Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey again NickEubanks,

1. checking up on my stats again for my site. its age is 59 days old and has not been registered before.

2. crawl stats are high of 137, average of 61, low of 10. That includes every data point since it is so young(less than 90 days old).

3. seomoz campaign says that I have 78 pages crawled though i dont think all of them should get indexed as pages seemed to get indexed within minutes usually. 59 are indexed. 57 were indexed today and I wrote a post as well as made a new navigation page to keep organized and then it went to 59 within minutes. I don't think tag pages with a single post get indexed or something since some tags do seem to get indexed and also have multiple posts.

4. total links: 1628 from 538 domains. Domain homepage PA of 40 with a DA of 33. Dmozrank 5.3.

my page for the keyword i plan to rank first for is PA 38, 67 links from 14 domains.

The site ranking in first position is much younger (2 year old site) than the other 6 beating me as I am in position 8.

these 6 have 5 with between 60 to 80 DA and one of the worse ranking site on the serps with a DA 46 though it was beating a DA 62.

Each also ranges from have very little to quite a lot of links.

first i'll share the first position stats as it is related to your main focus. PA 14 DA74, 71 links from 4 domains.

all the other 6 are over 10 years old.

after my site is a 6 year old site which i am now beating.

hope you enjoy this juicy info.

so in about 2 months i got to DA33 to answer your original question. This has been fun.

edit(i forgot to answer your question of where my sites are): I have used this strategy with several sites, dittoeffect.com which currently is over a year old and gets about 1million+ hits a year as well as another site which I will not share the name of which is only a month old competing with some 10 year old credit card sites for some decent terms in the top 10 (3000 a month search volume terms).

Sometimes it may seem that way however the way I see it is that sometimes a tumblr blog is not very popular or does not have a lot of links and page rank going to it so it won't be crawled for quite some time (even up to 60 days sometimes). Because of this you can see a fairly regular stream of links coming in.

Also I doubt you would be as obsessed with it as I was as I was building close to 700 likes a day (700 or more links a day) so I could focus my attention on this over a short period of time.

Being really good with searching on google and through other means I also used this to get links from high page rank sites including 400-800 over PR4-6 page links included in those. The higher page rank pages do get crawled faster though so sometimes it may be wise to avoid getting more than one from a domain. Also since these links are virtually endless, limited by the time and effort put into it, you can just get like 20 a day in a couple minutes and then just forget about it to keep it looking really natural.

Make sure to look at the rules for tumblr as self promotion is not something they support.

A good thing to do though which I don't even really see as self promotion is to search in google:

inurl:tumblr.com "your keywords"

in my opinion by liking relevant pages to your site you are then avoiding self promotion as you would obviously have interest in these pages as well as the added bonus of being able to add 1000s of relevant links.

Another important note is that your blog can be something like ditto-effect.tumblr.com and the links you get show up as ditto-effect. google sees these as links with the anchor text "ditto effect" without the hyphen so thats great too. Only fall back is that these can only link to your main page and only one tumblr account can be pointed to a domain.

Its hard to say the value of some of these links because its not in content though at the very least this is a great way to get page rank to go up as well as get your site crawled like crazy.

If you have any more questions don't hesitate to ask

Two big things stand out to me upon my comparison. the georgia site has far less backlinks and lower page rank than yours. You will find that the links they do have are extremely relevant in post links from other sites. On top of this they are also listed in DMoz. Their pages have great On Page SEO design and very good interlinked pages. Their site is 8 years old and likely has been well established as an authority.

Your site has a higher page rank which although that is a good thing is not an overpowering factor in ranking for a single keyword. Looking at your blog I noticed that you have made good use of interlinking with yourself for the terms you would like though the content is a little thin. What stands out most to me is that your links come from directories which have very little value compared to a relevant contextual link from the post of a site about divorces and lawyers.

I noticed you have a backlink from this page http://www.affordable-uncontested-divorce.com/ the anchor text here is "uncontested divorce blog" rather than "uncontested divorce". Really it seems like you should instead be focusing on more local terms such as "uncontested divorce new york city" for example as your site seems to be location specific. unless of course you do offer to cover cases outside new york then just going for "uncontested divorce" is fine.

Another note to add is that facebook shares don't influence the SERPs directly if at all.

The SEOMoz factors are a guideline to understanding the authority of a site and not a definite predictor of results in google since such factors are quite complicated.

to summarize:

1. age comparison.

2. relevant high value links as opposed to easy to get links.

3. appropriate anchor text for desired keyword.

bonus tips:

1. a few of your blog pages had broken image links

2. your images in your blogs have a good alt text but they link to the image source. try linking them to your about page or even the same post it is on as an image link with alt text is about the same as a text link with anchor text though you would be linking to a post you care about instead of an image location.

Ya dropping out of the index really sucks. I've had some a few sites drop out of index due to offending google and its lame to have to wait 10+ days to get them back. For some people it takes way longer or they don't ever get the penalty removed and give up.

Good post about understanding backlink profiles for anyone who doesn't know already. Really old info that has been around for a while though quite important to keep in mind. Haven't looked at the learn SEO section but that would be good to have floating around for people to see.

I wrote a reply then the page died and i lost it :(.

I hope no one does that case study to try and find out. Really no one should ever want to haha.

Ya I really do agree with what you have posted so far. All the skeptics do ask for proof. I was mostly asking because you stated: " You have to test. Then test again. This is only way to gain meaningful and actionable knowledge." So for you to believe what you are telling me I assumed you have proof besides possibly being misinformed(from experience and otherwise) as I may also be.

In your opinion do you think that such a malicuous attack could reduce rankings for an already established site (eg lose its long held first position for many keywords) or just that it would hurt future growth?

I am curious about what kind of penalty there would be to better understand this.

Good thread so far :).

Indeed, I did not look at the order of the thread. I have a friend who would love the way you talk haha. He loves to bring up the Dunning Kruger effect too.

I have read both threads as well as was familiar with the JC Penny incident since it occurred and looked into why after it did. JC Penny was the ones who got themselves penalized in this case.

Since so far all that has been presented in this thread has not been supported with a case study I would be happy to hear from those who have tested including yourself. Would you mind sharing your personal tests or at least posts that directly speak of tests?

Edit: My experience with SEO has given me a current 3k+ visits a day in less than a year of learning. As well as a great deal of research into penalties and fixing penalties for clients. I am seeking facts not trying to suggest I know best if there is more evidence out there. Specific tests are appreciated. To me it seems insanely easy to create a penalty for any site if what you are suggesting is true and would be a major flaw exposed in google's ranking algorithms far worse than promoting oneself to game the results.

Indeed, I did not look at the order of the thread. I have a friend who would love the way you talk haha. He loves to bring up the Dunning Kruger effect too.

I have read both threads as well as was familiar with the JC Penny incident since it occurred and looked into why after it did. JC Penny was the ones who got themselves penalized in this case.

Since so far all that has been presented in this thread has not been supported with a case study I would be happy to hear from those who have tested including yourself. Would you mind sharing your personal tests or at least posts that directly speak of tests?

so you are saying you could just beat all your competitors with a malicious link campaign?!

what is stopping anyone from just sabotaging any site then?

the good answer chosen for this is the same as mine and thumbed up a few times:

"

Short answer is no.  It would be all to easy for black hat SEO's to knock down the competition by setting up links like these to competators.  Google wouldn't allow such activity as it would make their SERPs all to easily gamed.

I wouldn't worry about it.  Just keep link building high quality links from trusted sites and you should be totally fine."

I would be interested to learn more about this as the info in those posts is kind of limited.

JC Penny happened to lose out on a lot of its traffic because it lost links that used to be valuable after having been found out that the links they had acquired broke the rules.

Google is far to easy to game if a malicious campaign really could hurt current results though it would make sense to me if malicious links seemed to provide a boost which was then lost after the links are determined to be malicious.

I don't think my comment deserves a thumbs down when the good answer chosen is the same, I thumbed yours up for adding valuable points to my comment though

ya for sure. commentluv applies best for those writing blog posts.

rereading the OP one aspect is helping with indexation. I read somewhere that twitter links (while not dofollow) do help with indexation speed.

If possible Simon could you be more specific as to what kind of new sites you plan on trying to get easy links for?

ah yes i believe i am mistaken. I got confused since seoquake does not cross out the links from my twitter page though it should cross out nofollow links.

the commentluv tip should help out though

Thats some really good advice there.

a few other suggestions include:

1. A Twitter profile has dofollow links for both the main profile as well as it seems as though tweets have dofollow links though you cant choose the anchor text.

2. Commentluv blog comments - search on google "commentluv enabled" "keywords or general topic" for example "commentluv enabled" "dog houses". Commentluv allows you to comment on a blog and generally in return one of your more recent posts can be selected for as dofollow link.

I have seen some similar activity on the link profiles of some sites and am equally confused.

I don't have a good explanation for this besides that there is bound to be some error or mistakes in gathering data to some degree.

Just wanted to add that I have observed a similar situation for a few sites.

personally I find it works best to name them as you listed in #1 since when you mouse over the images it will show that text. you may also title it to be more descriptive so the user know what they are being linked to.

the alternate text you want to be the text you would use as if it was a text link, so also the format of #1 however the difference from the title choice is that the title may be better to be more descriptive to improve the user experience.

hope this helps

You do have a good point, the DA is quite relevant to the results even for pages with a low PA.

Here is some info on the seomoz domain authority http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain-authority

to my understanding google values links differently depending on their age to confirm stability and authority.

Are you sure seomoz determines domain authority through age?

edit: with one of my sites after its first crawl after 2 weeks of existing the DA is 13. the next crawl begins on the 11th i could let you know what the results are after that as the metrics are quite slow to catch up (was 15 linking domains after 2 weeks now is well over 700 linking domains after a big link bait at 4 weeks old according to webmaster tools which is also behind)

You want to have less than 100 links on a page, that includes internal and external links. using a tool like seoquake or even an seomoz tool may exist to check this kind of on page info.

generally you want to have a constant link building profile, do you think facebook and twitter getting incredible volumes of links would get penalized?! no of course not. natural just means regular and normal looking. if you can build 100 links in a day and then spend 10 days not building links you are much better off building 10 links a day for the 10 days.

really you shouldn't be in charge of your incoming links, your quality and value bring in links by having people like your content and share it.

hope this helps

I have noticed the same thing too. Not only can your browsing history change the results but also if you use google plus and have +1'd a page of your site it will also show up higher in the results.

I find it helps a lot to use a rank checking tool rather than looking at your own SERPs.

Many times I had a broken heart from these confusing results

When I checked the urls that were supposed to be the google directory listings it said the page did not exist for all the ones i could find.

it is likely that they managed to get the listings up quickly then the listings all got removed.

I am not fully sure how google directories works so this is just a guess.

hope this helps.

Here is an excellent selection of video tutorials along with a software which offers a free trial.

http://www.noblesamurai.com/dojo/marketsamurai/

Great for learning the ins and outs of SEO.

Hope this helps.

You are over complicating a metric which may not even be relevant to what you want to achieve.

DA does not = higher SERPs necessarily.

DA can be increased probably well over 50 within a few weeks if you have the right connections.

For one of my sites comparing to google webmaster tools on a page that has been established for over a year webmaster tools lists 30000 links and opensite explorer lists about 3333 links so about 11% though i doubt it will be 11% for all sites as there could be many factors involved in this effect.

number of linking domains is about 90% of what it says in webmaster tools.

hope this helps

Here is a similar Q and A that I wrote a response to suggesting 4 tools which I have found immensely useful. Market Samurai also has some video tutorials that teach a really good strategy for finding great keywords.

http://www.seomoz.org/q/what-keyword-research-tools-do-you-recommend-to-help-with-seo

hope this helps.

Question number 1: No

There is a good rule of thumb:

If a competitor can do it to you then it is not harmful to you.

Here is why: There are many sketchy places you could get links to a competitor which would then give you control over their reputation without their say.

Question number 2: Also no but sometimes yes! (read below)

This one is a little different. Getting a link from a questionable source is not bad for you as described above, however if you reciprocally link back to that source then you may be vulnerable to being penalized by google if the site linking to you has been penalized. It is your responsibility to make sure you do not vote to bad neighbourhoods.

To further answer question 2, if you are reciprocally linking to a bad neighborhood and also linking out to another site your outgoing link can only be harmful if that site reciprocally links back to you.

So as long as your follow the answer above for question 1 then there will be no trouble

Hope this helps.

1. SemRush - SemRush is by far the best tool I have used for keyword research. You can see almost everything you can imagine about all your competitors keywords. You can also get an almost endless list of keywords almost instantly with any search. For example I searched money and instantly got a 10001 long list of keywords including the term money with incredibly useful data which you can save and keep even when you are not a member. This one offers a free trial though you need to give a credit card and cancel before its done.

2. Keyword Country - Keyword country is great. you can search and sort by almost any data types and with all sorts of ranges. You can search by CPC for keywords which is just ridiculous. This one also offers a free trial. Well worth checking out.

3. Market Samurai - From my experience market samurai was my first and favorite keyword tool for a long time and it even comes with a free trial.

4. Adwords Keyword tool - I wasn't much of a fan of this one at first but then I noticed if you log in you can see up to 800 results and use it pretty well to find some good keywords.

Generally I use several tools together to do my research as I find each has its strengths and weaknesses.

This is with over a year of experience. Enjoy!

When I started adding related posts at the end of each post and created a strongly relevant internal linking throughout my posts my ranking shot through the roof.

Yet another related post plugin for wordpress is great.

I have noticed that getting links from the appropriate TLD extension really determines where you rank on each google serps for the individual country.

you can search for sites related to yours for the specific TLD by putting inurl:.com in google along with your keywords.

the same thing works for all other extensions.

this makes finding .edu link opportunities a breeze for example

Besides link building you will want to make sure on webmaster tools you have set your targeted country to the country you want to rank best for. For example I have a site about college students which I've set to target the US since Canada mostly calls post secondary education University and College so the audience is split much more.

Hope this helps.

This is a really good question. Actually what I think is best is actually keeping the links separate and using the appropriate and most descriptive text for the page the text link points to and using the next best phrase in the image for the alt text. ex if you have a product called "big red dog house" then that would be the text link anchor text and the image alt text would be "large red dog house".

To solve the issue of too many links you should create subcategories within the categories to display fewer listings per page to reduce the number of links.

Now if you are worried about burring products make sure to divide the categories as evenly as you can so they do not go too deep. So if you have 70 products that were on the "dog houses" page try to make the dog houses page lead to a page with two links to categories "small dog houses" with about half the products and "large dog houses" with the other half. this way you create a tree of sorts (you can make many categories). The idea is to layer your navigation to guide the user towards what they want to find while structuring your navigation to give your products the attention they deserve from and seo stand point.

hope this helps

In order to rank for specific terms you must have relevant links with the right anchor text to those pages. If you have just made more pages and are only linking to yourself then you are effectively trying to just tell everyone that you are an authority without anyone else's opinion. So if you aren't being voted for (ie linked to) by other pages to say that your Nashville pages are what they are then you may just have a whole lot of low authority pages and need to build up more value.

Taking a look at your site you only have a little over 1000 links to your site with most of them going to the domain. deep linking is going to be key to your success or else you are trying to determine your own relevance.

hope this helps

Your best bet is to learn how to find dofollow links from high page rank sources.

A good way to do this if you have limited experience is to find a forum or registry required site that allows you to comment while getting a link to your profile with each comment. Also make sure that the profile allows you to have a dofollow link to your site. It is not too hard to post comments on pages and threads with 4PR+ which will boost your profile a great deal and thus boost your site's PR while being a legitimate way to provide value and get good results for yourself too.

buying and selling links is frowned upon by google.

I have also heard that in the future keywords in the domain will not be as valuable. age is definitely a big factor as well as the age of links.

Wayne gave a good answer.

From a great deal of research I have found that a 301 redirect loses some of the link juice to avoid people abusing the power of building many domains and then forwarding them all to one main domain.

In my opinion this is well worth it still especially when you don't have to go through the work to have established the link portfolio.

One thing to look out for though is making sure that the link portfolio really is as good as you think it is.

Look into the backlinks and see if they are from reputable sources which will stay there or if thy are just a mass of profile backlinks and comment spam which could just make it seem like they have a lot of good links or even get those links removed later on.

At the very least the 301 redirect will help get the robots to your site to increase crawl frequency which i find to be great when you want your pages to be indexed and updated quickly on google.

I suggest looking into building links with tumblr. you can make a tumblr blog and in the options you can set that tumblr blog to forward to your website's domain. after doing this you can then like other people's posts on their blogs by clicking a little heart on other tumblr blogs and by doing this you will get a link back to your site from their blog. this is a really easy way to get a lot of links quite easily.

having a lot of experience and practice I managed to get well over 10,000 in about a few weeks. Part of the reason for such a large number of links is because posts can be reblogged which means that another person's blog will have a copy of a post including the links to your blog. This means that liking one post sometimes gets you even over 10 links on 10 other tumblr blogs.

This is great for getting indexed and getting crawled very frequently though not so great for getting a variety of anchor text.

if this is unclear check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJYWNh1S_8o this video is a bit old but i think it goes over how to set up your account to point to your site.

hope this helps.

I am a huge fan of building links with tumblr. On webmaster tools, when the domain linking to me is not a tumblr subdomain but is using the tumblr platform, it says these are unique domains and easily puts my site well into the hundreds of different domains linking to it.

While I do agree that linking with the same anchor text may have diminishing return you are still receiving page rank and giving the google robots more opportunities to crawl to your site which ultimately still holds a great amount of value regardless of how google sees their ip. It is a myth that google even considers the same IP to be a negative feature. Google sees each page as a unique site (even within the same domain and same IP). If that site is reputable then it can pass on good value and if it is not then it doesnt. So often when people have many sites on the same IP they are not skilled at making them authoritative and thus assume that more sites from the same IP or more links from teh same IP can't add much value which is really not the case.

Hope this helps