Next steps for linking

Linking is usually the worst part of SEO work. It's a real stumbling block for many people.Actually creating a website and making sure it's optimized correctly is rather like paint by numbers. You just have to follow the steps and get it done. But then you come to linking and in many ways, it's far more complicated. It can be boring, tedious work and it's often hard to find good people to do it properly. It's going to get harder too; this is really a critical area for search engines.

One sad result of the focus on links to help with search ranking is that the web is nowdrowning in garbage pages created solely to hold links pointing to other websites, toconvince the search engines that the reference sites are important. This is bad for the search engines and bad for the web. So the search engines are going to continue to work on cleaning up, to distinguish between good and bad links. As I discussed earlier in this course, there are two types of links: the real thing and the fake thing.

Links that exist for good reason and links that exist solely for SEO reasons. They're all part of the link game. And as time goes on, the search engines will get better and better at figuring out at the difference. In some ways that will be making linking even harder. But if the search engines could distinguish between two forms of link 100% perfectly, it might actually make linking easier. Right now, there's a link arm's race going on. It's all very well the search engines discouraging the link game, the purchasing of links for instance, but as I've mentioned before, at the same time they are encouraging the link game, quite simply because it works.

If a site owner discovers that 10 competitors are ranking ahead of his site, thanks to playingthe link game, what is he supposed to do? Take the completely ethical path and avoid the game or think to himself, if you can't beat him, join him. The latter is what happens most of the time. But having said all that, overall it is true that real links are more valuable than the game; the fake links. Yes, they are harder to get, that's true as well. But if you can get them, that's the way to go.

And that's why Google talks so much about link bait and why you should think about it too.The most powerful linking technique is to create something so useful, or entertaining, or interesting, or amusing, or cool, or whatever, that people all over the web link to it. It's what the search engines want to see and it's what they will reward you for, if you can figure out how to make it happen. This video course is by no means exhaustive. If you want to continue learning about linking methods, there are lots of places to go with a wide variety of opinions.

For the Google point of view, about all things SEO, not just links, I'd suggest that you check in with Matt Cutts' blog now and then. You might also want to read Search Engine Lands, Link Week Column. Search Engine Land is about SEO in general of course, but has a regular column about linking strategies. The major link analysis companies, SEOmoz and Majestic SEO, can also provide interesting information. Or simply Google for terms, such as link-building strategies and link-building ideas, and you'll find plenty to keep you busy.

So we've come to the end of this course. Thanks for watching and good luck with your link building!

Questions to ask

If you do decide to work with a link company of some kind, you really need to understandwhat you're getting for your money. In the last video, I discussed some of the jargon you'll hear, but often linking companies are also very vague about what they will deliver, sometimes intentionally so. I frequently talk to clients who've worked with linking companies, sometimes for many months, without ever fully understanding what types of links they'll be getting and how many. Many website owners are of course not terribly sophisticated in this area.

They know they need links, but don't understand the kinds of things we've covered in thiscourse so link companies can easily take advantage of them. So in this video, I want to quickly run through a few things you need to ask and understand if you do decide to hire a linking firm. The first question is of course, what type of links are they providing? Links firms are often vague about this. They're just going to get you links; it doesn't seem to matter where. There's often a signal that you're going to get garbage links, because why would they provide high quality links, when you don't even know what you're getting? Are these links in blogs? If so, where? On comments, blogrolls, posts or reviews? Are they social network links? If so, what networks and what types of links? Of course, you'll also need to know if they're getting you follow or no-follow links.

Perhaps some will be no-follows, and that's fine in some circumstances, but at least be aware of what you're getting. How many links are you paying for? It's surprising how many people buy link packages without understanding the number of links that will be created each month, for example. Then will you get reports showing where these links are? If the service doesn't provide reports, you will never know if you're really getting links or not. Are you paying for permanent links? In other words, if you stop paying, will those links disappear? If so, you're basically renting the link.

Again, that can be okay as long as the price is right of course. Are these pages indexed by the search engines, in particular Google? If not, what's the point? And do the pages have any PageRank? That's not to say the pages with no PageRank or low PageRank are of completely no value, but you should at least know what you're getting. You also need to actually see some example links, so you can get an idea of how valuable the links are going to be for you, and if the person you're talking with is being honest.

Are they in posts and high quality blogs for instance? Or in really trashy, unintelligible blogs that look like they were written by someone who can't speak the language, or by a computer program? Are the links in account profiles that contain nothing more than a fake name in the link or are they in genuine well- written content? You need to know what you're getting.Consider also how obvious these links are. How obvious is it that these links are not real, but purely placed for SEO purposes? If it's really obvious to you, there's a good chance that it's also obvious to the search engines, and thus the links will likely have little value.

When talking with these companies, don't be afraid to push for answers you can understand.If the linking company can't or won't explain what they're doing, then you shouldn't beworking with them. And if you do work with the firm, check the reports and sample of the links now and then to make sure you're getting what you're paid for. Make sure you're getting follow links, for instance, on pages indexed by Google. If the page is very young, Google may not have gotten around to it yet. In which case you should at least check to see if the site itself is indexed, and perhaps how many pages in the site are indexed.

If only one or two pages from that site were indexed, there's a good chance your link on that new page will never be picked up.

Understanding linking jargon

One challenge working with link building companies is simply understanding what on earth they're talking about? I think part of that is intentional. There are lots of link building companies that are a little more than a scam and they don't really want you to know what they're doing. They're blinding you with science hoping to make the sale without going into detail about what you'll get in return. On the other hand, some services suffer from a problem common in the geek world, an inability to explain things clearly and an assumption that everyone is a geek and understands anyway.

Read More : Hướng Dẫn SEO 2016

So in this video, I'm going to run through a few bits of jargon you may hear while reading link building sites or talking to link builders. In fact, even if you have no intention of buying links, this video may help you understand general link building jargon. Some of the services you'll see offer, they're obvious; forum comments, directory submissions, press release distribution, and so on. But let's consider some of the terms we haven't discussed in this course, where we've only touched on quickly. Let's start with the few general link terms.

First, the term one-way links. This simply means that you get a link pointing to your site without placing a link back to another site. Typically, this term is used in some kind of link network situation, so be careful. You may be asked to link to a different site, site B we'll say, in return for the link from site A, you may be getting yourself into some kind of link network, and by linking out, you're telling the search engines that you are a willing participant and thus risk some kind of penalty.

When people talk about deep linking, they simply mean linking into your website rather than just to the site's homepage. This is a good thing to do, spreading your linking around your site. The term above the fold means the space in a website that could be seen when the page loads without scrolling down the page. It's quite likely that links near the top of the page are more valuable than links lower down the page. Another link type that's likely to be more valuable is a content or in-content link, a link that will be placed into content within a web page rather than just in a block of links.

You'll also hear the term landing page. That's simply the page that the link points to; the page that the visitor lands on after clicking the link. You may also hear the term relevant, which means the link will come from a page that contains content that is somehow related to the subject area of your site. That's a good thing, but sometimes even links are non-relevant pages, in particular, if they are keyworded can help. And a permanent link is what it sounds like. You pay once and the link should stay for good; though realistically one day the site will probably disappear.

Many links are in effect rented, you pay by the month. Some services will state that your links will be placed onto pages of a particular page rank, which of course, we have discussed in an earlier video; the higher the PageRank the more valuable the link and the more expensive.You may also see claims of particular Alexa ranks. Alexa is a website analysis service owned by Amazon and it maintains list of sites ranked by popularity; the lower the number, the higher the rank.

A low number means a more popular website. Site wide links are links placed on every page in a website. This often refers to links in blogrolls, or in traditional websites, links in the page footer. But it may also be links in some kind of link block higher up on the page. A Drip Feed refers to creating links gradually, a few a day or a week. The idea is to avoid a sudden huge increase in links pointing to your site which may look suspicious.

Spend enough time digging around link sites, and you'll see a feature called unique class C IP numbers. This means that each link, or perhaps block of links will come from a different IP number. But it won't be simply the last three digits in the number that are different, it'll be a number in the C block or above that will vary. So the links won't be coming from pages with IP numbers close to each other, which could indicate to the search engines that the pages are related to each other.

When link companies talk about blog links, they could be talking about several things. First is blog comment links, links placed into blogs by commenting on a post. They're probably of no use to you, as comment- links are generally nofollow, though some companies may be placing follow links into their own blogs. Then there's blog-roll links, links that appear in every page on a site in the list of usual links. These are typically rented out; you'll paid by the month or perhaps by the year. Finally, links in actual articles.

In some cases, you write an article and give it to the company. Or they can write it for you, though it may be in pigeon English. You'll typically get two or three key-worded links in the article and pay a one-time fee for as long as the blog stays active. Some services also sell what they call sticky posts, links in blog posts that will remain on the blog's homepage for a specified period of time. You could also hear about blog reviews, which are typically reviews of your website or product posted in a blog.

Again, you're getting links in the blog post not the comments or blogroll. Strictly speaking, of course, these are often illegal under FTC regulations, unless it's stated in the review that it's been paid for. A lot of services also provide social bookmarking services, which really can mean a number of things. There are a lot of social networks now, so one big question is, what networks are the links being placed into? Sometimes these services create hundreds of accounts on five or ten different networks, and then place posts containing links to your site.

They may also provide profile links which are links directly from an account profile. These may be social networking accounts, but could be accounts from just about any website open to public registration, such as forums. You sometimes see services offering to create squidoo lenses. Squidoo.com is a site that allows members to set up pages known as lenses, collections of information related to a particular subject. So these services will create lenses about your subject area and include links to your site.

Whatever kind of social networking service is being offered, it's worth bearing in mind that in most cases the links you're going to get are probably not very valuable. One more unusual service that you may run across is Link Wheels. A Link Wheel is a network of sites that all or mostly linked to the target site, your site, but it's also linked to each other in some kind of pattern. In the simplest incarnation, you might have, say 20 sites linking A to B, B to C, C to D and so on, all the way up to R to S and S to T, and the T site links back to A.

Then all of the sites linked to your site and to any other sites they're promoting of course. Link Wheel companies often use social networking sites, setting up accounts to act as the spokes of the wheel, and so, perhaps a combination of social networking sites and blogs. You may also see sites offering search engine submission services. In general, this is a waste of time and money unless the service also includes submitting your site to search directories, not merely search engines. There are a lot of search engine submission scams out there often claiming to submit you to a list of search engines that include systems that no longer even exist, so beware.

Finding link services

As we've seen, sometimes paying for links is not the same as buying links. And in fact, there are many, many companies looking for your business, companies that want to help you get links. Some of those companies will help you get links in a way that the search engines dislike, while others use more legitimate methods. Companies that provide services related to real link buildings, not just selling links. And of course, many companies use both approved and non-approved methods. So in this video, we're going to look at the subject of finding companies to help you create links in various ways.

In fact, you will run into companies that have a whole menu of options in which you can choose. Let's start with one of the many worse forms of link, blog comments. You can easily find services that will go out and place comments in blogs pointing to your site. These are really obnoxious; the worst kind of link spam and they probably won't help you any way, as it almost always nofollow links. Any company selling a blog comment service is hard to take seriously. You'll also find companies selling forum comments.

As I discussed in an earlier video, forum commenting can both be a viable strategy and non-offensive if it's done right, but most companies doing this won't do it right. They'll simply drop garbage posts into as many forums as they can, relevant or not. Of course, you'll find companies that will post your site into web directories, and I think this is fine, an ethical strategy, though these days most of these directories hold little value. On the other hand, some companies will drop your site into niche directories, directories related to your business, which is more valuable.

You'll also run into companies that do reciprocal linking, contacting websites on your behalfand asking them for links. As you learned in an earlier video, this is not likely to be very helpful as reciprocal linking is no longer particularly valuable. You'll actually find companies doing most of the linking methods we've discussed in this course, such as posting articles and press releases for you, or submitting your site to local directories. Now we're getting to the out and out link selling. There are a number of services that will place your links into blogs, not into the comments, but into the blog posts and blogrolls, the list of favorite links.

There are essentially two ways this is done. First, there are companies that act as clearing houses connecting bloggers and site owners with bloggers stating how much link cost in one of their articles. In theory, this can be done without upsetting the search engines by making the links no-follow links. Of course, these are generally follow links, as no- follow links will be defeating the whole purpose. By the way, selling links in blog post is not only against Google's guidelines, but in many cases in the United States, it's actually illegal, whether you use follow links or nofollow.

Though almost nobody knows these FTC regulations exist, but they do. Another problem; bloggers sometimes fake their PageRank so buyers end up paying more for a link than it's really worth. And one final problem; these sites are not hard to find, which means it's not hard for the search engines to find them either. The other way to buy blog links is from companies that own dozens, maybe hundreds of blogs. There are many of these companies, perhaps thousands, in particular operating in Asia.

There's a little cottage industry of young Indonesians, for instance, who build blogs, then sell links and article for a one-time fee, or in the blog's blogrolls for a monthly or annual fee.Similar to this, and often run by the same companies, a link is placed into websites that appear less bloggy and more like regular sites. Of course, blogs are merely content management system, so a blog is a website and a website might be a blog. But before blogging software became popular, companies were building networks of regular websites in which they could place sold links.

Another service you'll run into is the placement of social networking links, often known associal bookmarking. These companies often create hundreds of social networking accounts in which they can then place links. Or perhaps go out and create profiles on sites that allow account creation and then place links from those profiles back to your site. You may, if you dig deep enough, run into services that build links en masse, sometimes using software such as XRumer, which automatically post into forums, even automatically entering capture codes.

Systems such as this and the various link networks you may run into are a little scary. They can create many thousands of links very quickly and can create a very unnatural looking link profile. They are the prime target of the search engines. There's nothing subtle here. Finally, there are out-on-out link selling, companies that put buyers and sellers together. Like the blog services I mentioned, site owners sign up and add their site to the inventory, then buyers come in and pick where they want to place the links.

The link sellers can be small sites owned by individuals or even major sites owned by, for example, newspapers. So how do you find these services? Well, that's the ironic thing. You search for them. Search for terms such as buying links, buy text links, link building service, and so on, and you'll soon find plenty of services. You can also find people by searching in the outsourcing websites, such as Odesk.com, Guru.com and Elams.com. Search for link building for instance.

You might also want to search for the term "link building reviews" to find websites that review link services. Here's a major problem with link building services though, all too often it's impossible to figure out what they actually do. There tends to be a lot of blinding with science going on. So in the next two videos I'm going to discuss how to understand what they're talking about and what services they actually provide.

When is paying for links buying links?

In the previous video, we discussed the issue of buying links, about how the search enginesdon't like it, about how they sometimes punish it and how at the same time they reward it. But what is a purchase link? After all, there are lots of services out there that will help you get links and some of what those services do is actually legitimate. If you pay somebody to help you create links, are you buying links? The classic example is Yahoo! Directory which charges $299 a year for a listing. Google doesn't penalize Yahoo! Why not? Well, Google's position is that Yahoo! and some other directories, Best of the Web for instance, provide value-ad editorial services.

They don't just take anyone who pays, they review the site and reject many, and that's this human review process is much more than simply selling a link, and in fact, provide some value to the search engines by pointing out decent human reviewed sites. Shabby directories that accept anyone who pays that provide whatever anchor text you want and so on, are more likely to be considered selling paid links. How about the advertorials, often known as feature releases or mats that I talked about in an earlier video? Aren't these paid links? Well, in a sense they are.

I think the advertorial companies would argue that they are more than that though, that they are links inside genuine content. On the other hand I suspect the advertorial market is simply too far under the radar for the search engines to have noticed. If they have or eventually do though, it wouldn't be hard for them to stop rewarding such links. All they need to do is to sign up to get the editorial content then block it wherever it's found. So how can the search engines figure out if links have been paid for? Often they can't of course, and those from the buyer's perspective are the very best types of paid links, but sometimes they can.

Look at this example provided by Google of a page that contains the links. First, notice that this is really badly written. In fact it's probably spun, an article created by a piece of software.Next, notice that the links don't fit the text, "enable it to pay day loan you stay healthy," for instance. It's not so hard for the search engines to figure this out. Here's another example.Newspaper websites used to frequently sell links. Well, the recent actions by Google have probably stopped much of this business.

This is a link block on a newspaper site, and yes, these are all follow links. It's getting hard to find these links now, as most of newspapers have been frightened off selling links. This blog post from Google's Matt Cutts gives a clue as to why. Here's another way they can find purchased links, direct research. After all if you can find link purchase opportunities and I'll show you how in the next video, then so can they. In fact, the search engines do go looking for link networks.

They figure out identifying features in the core sites involved in the network and then they knock them out of the game. The risk to you if you're a purchaser is that you maybe paying for links that have no value. Though in some cases, the networks simply go out of business and you stop getting charged. Still, the search engines are merely scratching the surface. How do they stop you, for instance, emailing a blogger and asking if they will add you to the blogroll, their list of favorite links for 25 bucks a month. It's almost impossible to police this kind of thing.

What they can do though is hit the most obvious problems and over time they'll get better and better at doing that. Still as a wise man once said, make something fool proof and they will just build a better fool. Buying links is not going to go away. It's just going to get more sophisticated. So what's the answer to the question posed by the title of this video? Should you buy links? Well, I'm not going to provide an answer. I want you to understand the lay of the land and understand that there may be dangers, but it's up to you to decide how to build your linking strategy.

There is however one important consideration. Be warned that many link building companies you may run into are little more than a scam. I often get new clients who ask me what a linking company did for them only to discover that the company did little or nothing of value.