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Hi,

I've used Squidoo for link building before and it does provide a good backlink.

You need to make sure that your article is live on Squidoo before the link is seen by the search engines. This isn't easy, but it is possible.

Firstly, make sure your post is worthy of being published. Make your lens as interesting and unique as possible - lots of content, images etc. Squidoo seem to love 'top 10' articles.

Secondly, make sure your article is live. Squidoo will often put your post live at first and then take it down over the next day or so. This can be rectified by building links into your squidoo page (ie plug it on a social network page like Facebook, or build some free directory links into it).

Another site similar to Squidoo is 'HubPages', this is good for link building as well.

Hope that helps!

Hi,

Sorry - 'live' in Squidoo language is 'featured'. For your article to be visible to search engines external to Squidoo it needs to be a 'featured lens'. You can see if your article is featured by logging in and seeing if you have a red circle or green tick by it.

Another way you can get your lens featured is to encourage other squidoo members to comment on the article.

With regards to HubPages - you need to have a Hub Score of more than 40 or a hubber score of more than 75 for the links to be made 'dofollow'. If your article is good enough and you build some links into it, or promote it, it doesn't seem to be too difficult to get a score above 40.

I typically work according to a 1:2 ratio - for every 1 directory link I build (niche-specific), I build 2 links from other link sources. This seems to work well for us.

I think there are still some really good natural directories out there (that aren't just for SEO), so I'd be surprised if Google didn't take into account directories.

Does anyone know of a free video sitemap generator? Thanks

Thanks Keith, totally agree with you - directories definitely aren't as valuable as they used to be and they only make up a tiny part of our link building strategy now. This is why we seem to have developed our favourite ones as we submit sites to so few directories, we want to make sure they're good ones!

Hello from a not-so-cold (but not sunny yet) Bristol.

Remember Google can crawl a page and still not index it - so you probably want to know which pages Google has indexed?

To see how many pages are indexed in Webmaster tools it is useful to look at your sitemaps page - it'll tell you how many pages have been submitted and how many of those have been indexed.

One thing you can do to see which pages are in Google's index is type the below into Google search engine

site:http://......

There is a good thread on this in the webmaster tools forum that you might find useful - http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=378b3cdf485ee3a7&hl=en

Thanks,

Karen

Hi,

I don't know much about the service if offers, but I'd imagine anything 'automated' would be classed as black hat by Google.

When link building I often go by the moto - if it's too good to be true, it probably is. Depressing huh? But it's a good way of keeping link building under control...

Karen

We're having a bit of a debate in the office today about SEO directories. We all seem to have our favourites here - Octopedia, AbiLogic and JoeAnt to name a few that have been mentioned.

Just wondering what everyone else's favourite directories for SEO are?

Which pass the best link juice? Which offer the best value for money? Would love to know everyone's thoughts...