I had recently made a post about most viewed video on youtube. There is fair amount of competition for the keyword and my post was ranking at >150 on the SERP. However yesterday I linked this post from 2 existing posts and a new post with varied anchor text and today the post has moved into 11th position on SERP. I am going to link my posts about Com surrogate, dual core vs core 2 duo and free bollywood movies to see if internal links can push these posts up in the SERP.

While I am at the topic of ranking with internal links, let me make one thing clear. WordPress plugins for internal links are good for getting posts indexed. However they are not the best way to use internal links to rank for particular posts. You should always identify relevant posts to create internal links.

April 2009 pagerank update is on right now. I am seeing changes to the pagerank of several client websites. However the PR is fluctuating indicating an update in progress. Check your own pagerank. I shall come back with a detailed post soon.

Image search results do not monetize well since google shows the results in an iframe. Solve that problem by adding the following code to your page. Now when a person clicks on a image search result, he will directly come to your site like normal search.


<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
if (top.location != self.location) top.location.replace(self.location);
</script>

Here is a video from Google that provides more detail about image search. It is 15 minute long, so watch it in your spare time.

1. Flickr
2. Digg
3. Propeller
4. Technorati
5. MyBlogLog
6. BloggingZoom
7. Current
8. Linkedin 
9. PostOnFire
10. CoRank

Looks like I am learning more SEO from the sample resumes website I am working on. It has been more than 4 days since I wrote about  resume format on my resume site and Google has not indexed it yet!!!! When it comes to blogs, Google indexes them in seconds from publishing. And here is a static website with good ranking for several target keywords related to resumes and Google has not indexed it for more than 4 days. I have added a sitemap to it and submitted the same to Google webmaster tool.

Learning: Even if you intend to create a static website, you will do well to base it on a blogging platform like wordpress and then customize the template code to give it a static look.

After advising others about SEO for close to 4 years, I have decided to walk the talk and try and get a website to rank on Google based on my SEO knowledge alone.** I have started working on a website for sample resumes and created 4-5 pages around 1 month back.

I was not able to follow up on the results due to problem with my internet. Yesterday I was checking the ranking of the website on Google. Following was the result for the keyword sample resumes

Google.com               204

Google.co.in              18 

Google.co.in              9 (Region=India in advanced search operator)

I know that Google provides different results based on geographic preference of user. However what puzzles me is “how does Google know that jhingalala is India focused website?” Some of the basic parameters that Google uses to determine geographic preference of a website are

The TLD extension of the website   .com is not specific to India

Server location                                    My server is located in USA

Linking websites                                 I doubt if I have any incoming links from India specific websites.

content on the page                            I have not included any geographic locations on the page

Then what makes google think that jhingalala is India specific website and will it hurt my efforts to make it rank on Google.com in future. I will appreciate your views on this topic.

** I have got some of my own sites quite good ranking on google. However most of that was natural without much concentrated SEO effort other than basic technical optimization

P.S: I seem to be getting much better understanding of SEO by trying to get this resume website to rank on Google. Will be sharing my experience on this project as I go along. Looking forward to your help and feedback on this topic.

I am just wondering if this will hurt the future chances of jhingalala ranking on google.com since

In this guide, I shall cover the following topics

1. The importance of backlinks (Hint: It is not Google alone)
2. Links can get you penalized. Things to keep in mind while building links
3. Not all links are equal: What determines the importance of a backlink
4. Types of links
5. How to get free backlinks from
   • Pages that allow you to submit links
   • Dofollow blogs
   • Dofollow social bookmarking site
   • Dofollow Forum
   • Dofollow social bookmarking
   • Directory Submissions
   • Article Marketing
   • CSS Gallery/ Wallpaper Gallery etc
   • Blog Review site
6. How to get more value from your existing links
7. Link Baiting: How to write posts that will get links on their own
8. Link Tracking: Find who links to you and to your competitor
9. Some blackhat and greyhat methods for building links

The importance of backlinks – Trust, Traffic, Reputation and even more links

If you read SEO blogs, then there is a good chance that you have formed an opinion that backlinks are important for ranking well on Google alone. That is a misconception and that is the reason why we see many newbies trying to spam rather than build links that will be appreciated by everyone. Relevant Backlinks have helped me to

• Build trust quickly: There are a number of blogs out there. It becomes really difficult to know which one to trust. Recently Niharsworld linked to one of my posts about keyword difficulty analysis. I am sure people who visited my blog through Nihar’s blog, would have found it much easier to trust what I was saying.
• Get direct Traffic: My blog post about the top 250 Indian blogs was linked from several high traffic blogs including DevilsWorkShop, Abhisays and Indiblogger. Those links brought in a lot of traffic to me.
• Build a reputation: I have been a frequent poster at the Indiblogger forum. While answering many questions, I have linked to my posts. However more importantly I have developed a really good reputation with many regular visitors there. I will not trade that trust for any amount of search engine traffic.
• Get even more links: That is right. Links get you even more links. You may write really interesting posts. But if noone reads it, then noone can link to it. Also remember that when someone links to you, he is recommending you to his readers. He will never do it unless he is sure that you can be trusted. So Trust, Traffic and Reputation are not some nice but useless medal but they are the primary requirement to get links.

Links can get you in trouble – Things to look out for while building links – Diversity and Velocity

After reading this post, you may get tempted to go out and get 100 PR5 links with the exact anchor text of “make money online”. You are confident to get a pagerank 9 and rank at the top for the highly competitive word. Only to realize that your pagerank has gone down to 0 and your blog is no where to be found on Google!!!!!!!You have been penalized by Google.

Please understand that Google is trying to identify great content by counting the links. You building 1000s of links says nothing about quality of your post. You are confusing Google and hence Google hits back by throwing you out of its index. Does it mean you should not create links for your own blog? Hell No. Build links by all means (that is why you are reading this post neways) but do so in a manner that looks natural.

There are 2 important signals to identify artificial link creation – 1. Velocity of link acquisition and 2. Diversity of your links

Velocity of link acquisition: How does a normal good quality blog get its links. It always starts with a single link, then in sometime someone else finds it and gives him a link. As more and more people discover your great content, you start getting more and more links. What if some 5 months old blog gets 100 links over 7 days? Either it has done something very spectacular or something fishy. It is more likely that the blogger has gone around dropping his links on all the forums, social bookmarking sites and blog comments or someone buying links. Try to build links so that it looks as natural as possible. Start slow and Gradually build up the speed.

Diversity Natural links differ. They differ in the pagerank of the linking page and the anchor text used. If you produce a great article, some bloggers with PR 1 and some others will write about it. Some will link to it with anchor text of “click here”, some others will use your blog name and some will use “make money online”

What happens if you get hold of 100s of dofollow blogs, sorted by pagerank? You select the highest pagerank blogs and start commenting with the “make money online” as the keyword. This lack of diversity can tell Google that there is something not natural there and your site can get penalized.

To summarize, take it slow and mix up your link. Get some PR 0 links and some PR 5 links. Use click here in some links, your blog name in some other and the keyword in some of them. If you have to go with one learning from this post then it should be “build links that look as natural as possible”.

Not all links are equal: What determines the importance of a backlink 

• Dofollow or nofollow: This is the most important factor since nofollow links count for nothing.

• Strength of the page (PR) on which link is present: The PR is one of the most important factors affecting the value of the link. However many people make the mistake of overrating the importance of this factor.  I have seen many examples where 2 properly designed PR3 links have given a higher ranking boost compared  to a PR5 link. So try to get high PR links but do not obsess over pagerank

• Anchor Text of the link: This is one of the most underestimated part of a link. A proper anchor text is absolutely important especially if you are targeting a particular keyword to rank for.

• Total number of links on the linking page: If the linking page has 100 outgoing links, then the value to each page goes down. Hence you should prefer to get links from pages with not many outgoing links on them.

• Age of the link: To discourage spammers, Google does not give 100% benefit of a link to the target page immediately. The value of a link increases over a period of time and reaches maximum value anywhere between 3 to 6 months after the links was first discovered.

• Contextual relevance of the page to the Target page: I had talked about my attempt to rank for keywords related to sample resumes. Now if I place a link to my freshers sample resumes  page from this page about link building, then google will give lower importance  to the link than if I had written a complete post about sample resumes and then from there linked to sample resumes site

• Contextual relevance of text around the link: If you see the example above, I have atleast talked about sample resumes in the paragraph surrounding the links to the sample resumes site. In my experience that trick alone gives a decent boost to the power of the link.

• Type of link: Type of link is so important to the power of link that I have discussed it in detail in the entire section below.

 Donace has done a great job of explaining the importance of different factors of a link.

Types of Links

As you go through the various methods for building links, you will realize that some methods like blog commenting, social bookmarking are way too easy while a method like link-baiting is 1000s time more difficult. Then why do people bother with creating link-baits? The answer lies in the type of link that you end up getting through the different methods.

• Dofollow/ Nofollow links: Nofollow links are the ones where the webmaster is effectively saying to the search engine that they are not vouching for the quality of the target page. These links are found in the comments of the blogs, forum signature etc. They contribute the least or nothing at all to your ranking. We shall be talking about dofollow links in the rest of this article.
• Internal Links/ External Links: Internal links are links from pages on the same domain and External links are links from some other website. So if I link to an article on Binaryday from this post then it will be an internal link, whereas if I link to an article from DollarShower, that will be an external link. Many articles about link building talk about external links. While external links are important for improving the Google’s trust on your site, internal links can help particular pages on your site. (I shall cover more about internal links in my article about pagerank sculpting)
• Editorial links: These are the links that are provided to you from within the body of the article. So articles that I link from this article will be editorial links. They are the most valuable links as people link to only the best articles from their content. However such links normally suffer from non relevant anchor text as the person linking to is not worrying about your ranking and hence ends up using click here or your blog name as the anchor text.
• Sitewide links: These are the links that are present on each page of the blog/ site. Think of the links from blogroll or footer of a blog. While such links increase the quantity of links to your site, search engines generally put very less value on such links. Given a choice I will always opt for a single editorial link from a site rather than 1000s of sitewide links.
• Links not in control of bloggers: There are many places from which you can get dofollow links. However the links are not given by the webmaster but rather it is given by the person who is getting linked. Continuing with the example of Nihar’s link to me, the link in the body of the post is an editorial link. However the link to my blog post that I have provided in the comment is not an editorial link. Even if it were a dofollow link, it will not add as much value as an editorial links.

So the answer to the question that I asked at the top of this section i.e “why people worry with link-baits while it is possible to get equal quantity of links through other methods like commenting on blogs or social bookmarking” is that “link-baits typically get you editorial links whereas other methods give you sitewide links or links outside editorial control”. As I said, I will swap 100 links for a single editorial link.

Methods to get free and relevant backlinks 

1. Try the following search on google to get pages that allow you to add your links. Replace keyword with your keyword

“keyword” “Add link” OR “Add site” OR “Submit Site” OR “Add URL” OR “add a site” OR “add your site” OR “add a URL” OR “add your URL” OR “suggest a site” OR “suggest a URL”.

2. Dofollow blogs, social bookmarking sites and forums: Everyone advises us to comment on dofollow blogs to get free backlinks. However how do I find dofollow blogs? Simple. Just search for “dofollow blog search” to find a number of search engines based on dofollow blogs. However not all of these blogs continue to be dofollow. Hence do check manually before you start to comment.

You can find a list of great dofollow social bookmarking site and dofollow forums here as well.

Bonus tip: I always prefer to comment on dofollow blogs that have commentluv and top-commentator plugins installled. That way I end up getting 3 links for a single comment!!!

3. Get a free backlink from delicious http://raven-seo-tools.com/blog/311/creating-dofollow-links-on-delicious

4. Use Twitter to get a free PR 4 backlink http://www.dailyseoblog.com/2009/02/twitter-can-help-you-get-backlinks-yes/

Get more out of existing backlinks

I am constantly surprised by how little attention bloggers pay to the existing links. If your blog has been around for more than a year, then you will be surprised by the increase in ranking, that you can get by simply optimizing the already existing backlinks.

5. Change the anchor text of your existing link to something more relevant: Many people link to your pages with your name or the name of your website. There have been number of times when people mention my blog as via binaryday, binaryday said etc. Since anchor text is one of the most important determinant of the value of a link, you will do well to find out all those pages and then try to contact the webmaster and ask him to change the anchor text to something more relevant. Here is a simple google query that gets me all the pages that are linking to binaryday with binaryday in the anchor text. “allinanchor: binaryday -site:binaryday.com”. Once I have identified these pages, I need to find out ways to contact the owners and ask them to change it to a keyword of my choice.

6. Sometimes people mention your blog or your name without a link to your blog. It is easier to convert these mentions into a link to your blog. To find pages where people have mentioned binaryday without linking to the blog, I use the following search query on Google “binaryday -allinanchor: binaryday -site:binaryday.com”

7. Convert 404 errors into valid backlinks: How dare I speak on a topic, once Matt Cuts has discussed a topic related to SEO? So here is the article from the master about how to convert 404 error pages into free backlinks   

8. Add strengths to page linking to you: This is the only original idea of mine. It is difficult to get links from high pagerank pages with tons of links. So I try to get links from low pagerank pages and then use my knowledge of SEO to improve the strength of the page. Simply get it a bunch of free links from dofollow blogs, forums or social networks. Digg it, stunble it or twit it, thereby increasing the chance that the page will pick up some additional backlinks.

P.S: I am going to be updating this post with details over the next 15 days. Let me know if you will want me to cover any other topic related to link building here.

SEO is a really complex concept. At least if you are planning seo forlong term success. However human mind has a tendency of simplifying things as much as possible. Probably that explains our obsession with the concept of pagerank. All that we have to keep moitoring a little green bar to know how successful our SEO efforts have been. I wish it was that simple, but unfortunately it is not.I shall not be worried, if such partial knowledge about SEO resulted in wastage of time alone. The problem is it puts your blog/website at the risk of being penalized.

For example take the case of link building. Backlinks are the single most important factor in deciding your ranking on Google. So everyone advises you about building links to your blog. Nothing wrong with that. The problem is when someone makes you believe that building links as fast as possible will get you results fast.

If that is the only seo post that you read before you start getting links for your blog, you are in trouble. You need to learn about anchor text diversity, speed of link acquisition, problem with link exchange and circular link exchange, issue with domains on the same server, site-wide links issue etc. The question is are you ready to commit that much of time to understand so many concepts or do you want to go commenting on dofollow blogs?

BTW, if you happen to be an electronics engineer, I will like your views on my post about the difference between intel core2 duo and intel dual core processors.

Thanks to donace from thenexus for putting together this cool list of free seo tools.

Nihar has given a detailed instruction about how to add wordpress pages to navigation bar

Ajith at dollarshower has some greatly simplified articles about seo

These SEO steps are so basic that you have already done these steps. However since they are so basic, you have no business not doing any of them.

1. http://yourblog.com redirects to http://www.yourblog.com or vice-versa.
2. Your permalink structure is /%postname%/ or /%category%/%postname%/.
3. Your blog has a sitemap.
4. You have a google webmaster account and your sitemap has been submitted to it. Ideally you should submit to yahoo and msn as well.
5. Your post titles should not be blog name >> post title. It should be Post title at best. If you think your blog name is too cool then max you can do is use post title >> blog name
6. If you show an excerpt on your home page then you do not use a “read the complete post” as the link to the complete post.  You use “read more about keyword keyword” like this post should be linked from homepage as “read more about wordpress seo”
7. You link to your own posts with proper keywords
8. The link to your about-us, contact-us page is nofollowed.
9. Each post has atleast one image
10. each image has proper alt and title tag

1. Search engine ranking factor from Seomoz It should be a crime to be blogging for more than 3 months without going through this article at least thrice. The article talks about all types of positive and negative ranking factors. The relevant positive factors are Anchor Text of Inbound Link, Global Link Popularity of Site, Link Popularity within the Site, Topical Relevance of Inbound Links, Link Popularity of Site in Topic and Global Link Popularity of Linking sites. Most important negative ranking factors are External Links to Low Quality sites and Participation in Link Schemes.
2. Link Value Factors Explained As we have learned in the article above not all links contribute equally to your ranking on Google. Several factors influence how much value is added by a particular link. This article has 17 SEO experts discussing the importance of 40 factors on the value of a link.
3. The Secret to Making Every Link Count For Your SEO Rankings Simple but highly useful article about importance of getting organic links from relevant websites to different posts on the blog. Avoid getting all links to your homepage or links with identical achor text. Getting links too fast may raise some flags at the Big G.
4. How Getting a Link is Like Picking up a Woman Perhaps one of the best explanations about what you can do get links to your post naturally. The comparison with picking up a woman, drives home the points even for non-geeks.
5. Most Overlooked SEO Metric: Link Placement The post talks about importance of link placement within the page. Good point to remember while building links
6. Link Building Strategies: 69 Solid Tactics For 2009
7. 30 Ways to Get Links Naturally & Stop Link Building
8. The Definitive List (75+) of Link Building Techniques in 2008
9. A Linkbuilding Method So Effective I Can’t Believe It’s Not Blackhat Talks about a very simple but effective way to build links from authority sites, organically.
10. A Big Roundup Of Link Building Tools As the title suggests this is indeed a big roundup of link building tools that are useful.

Finally do consider using the Link Building Report Template to better organize your link building efforts.

Dofollow blogs are blogs that do not put nofollow tag on the comments and hence you can increase your pagerank by commenting upon them.

Is this just another list of dofollow blog list?

There are many list of dofollow blogs available on the internet. However all of them are absolutely outdated. Many of the blogs listed on these lists are no longer dofollow and many are not a blog anymore. I am checking each of those blogs to see if they continue to provide dofollow links or not.

http://www.rivertorivernyc.com/blog

http://bakkouz.net

http://www.ashotiwoth.org

http://www.universalhub.com

http://www.blogpi.net

http://www.neilshearing.com

http://weblogtoolscollection.com

http://www.411mas.com/blog

http://www.knupnet.com

http://www.kabalyero.com

http://www.code4gold.com/blog

http://julianschrader.de

http://blog.campaignblasts.com

http://www.stevenaitchison.co.uk/blog

http://schwoit.com

http://silkenhut.com/blog/

http://standalone.blogsome.com/

http://review.miss-kate.com/page/2/

http://www.bisnis-net.info/

http://table4five.net./

http://www.magicalrosegarden.com/

http://momreviews.net/

http://www.jtmusicreview.info/

http://aprobloggermom.com/

http://www.yourmoneyinfo.com/blog/

http://www.lauralohr.com/wordpress/

http://silvermelody.com/

http://boatinginbeautifulbritishcolumbia.com/

http://www.whatcanimakewithit.com/

http://hotchickwriter.com/

http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com/

http://www.simplerandomness.com/

http://ericsocia.net/

http://fatladysingz.com/

http://www.pixelheadonline.com/blog/

http://revellian.com/

http://www.triathlontraining.us/

http://yourwebsiteprofit.blogspot.com/

http://www.howtowakeupearly.com/

http://www.londonerlife.com/

http://jakeldaily.com/

http://www.lifeintherough.com/

http://www.thedailyfuzz.com/

http://marketingasolicitor.com/

http://secretofunlimitedprosperity.com/

http://jennys-corner.com/

http://www.newsnotion.com/

http://www.brilliantcheers.co.uk/

http://blog.achille.name/

http://chrishoyt.com/

http://blogthatoutside.com/

http://www.layercake.net/

http://pajamaprofessional.com/

http://crayonwriter.com/

http://tagskitchen.com/

http://trademacro.com/

http://www.brianpratt.net/

http://andybeard.eu/

http://armymomnj.name/

http://www.bodyfitnessinfo.com/blog

http://poundingheartbeat.com/

http://richardxthripp.thripp.com/

http://bloggervention.com/

http://focusorganic.com/

http://www.delightfulwork.com/

http://www.buymeblog.com/

http://www.communityspark.com/

http://www.ecommtips.com/

http://emoneymarketing.com/

http://www.jonespc.com/

http://kansha-shite.blogspot.com/

http://lastblogger.com/

http://magicalrosegarden.com/

http://marketingblagger.com/

http://www.momisnutz.blogspot.com/

http://www.patricksays.net/

http://pimpmypagerank.com/

http://thereasoner.com/

http://selfhypnosisprogram.com/

http://www.simplekindoflife.com/

http://blog.techiezone.in/

http://blog.c-yoga.de/

http://www.agentsheaven.com/blog

Visit the pages and leave meaningful comments. Most of the dofollow blogs have very strong moderators and hence any spam comment is sure to be deleted.