should still work. If Google were to get too aggressive, there could come a time when Google’s docking legitimate non-paid links in content and Google does not want to penalize legitimate linking.
Thankfully, Google does not put directory submissions in the same category. If the directory is a link farm, that’s another issue, but if the directory is legitimate and carries rank, hiring someone to manually enter links should not be a problem. And the issue of getting too many links all at once is avoided because although submissions might happen during a set period, each directory is on a different schedule to approve your link so link approval will happen over an extended period.
Heard of SocialMarker? If you haven’t, it’s one of the best link building tools available - really amazing that it’s still free. There are other free ways to share posts on viral networks, like Shareaholic, but SocialMarker is far better than Shareaholic because it allows you to add links to social networks all in one place. Shareaholic just adds a toolbar drop-down where you have to click on each site individually. Mind you, this is cool and helpful, but SocialMarker is so useful and well-designed it feels like you’re getting away with something by using it for free.
How SocialMarker Works
Add the SocialMarker button to your toolbar, or just visit the site and add a post. The SocialMarker engine will then scroll through each social bookmarking site. It’s really no different than if you were to do this yourself using your own bookmarks, but it’s far easier and faster having it all on one site. First off, though, you’re going to have to open up social bookmarking profiles at all of these sites, or choose which one of these sites to submit links to. The more the merrier, really. Though, as I wrote, it’s better to be active on social networks to improve the page rank of each page you submit. Instead, you can submit to a bevvy of sites and then be really active on a select few. Having links on the other networks can only help your visibility.
Another benefit of using the SocialMarker engine is that you can change up the description and title for each submission. While this might sound like a lot of work, it can help how the social bookmarking link is indexed in Google. Just as articles are docked for duplicate content, so can social networking links. For articles: you submit 100 duplicate articles – Google keeps one and discards the rest. Social networking links can work by the same principle, so only your Digg link might be saved and the rest discarded, which doesn’t help increase your rank through social backlinks in search engines.
That said, you may be mostly interested in the traffic from having these articles posted on the networks themselves, not necessarily the page rank benefits. You can potentially gain a lot of traffic this way – as well as potential backlinks if people start posting about your page – so this might be enough of an incentive to not mix up descriptions. Ideally though, the best way to use SocialMarker is to write new titles for each post, as well as new descriptions.
Bookmarking Demon
If you’re lazier and you don’t have a problem with duplicate content (or being a spammer), you can also use an automated program like Bookmarking Demon. Same principle: you input the title, URL, and description, and the engine submits your link to a list of social bookmarking sites. With BD, however, it submits the site for you - you don’t have to do a thing. For someone who’s got a fleet of sites, this could be useful. Otherwise, this is just an automated way to generate links, ala any spam robot.
In addition to automated submissions, Bookmarking Demon will automate sign-up for social networking sites, which SocialMarker does not do, saving you some time. Bookmarking Demon’s aware of the spam-quality of automating submissions, so there is an option to use a proxy server for submissions so that your IP address doesn’t get targeted and banned from networks for over-submitting sites.
Make no mistake, this is spam software, but there is a way to use this without overloading the web with bad content. If you just wanted to spread a blog post via social networks without having to point and click each site, this software makes sense. The engine also submits to scuttle sites – a kind of sleazier, spam-esque bookmarking site. A number of scuttle site are dofollow and have rank, so they’re another linking opportunity. Example: www.buzztagz.com. Mostly, scuttle sites are like a cousin to pingback spam sites. I’m feeling sleazier as I write this.
Bookmarking Demon is offered through Clickbank. While I’m here, I want to write about something that bugs me: the quality of Clickbank sites. Perhaps Clickbank affiliates are hugely successful and don’t want to mess with their business model, but most Clickbank pages scream of spam and they look like the web circa ten years ago. In short, they look tacky. Bookmarking Demon is a very popular software, but it still suffers from the same layout with the worst-possible SEO by having all the content on the same page with no fresh updated content.
Is it bad form to link to this black hattish software program? As I wrote in my black hat post, it’s good to know the tactics of the other side and why they’re effective, or not. And there’s an argument to be made for its legitimate use. But programs like Bookmarking Demon are part of why the web’s getting cluttered with sub-par sites. My recommendation: stick with SocialMarker.
SEO is rife with a lot of myths, and one of the king of these is that edu and gov links send better link juice than .coms and everything else. Perhaps “myth” is taking it to far because no one is really sure how exactly Google measures page rank. So a lot of search engine optimization is based on speculation, not proof. One person might say edu links have increased there SERPs for certain keywords, others say the opposite. And the first person might not be factoring in other link building efforts via .coms that might be contributing to a better positioning.
You’d think Google’s Matt Cutt’s own words would have silenced the issue, but it hasn’t. He has said, “There’s no special “Yahoo boost” or edu-boost or gov-boost. Those links just tend to be higher quality.”
Really, this makes sense. Why should one site have a “better” page rank than another? Wouldn’t that site just be given a higher page rank instead? Two sites with a page rank of 7 must send equal link juice – so long as each site has the equal number of outbound links on the page. The confusion likely arose from the fact that edu and gov links have an easier time establishing authority – hence Cutt’s reference to “higher quality.” In other words, the majority of them do have better rank relative to .coms. Anyone can set up a .com or .net, but not everyone can set up an edu. Therefore, edu’s are better able to gain page rank than other types of sites. But just because it’s easier to establish page rank does not mean that the site sends more page rank your way.
I’m not making any final declarations on this because the jury’s still out, but this to me makes the most sense. A student’s edu page with a page rank of zero should not have more authority than another website with a page rank of zero. Zero is zero. In short, the top level domain is not the determining factor.
What is the determining factor is the page rank of the page and the number of outbound links. So if you’re able to score a link from an edu site with a good page rank and limited number of links, then great, you’ve done well. But the same thing applies to .coms or any other top level domain. That said, it is a good idea to get links from sites with varying TLD’s because this is a further illustration of your site’s authority. You’re linked from varying types of sites: the web likes you.
The Page Rank of Outbound Links to Edu’s and Gov’s
I periodically do content work for a content production firm that requires outbound links only to edu’s, org’s, and gov’s. Part of this is so that the pages don’t link to any competing .coms, but part of it is also because linking to a high-quality edu or gov is supposed to be better for your authority than linking to a standard .com.
The principle in this case remains the same – linking to a site with a high page rank (i.e. has already established authority) is a good idea if it’s a .com or any other TLD. It will enhance your site’s authority by being part of a network of other quality sites in the same domain. It’s not necessarily better for me to link to this .gov site about SEO, rather than a site like SEOmoz.
Does this mean that you should only link out to site’s with a high page rank? Not at all.
Linking to other blogs – even if it’s a PR 0 – will help start relationships that can lead to backlinks in the blogosphere. You could go a little nuts only linking to high PR sites, which could actually diminish the number of backlinks you can generate. Only a few sites have very high page rank and those sites are the least likely to link back to you, as their links are at a premium and they’re too busy to look at your new site. Overall, you should be linking to good-neighborhood sites, but if you limit your linking only to edu, gov, and high PR .coms, you run the risk of boxing yourself into a corner.
How to Get Edu and Gov Links
OK, I’m sure this isn’t stopping anybody from pursuing edu’s or gov’s. And as I’ve said, having edu’s in the mix can only help, not hurt, so why not add it as part of your link building program. One method that’s thrown around online is to put this search string in Google:
site:.edu inurl:blog “post a comment”
It works. There are plenty of edu-affiliated blogs and other sites where you can add links. However, the problem with most edu comment pages is that the majority of edu’s use nofollow for comment links.
Do the same thing for government sites:
site:.gov inurl:blog “post a comment”
Gov’s are even more difficult: most are nofollow, require a separate log-in, and often have no space to add a url. Edu’s are much easier.
Of course, the really prized links are those within a post or page on page on an edu – as is the case with the web in general. Comment links just don’t send that much rank. You need to be a little aggressive with your site marketing. If an edu or gov site is covering something in your niche, you can contact the webmaster and (politely) ask to include your link in the page. Don’t just expect it to happen without taking the initiative.
Otherwise, buying these links doesn’t make a lot of sense because edu sites can be transitory. Often, they’re taken down in the future – which really means you’re renting a link, not buying it. And given what I’ve said about the value of .gov’s and edu’s relative to high page rank .com’s you might be spending your money thinking that you’re getting back more value than you really are.
