via flickr

I was asked by a friend today if posting comments on blogs with no follows is a good way to build links for SEO. When I asked him what other strategies he had for acquiring links he mentioned this was going to be primary source of link building!

Why link building using comments is on its way out?

Just like the good old days where keyword stuffing and meta tag stuff used to work quiet well, search engines and especially Google are now catching on to comment spamming.

Links in comments are now devalued regardless whether or not if they have no follows. This is a direct response to the huge amount of spam comments now appearing on blogs, if you have ever ran a blog of your own, you will know what I mean, even the most obscure, hard to find blogs on the strangest topics can attract spam comments.

Its actually not hard for search engines to determine if  a link is from the comments section of a blog, a quick look at the code in wordpress.

<ol class=”commentlist”>
<li id=”comment-1372″>
<a id=”comments”>

Not hard for search engines to look for these tags and devalue the link-juice within them is it?

Don’t despair, comments are still useful

While comments are no longer useful for link-juice / reputation passing, they are still useful for the following reasons;

Driving qualified traffic

Lets say you own a fishing / lure store and you come across a blog post from someone complaining he isn’t catching any fish. This would be a perfect opportunity for you to leave a comment with fishing tips and suggest some lures he could use; at the end of the comment, be honest and say you own a fishing store where they purchase these products, with one link to your website, not ten!

You already have the target audience thanks to the blog post, now its simply putting together a well constructed comment.

Be mindful how you structure the reply, comments that look like a cut and paste job or advertising fluff will be deleted. Trust me, these type of comments are not hard to spot.

Ask yourself, are you providing any added value to the post, if a friend came to you with a complaint that he isn’t catching any fish. Are you going to give him a bunch of random lure names without telling him why he should use them? Of course not, be conversational. don’t write your comments like robots, because they will be treated like one.

Quicker Indexing

Comment links can also be used to get your website indexed quicker by search engines, if your website is new and not showing up in Google index; it is most likely in Google’s Sandbox.

A method I have found to be useful is using blog comments on popular blogs to naturally drive Googlebot to your sand boxed website.

Follow the advise above with comment structure and don’t spam. You will find once you have a few decent comments approved on blogs, it will move out of the sandbox faster, in most cases I have found this process to be faster than manually submitting your website to Google.

( Don’t forget to setup a Google webmasters account, if your sites not been found it could be other issues causing it, don’t assume its just been sandboxed, I will be posting about Google Webmaster Tool soon, stay tuned )

Making Connections

Blog commenting is one of the simplest form of Social Media Marketing! Good comments generate discussion, and this is what every blog owner wants. Subscribe to comment updates via email so you know when someone else has responded to your comment, this is where you can really engage with your target audience and offer your services / products.

Good comments can still land you juicy backlinks, most blog owners appreciate good comments and will reward you with a link from an actual post perhaps mentioning how your fishing lure has helped him catch more fish!

Not only do you get a backlink from an actual post which would pass on the link juice, you have just gained yourself a loyal customer that will potentially refer others to your website.

Closing thoughts on blog comments

So hopefully you will take my advice and stop comment spam once and for all on the internet!
But seriously, blog commenting is a great internet marketing tool, but for link building purposes they are clearly not as useful as they used to be. If you are solely focused on an SEO campaign, cross off blog comments please!

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The buzz within the search marketing industry is torn between 2 of this quarters biggest announcements:

1. First been the search partnership of Bing ( Microsoft ) and Yahoo! ( more )

2. Secondly Google has announced a major update to its search infrastructure code named #caffeine

We are going to explore what caffeine is all about and the major differences in part 1 of this 2 part post. In part 2 we will be dealing with some direct data comparisons and delivering our own conclusions based on this data.

[ don't forget add our RSS or Twitter to get notified when part 2 is released ]

On August 10th, the Google Webmasterblog announced public testing of their new #caffeine search quoting :

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.

The caffeine update is been reported as a complete rewrite of Google’s search infrastructure – lets check out what this means;

• Changes in how Google stores the massive amount of data gathered by their robots.
  This is a direct response to the rise in new digital media such as streaming videos, blog posts, social media content ( Twitter, facebook ). The old Google infrastructure was built to handle data by way of Collection > Quality Ranking  > Sandbox > Indexing. However with the explosion of real-time content, search engines are faced with the daunting task of filtering all this content to provide a real-time search. With any major change in a new data model, software must be upgraded / rewritten, this is part of the Google Caffeine update.
• Changes in how the Google collects its data.
  While this has not been confirmed, it is safe to assume with any updates in how data is written and stored, changes to the data collection process will also be different. Google uses robots that crawl through the web for data ( googlebot ), this is traditionally data that may not change or update in real-time. The caffeine update must include changes to the robot to cater for real-time content. My theory currently is Google has developed several types of robots that differ in its indexing rate and craw rate to cater for different media content.
• Changes in the how data is served to end users.
  So, Google is fairly tight lipped at the moment when asked if the #caffeine update will effect end-users. Quoting from their Google webmasterblog:

The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results

• From what we have tested on the #caffeine sandbox this is not really the case, some major differences we and other users have reported include:
  • Massive differences in the total search results returned. We are talking a few million results wiped out from results in general.
  • Search query time is generally faster. ( however take into account no Adwords are been displayed, which would increase load time )
    
  • Major SERP ( search engine result position ) changes. Which leads me to the next important point.

Have the search results changed in Google Caffeine? ( Changes in the Google algorithm / ranking system )

Yes most definitely, although Google is stating otherwise ( for now ). When we first heard about #Google #Caffeine I posted this question to Matt Cutts from Google.

john chen August 10, 2009 at 7:47 pm

Hi Matt,

Been sussing this out all morning, from the Google blog and your post its seems there are algo changes / updates on the current sandbox. I’ve noticed some definate changes in the how the SERP is different in the sandbox in my play this morning.

Could you confirm this?

Matts response was:

john chen and Daniel Sterling, most of the changes are in things like our core indexing, so there’s less changes for things like rankings. Lots of users won’t notice a big difference

From our own research and you can verify this yourself in the #caffeine sandbox, this is simply not the case! There are major differences in Caffeine SERP that will ultimately effect users, SEO and most of all companies that depend on their search positions.

Some changes we have identified in Caffeine SERP

• Google Sitelinks disappearing from some results.
• Rich Snippets disappearing from some results.
• Caffeine has difficulties handling 301′s. ( This is a bug )
• Page 1 results mostly contain the same sites, however positioning is quiet different
• Page 3 and onwards seem generate completely different results.
• The index page on root domain now has more weight.
• Pages with heavy keyword stuffing are been penalised.
• Pagerank Sculpting is no longer effective. ( further confirming the rel=nofollow topic )
• Brand name / Domain trust further effecting SERP. ( a step further in the Google Vince Update? )
• Number of inbound links from external domains
  
• External links using targeted keywords as anchors carry more weight.

These changes come from our initial research in comparing a sample data of searches, and by no means represent a concrete conclusion. Google caffeine is still under development, as such the algorithm and infrastructure will change and alter in the near future. These are just preliminary conclusions for your consideration ( food for thought ) and therefor I recommend that you make no immediate changes to your SEO strategies, but simply keep the above in mind.

How have your websites performed in Google Caffiene?

Google has released #caffeine for general public testing here

If you are after a direct comparison tool between #caffeine and current #google search Try http://www.goobinghoo.com/

Goobinghoo - side by side SERP comparison

You can easily compare the search results side by side, but don’t forget to sign out of your Google account. ( otherwise you may see your own preferred results )

Part 2 of this Google Caffeine update post will expand further into our findings above and with real data + example comparisons, as well as some SEO tips that you can perform today.

Did you find this post informative? Have anything further to add? Please leave a response in the comments section.

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Building an email list is said to be one of the most profitable things a webmaster can do. Of course, you can’t simply ask people to give you their email addresses. You must offer something in return, and this “something” usually is a newsletter. However, many webmasters hesitate in starting their own newsletters because they already struggle to find fresh ideas for their sites; having to find content ideas for yet another venue looks like quite a challenge.

If that’s your case, fear no more. Today you’ll see there are at least two easy ways to create content for it.

1. Using your newsletter to plug your site

Even if at first you really, really can’t think of any exclusive content to fill your newsletter, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t begin collecting those email addresses now. You can always start out with update alerts and evolve as time goes by. Update alerts are great to generate repeat traffic, because subscribers will be regularly encouraged to visit your site.

Do not just put together a lame list of new items added to your site. View each site update as an important happening — and try to convey such view in your newsletter text. Use it to tease your subscribers, to make them feel that they must visit your site right away. Of course, you should never generate false expectations; if you’ve just published a new article, don’t make your newsletter’s subscribers believe they will find five new pieces.

In case you tend to update your site daily, you’d better send out weekly update alerts. Otherwise you may look pushy and even spammy.

2. Complementing your site’s content with a newsletter

This method allows you to plug a site on your newsletter and the newsletter on your site at once. But it depends on your site content’s structure. Here’s what you should do: whenever you publish a list of new items, make sure not to post all of them on your site; save some for your newsletter. Alternatively, publish only one type of media on your pages and save the other ones for the newsletter.

Say you’ve written a list entitled “50 Effective Money-Saving Tips.” What you want to do is post 30 or 40 list items on your site or blog and end the text with a paragraph like this: “The remaining tips will be published on the upcoming 20th issue of our newsletter. If you don’t want to miss them, subscribe now.” If you have shot a video to demonstrate some (or all) of the money-saving tips, you can post the whole written piece on your site and entice readers to subscribe to your newsletter in order to get the video’s link.

In both cases you must display on the newsletter some links to your site’s content. This way, subscribers who still haven’t seen the updates will feel enticed to visit your pages. Taking the examples above, they’ll want to either read the first items of your money-saving list or view its written version instead of the video one only.

Do you have a newsletter? Leave a comment to tell us how you create content for it.

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Everyone at some point or the other has been fascinated by how Google views their sites and decides the rankings. While one can only assume based on a few factors, Google Webmaster tools are the only solution with any to that effect. The tools help in diagnosing the errors if any on your site, in increasing its visibility in terms of rankings and also let the owner make preferences with regard to how his/her website is listed. It is a treasure house of tools indeed.

The first and foremost thing one requires to use Google webmaster tools is an active Google account. Once that’s done, the rest is almost done as well. Read the rest of this entry »

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I have previously written about the backlinks that really matter for Google: the ones which come from authority sites. However, many, many webmasters and bloggers claim that one should get all the backlinks they can, no matter where they come from. In their opinion, Google won’t ignore discounted links even when they aren’t as valuable as the authority ones.

What are discounted links anyway?

There are three basic ways to look at it:

1. A discounted link would be one that comes from dubious sources, i. e., obscure pages that don’t have a strong reputation among Internet users. Read the rest of this entry »

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As professional bloggers, there’s constant pressure to keep ourselves updated on the latest trends. Subscribing to the RSS feeds of the most important websites makes this so much more convenient and faster to do. Looking back, I don’t know how I ever did without it. Reading feeds every morning is a great way to start your day, because it gives you a lot of article ideas and interesting conversation pieces. Not yet into the habit? Here’s a few of RSS aggregators you can choose from. Read the rest of this entry »

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Many webmasters spend part of their time monitoring their competitors’ performance. One of the things that they usually do is to try to learn more about competitors’ traffic. But when stats aren’t publicly available on a given site, how can one find out how many visits it gets?

On the Internet you’ll find several tools that can help you estimate a site’s traffic. Today I’m going to review one of them: Statbrain. Read the rest of this entry »

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As a small or home-based business entrepreneur, the Internet is like your henchman, always at your disposal and providing his powerful services for you to profit from. Google local search is one such convenience that the Internet provides for you to exploit.

No matter what your business is – whether it is a small local business, a business run from home or an online business, no matter what, it always helps to list your business online, especially on local searches like Google Local. Read the rest of this entry »

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There is nothing worse for a website looking to expand than being removed from the Google Index. If your site has been removed and you have absolutely no clue why this happened and how to recover from this onslaught, this article is for you.

Before we move and we tell you how to recover from Google’s snub, lets review what Google probably told you when they removed from the index. Read the rest of this entry »

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Google love — i.e., good rankings that lead to abundant traffic — is what most webmasters and bloggers struggle to get. And I’m sure that most of them have already learned what it takes to achieve it: they must ensure that their blogs and sites are good resources which will benefit web surfers in some way, hence generating the backlinks that Google values so much.

Since most — if not all — webmasters and bloggers are aware of this, why so many insist in using “dirty tricks” to build links? Read the rest of this entry »

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