This is a guest post by Mark Ius, on behalf of Red Fly Marketing, a digital marketing agency in Ireland, which includes both a web design company, and an SEO company.

It’s well known that most SEOs hate link building with a passion. Why? Two reasons. (more…)

I got the question recently from a friend at a big corporation, in the context of buying reviews. Of course, Google does not make the law (yet), but there are laws restricting misleading marketing. (more…)

To visitors coming via my 101 Advanced Text Link Buying Tips article on Search Engine Journal, welcome. Here’s an overview of my link buying services. (To my regular readers, check out the article and link to it or link here if you like it . )

The main benefits of using my text link buying services are that I

• Reduce your risk,
• Get you the most value for money, and
• Maximize your ROI.

To buy text links effectively, I follow a few principles:

- Minimize risk by making paid links indistinguishable from unpaid links. This also maximizes effectiveness.
- Purchase links for rankings, but also for branding and community building. Brands and communities are valuable assets that drive traffic and revenue.
- If it can send traffic that converts, the link is worth buying. This is why demographic targeting is a valid approach to buying links.

My rates start at $1000 for every $1000 in paid link spend, which is based on the average amount of time involved in managing such a budget. For link purchases beyond $8,000/month, we can negotiate better rates. The rates are also negotiable for long-term commitments of 9 months+.

If you’d like discrete text link buying services, contact me.

I’m working on an absolutely massive text link buying piece for SEJ. To keep your appetites whetted, here’s a little sneak preview. (more…)

SMX West’s video SEO panel taught me that the number of embeds your video gets is important to having it rank better at Youtube, and potentially in Google’s universal search results. So why not speed things up by buying a few installs and links for your video?

If more embeds means better SEO, there seems to be an argument for buying installs, just as there is for buying links in normal SEO. An embed is when someone copy-pastes the html code from Youtube to put a video on their site. (more…)

I’m working on some pretty detailed, informative pieces on link buying. One is a MASSIVE how-to. The other is a niche how-to for a specific type of content. If this type of link building is your thing, add my rss feed to your reader for more.

What are the pros and cons of buying links? What risks and rewards should I consider in a cost-benefit analysis of a strategy of paying for backlinks?

(more…)

by Stuart Frisby Identify link patterns. Look around a niche and ask: (more…)

What are your direct competitors doing in the way of backlink development? My research in over 30 verticals sheds some light on the question. This is part 2 of 2.

I posted Part 1 “What 70+ Hours of Backlink Checking and Research Shows…” on Search Engine Journal, in which I covered:

• Practical uses for this competitive intelligence,
• My methodology in conducting this research,
• Some fun data points for niche research,

Here, I’ll go over these three points:

1. Screenshots of the data,
2. My analysis and conclusions,
3. Some caveats.

At the end, I’d love to hear comments from people of all experience levels. Don’t worry about sounding “dumb,” because there are no dumb questions: a desire to learn shows great intelligence!

(more…)

The defining mantra of OG SEOs, which I’ve read time and again, when it comes to paid links: “Do what it takes to rank.” Keep that in mind. (more…)

I’ve seen variations on this link building trick, but it’s the first time I see it producing additional links beyond the value you already have. (more…)

A while back someone in the search community recommended I get a form fill extension (more…)

Here’s what I’ve experienced and learned in the past year. Feel free to skim, but as with my scratchpad first discussing submarine crawling, what you read here today may be industry-changing search news in 6 months… (more…)

Link buying advice often sounds something like, “Get links from relevant sites and pages for the greatest boost to your rankings.” Link buying advice is often wrong.

According to everyone’s favourite content network guru, keyword selection on the content network needs to be based on demographics. That’s why I saw the following weight loss ads on a page that had nothing to do with weight loss, and nor did the site hosting the page. (more…)

Update: These are no longer being offered; I got an immediate response and booked all the spots. Link building inquiries with budgets for the service are still welcome, however.

While I’ve been doing online marketing for a while now, I’ve had little to do with the link buying aspects of link building so far. That isn’t to say I haven’t read about it or even shared some new ideas on disguising text link ads … but my clients to date and my own sites have been able to rank using Google-approved tactics. Not to say I haven’t done it on my own test sites, but I’m admittedly short on experience here. (more…)

Jim’s thinking on buying links can’t be that far different from Aaron Wall’s or Greg Boser’s or Todd Malicoat’s thinking, imho. They’re all part of the Vet SEO independent webmaster school of thought. And if you have done any reading at all on search, you’d know that Aaron, Greg, Todd and others encourage big brands to buy text links to rank higher. Now consider that Jim and We Build Pages have got an excellent reputation in the search marketing business, and thus likely have attracted some big name brands to their client roster. Why would WBP not buy links for them? (more…)

Get the lowdown in my post at Youmoz. The template’s already had over 250 downloads! And on a related note, Internal Link Building just crossed the 2500 download mark!

Aaron Wall hasn’t written extensively on WP blog security in the past, to my knowledge. However, he knows it’s a topic likely to be popular with the general blogger community and not too technical to push them away, while still being meaty and fresh enough to appeal to his regular SEO audience. (more…)

Internal Link Building has been updated – everyone should get the new version, as it has fixed the main bugs troubling many installations, plus added some awesome new functionality. Download internal link building by clicking here!

Internal Link Building’s New Functionalities and Why They’ll Rock Your Socks: (more…)

A few of you have been kind enough to report bugs and issues with the internal link building plugin. I’m currently aware of the following issues. They’re on the to-do-list to be fixed and/or improved. I wasn’t sure whether or not to hide these bugs or be upfront about it, but I figure it’s better to fess up and be transparent than whatever might happen in the alternative.

Keep in mind, however, that some problems will be specific to you personally. Try de-activating other plugins before you come to report a problem. If that doesn’t work, then please, I really, really want to hear from you!

Also, if you’re on version 1 of the plugin rather than version 2, get version 2
now as it fixes a common bug (see 2 below) and may address yours. You don’t need to worry about losing saved keywords; they’ll be there when you install the new version. This is per my testing on a 2.5x WP install on this site.

1) Apostrophes are not being accepted (more…)

Update: Welcome Sphinn, StumbleUpon users . How can you rank for competitive keywords like “Mortgage Calculator”? I don’t know about SEOBook, since he’s always talking about it, but here’s how Google would rank for a bigshot mortgage term like that.

(more…)

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/advsearch;_ylt=AsF7s1pRZXQjk6M7mHIy99bal8kF?p=http%3A%2F%2Fseoroi.com%2Fspecialty-services%2Fnew-seo-plugin-for-wordpress-internal-link-building%2F

Try and find http://www.pokeraffiliateprograms.com/forums/general-poker-affiliate-discussion/17456-new-plugin-wordpress-internal-link-building.html

(Updated with new link as Yahoo changed its results and included other links I’d gained.)

Hint: It’s not (more…)

See here: http://seoroi.com/specialty-services/new-seo-plugin-for-wordpress-internal-link-building/

The download link is now live towards the end of the post. Thanks to all of you who were patient and to everyone who offered help and kudos etc. Matt Longley and his team of developers, who are preparing to launch Site Source 101 in August, were the kind and helpful folks that finally got stuff working for me!

Note: If you download this, please link to this page from your blog or share it on StumbleUpon by clicking this button:

Update 1 : The plugin has been downloaded 6200 + times! And many webmasters use it on multiple sites, so it’s probably being used on 8000 to 10,000 sites!

Update 2 : To download the plugin, you need to add my RSS feed to your reader. The download link is now in my RSS feed’s footer . That is to say you can find a link to download below any post, but only if you read via RSS.

Some folks have complained about the need to subscribe. And I understand where you’re coming from – it feels a little pushy and you probably already have a bunch of subscriptions.

But there are good reasons to subscribe to my rss feed (besides it being free):

1) To learn about updates to the plugin or about new plugins or valuable SEO tools and research I release.

2) To learn new SEO techniques. If my plugin is worth downloading, then aren’t my other SEO ideas also worth your attention?

Key info on Internal Link Building:

Internal Link Building gives you an admin panel to assign keywords to given destination URLs. The point being that your website will link within itself a la Wikipedia – every time a keyword occurs, it links to the page you defined. (more…)

Aaron Wall claimed, in Strategic Content Based Link Building, that you could gain $10,000 worth of links with two days of work. That’s a lot of hyperbole, which goes back to how I didn’t make 3K in a week. My 3K post and my criticism in the comments on Aaron’s post is at the heart of this post’s idea: (more…)

So I got the following pitch in an email, in summary:

We will create personas and add value to communities around your topic and get links to you from members of those communities. Each link costs $xyzabcd.

When link buying turns into genuine, valuable editorial content that people would be happy to find in a SERP, which content only indirectly affects the links you built… is link buying still problematic?

Update: See more on what google wants, from the horses’ mouth.

Legal fictions can be used by greyhat SEOs to overcome Google’s nearsighted paradigms on buying websites and buying links. While Google is trying to pass off its guidelines as law – and is succeeding in convincing some people of that fact* – the facts are otherwise, and my two-post series on the topic will show that the law can actually enable people to skirt Google’s techniques and expose its faults. (more…)

I’ve been asked the question recently in connection to business blogs: Should I blog on the company’s official site/domain name, or should I blog on on a fresh domain name? Each approach has its advantages, but with current search engine algorithms, my advice is to have the blog on (more…)

You’re likely to see some of these in future posts here and aroud the various lovely places that take my stories. So check out as many of them as you have time for, cuz there are some real sweet ones in here.

Diorex doesn’t blog anymore, so Smaxor republished some of his classics. (more…)

Two techniques I’ve thought of recently to modify the traditional “look at the top 100 to find targets” link building technique: (more…)

Welcome Search Newz visitors! It seems that Search Newz’s syndicated version of my article, “If You Listened When Google Announced Submarine Crawling,” which follows up the one you’re seeing now, forgot to link to an important Matt Cutts video. So there’s the link to help you out. Anyways, on with the show – here’s what submarine crawling is all about, as interpreted from Matt Cutts’ explanations.

Matt Cutts’ post and this Webmaster Central post recently explained that “high quality” sites are being given special treatment – submarine crawling.

We all know that links from high quality sites are more valuable than those from average or mediocre sites. Now, Matt and Google have given us a new measurement for finding high quality sites – submarine crawling – and thus high quality link prospects.

Russian Submarine courtesy of Orpheus Grey.

So WHAT is Submarine Crawling? (more…)

Google killed former SEOmoz CTO Matt Inman’s widgetbait because some Guardian reporter didn’t like it and wrote his negative opinion up. Then Aaron Wall was unlucky enough to trust a jerk who asked Matt Cutts about Aaron’s affiliate program based linkbuilding.

The question is: Will Amazon get a beat-down too? For their (more…)

SMX West was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. In large part, that was due to all the great people I got to meet. It was quite literally networking on steroids. If you want to learn more about SEO or chat with some bright people in the field, have a look at these people and the sites they back.

And if you want to have any success at all, be it in SEO or otherwise, invest in your network. Why was Guy Kawasaki able to launch a succesful site and get 200K pageviews in 24 hours? Because he spent, in his own words, “24 years of schmoozing and paying it forward.” In English: He made friends. Lots of em. Genuine friends. Pretty good reason to go to SMX Social Media, in my humble opinion.

Rand Fishkin, Sarah Bird, Rebecca Kelley, Jane Copland, Scott Willoughby, Jeff Pollard, Gillian Fishkin, Evan Fishkin - SEOmoz (Evan, let me know when you put your own site up) – Finally! I think that meeting you guys and hanging out with you was probably one of the biggest highlights of the whole trip for me. And if that weren’t enough, the awesome business/community you guys run allowed me to have/meet a whole bunch of other friends at SMX! I learned a lot, had a blast, and of course, I can’t thank you guys enough for your help getting my lost laptop back! Friends in need, are friends indeed …

Will Critchlow, Duncan Morris – Distilled – Guys, it was very nice of you to say hi and have drinks with me at the “Expo Hall Networking Reception,” and chat it up at Gillian’s table. Next conference we need to spend more time hanging out though! Distilled are doing big things in the UK, so if you’re in that part of the world, give ‘em a ring!

Tamar Weinberg – Techipedia / Mashable – Tamar has got to be one of the biggest social media power users you’ve ever seen. She’s on SU, Sphinn, Flickr and does awesome stuff at all of those places! And so I was totally surprised and flattered when this superstar walked over and said hello at the reception. Fun hanging out with ya Tamar!

Chris Winfield – 10e20 – Chris, thanks for sharing some tips and concrete pointers with me at SMX and for twittering my post on being an independent webmaster – that brought it to most votes in upcoming at Sphinn literally overnight! You’d think that Chris would be a pretentious guy (not to mention his frequent mentions and citations in the mass media and stature as a social media powerhouse) but he was very down to earth. Great to meet you Chris!

Sean Maguire – 360 Sell – Great of you to say hi, Sean, and nice to meet the man behind the moz comments! I appreciated the offer of a ride to the airport as well!

Hamlet Batista – Ranksense SEO Software – Hamlet, your software demo was really impressive and I’m looking forward to testing it out in depth once my exams are done! Also, funny story about the t-shirts .

John Carcutt – Applied SEO – I read Stuntdubl’s tips on attending a conference, and brought a notepad with me to my chat with him and Mike Gray and Rae Hoffman. I only wish I’d done the same when chatting with you, John, because you kept making me say “wow, that’s a great idea” and sharing these sweet tactics that have unfortunately vanished from memory. Sigh… Great idea with putting your social media profiles on the back of your card though!

Jordan Kasteler, Stephen K Hansen and Brian Utley - Utah Web Services (& SEO) – Jordan, thanks so much for saying hi. It was really nice to meet you, Steve and your other teammate (who didn’t have any cards, hence the blank), and I had fun chatting with you dudes .

Jon Kelly, Scott Schedek; President, BizDev Manager – Sure Hits Insurance and Loans – Nice to meet a fellow Mozzer, Jon!

Ralph and Jason Thompson – Ad Customers (PPC) – Ralph’s a former lawyer and real estate agent (very cool, imho) and got online back in the 90s, sensing the next wave. Pleasure chatting with you two and whenever you have a question on local, let me know!

Ken Jurina, Damian Finlay; President and Consultant – Epiar Industrial Strength Keyword Research – Ken, it was cool to finally meet you and I hope the stuff with MatchCraft works out. Damian, thanks for teaching me a bundle, and I also hope those references pan out .

A, Renee Henry and Janet Prado – Matchcraft SEM – A pleasure singing along with you guys during Karaoke, guys, and chatting afterwards (even if we were all a bit tired/hoarse).

Miguel Salcido, Stephen Peron and Mike Cheslar – eVisibility – Awesome chatting with you folks and smooth moves on the rel=nofollow shirts! Also, thanks for being a sport on the paid drinks stuff Miguel.

Jay Young, Big Kahuna - Str0ud LLC / Linkfish Media – Nice chatting with you Jay, and congrats to you for the success you’re having!

Tyler Shears, Online Marketing Manager – Databanq Media – Tyler, thanks for coming up after the panel and introducing yourself dude! Honestly, it was awesome to see someone else my age there, not to mention how well you’re obviously doing! Keep it up .

Fionn Downhill, President & CEO – Elixir Systems – Talk about being an Influential! Fionn, you taught me (and everyone at that growing your firm panel/lunch) a whole lot, not to mention changed my perception of SEMPO! Thanks a lot, and here’s to some more chats in the future!

Amy Konefal, Sandra Niehaus, Lance Loveday – Closed Loop Marketing – Amy, that was an eye-opener PPC presentation and Sandra those were great practical details you shared on MV testing. And Web Design 4 ROI is awesome !

Loren Baker, Eric Lander – Advance Rankings – At first I didn’t even realize Loren was the Loren Baker from SEJ, but obviously that changed when I saw his card! Eric was my co-panelist on the local SEO panel, and brought a fresh perspective to the table given his industrial strength work doing hundreds and thousands of local listings (whereas most local clients are small and have a single location).

Eric Wu, Fernanda Dorsey; Salpi Bilanjian; Sr. Product Manager of Search Audience Product & Services, Product Manager Search & Commerce, Sr. Product Manager & Account Manager – Earthlink – Glad you liked the paid drinks bit, bud, and I look forward to seeing what you’re doing with G Custom search. You guys win the award for team with the shortest names and longest job titles ! Or perhaps you’re all working for two people’s worth and need a raise? My $0.02…

Li Evans, Editor and Director of Internet Marketing - Search Marketing Gurus and Key Relevance – Just like Tamar, Li paid me the huge compliment of coming over to say hi! To this little pisher! Awesome meeting Li, and thanks for making me feel welcome at the conference .

At this point, it’s getting a little tedious writing this out for everyone I met, so I hope you guys’ll understand if I just link and mention your names.

Nate Poupko CX Digital Affiliate Network (Awesome AM if any of you guys want to join; incidentally, that’s a thankyou link for Nate’s help in researching offers. It’s his affiliate signup link.)

Harrison Gevirtz – Gevirtz Media / CPA Share A pleasure meeting and chatting with you dude . Let’s talk more on MSN!

Lisa A Williams Media Forte Marketing

Daniel Riveong e-storm

Chris Silver Smith (awesome doing the panel with you and chatting afterwards!) and Stephen Spencer – Net Concepts

David Mihm – David Mihm web design (yet another SEOmoz friend I get to meet!)

Carlos del Rio (you naughty spammer ) - 100 Dollar SEO – Yeah, you all wish you could hire Carlos for $100! (Hey, I kinda wish too, cuz I’d outsource everything to him!)

Jim Hedger – Markland Media – See also the words of wisdom from Jim at the end of this post.

Andrew Shotland – Sphinn buddy and Local SEO Guide

Ryan Miller, President – Etna Interactive Cosmetic Surgery Marketing – Ryan, I appreciate the tip on improving the follow-up direct mail to clients! To everyone else reading this, Ryan came forward after my local panel and suggested to me that if I wanted to make better use of direct mail to get reviews from past clients, that the cards send visitors to a redirect on your client’s site, instead of sending them to the Yelp/IYP or other review site. The point being that if Yelp etc. change their URL conventions and your review page changes location, the cards will still be valid (because you just need to change where your redirect points to).

Brian Gil, Director of Yahoo Local Product Mgm’t – Yahoo local – Great meeting you and doing the panel with you Brian, and kickass interview at Matt’s!

Colin Stevens, Director – Better Bathrooms and Jacuzzis – Next time you’re this side of the pond, I’ll take you to see the Montreal Impact.

Lindsey Walsh – Search Engine PPC – B2B PPC Management

Michael Dorausch (Sphinn nick: planetc1) – Los Angeles Chiropractic

Jason “Just Fred” Englert – SEOmoz nick Just Fred – Just Fred Works (yay, another SEOmoz buddy I meet )

Ian Lurie – Portent Interactive – Great sense of humour .

Xavier Dao – Avery (Office Products) Dennison – Nice to meet you, Xavier; let’s chat a little longer next time! (Ok, that was my fault, but still!)

Jonah Stein – Newly Indie SEO Consultant Who Understands ROI (a man after my own business plan!) – That reference from Aaron Wall is just about the best expression of how valuable your network can be when something big changes and you need to start from scratch!

Omer Shoval – Net Working SEM Expert

Mike McDonald, Tiffany Doughty – Web Pro News

Brian LaFrance – BootsnAll

Greg and Barbara Boser – 3 Dog Media (SEO, SMM, WP, Reputation Mgm’t)

Andy Shaw - Lincoln Property Company

Tony Adam – Tony Adam SEO and Social Media

Keri Morgret – Morgret Designs, Search and Analytics

Andy Beal – Marketing Pilgrim

The following three chaps were fun talking to in terms of growing an SEO business .

Kathi Buettner – Resort Quest Hawaii

Gary Senser – Net Advantage

Kathy Barlow - Travel Insurance

David Holmes – Digital Hospitality

Brad Rowe – Buy & Sell Colorado (You can buy and sell states now? When did that market open up??! )

Dennis Mortensen – Index Tools
John Epp – Webmaster Radio (aff)

Emily Spence – Enquisite Search Analytics

Here’s another Greyhat SEO idea for you, ladies and gents. The sneakiest text link ad disguise ever! It’s a true Sherlock Holmes who’ll see through this disguise. If you enjoy this post, there’s plenty more where it came from (i.e. the greyhat, idea and linkbuilding archives), so do subscribe . Update: Many people reading this want to hide their link destination using javascript. See here.

Google AdSense unit image courtesy of Frank O’Dwyer.

Steps:

1. Put Adsense on the page from which you want to sell/buy a text link.
2. Take a screenshot (more…)

Here’s my effort to share original resources that haven’t received wide attention/link love on other blogs. Hence I haven’t shared Aaron Wall’s tools (how useful would one more mention be?), Xenu Link Sleuth or SEOmoz’s tools (though I had to put them in the Friends section). Here is search marketing’s BIGGEST, BADDEST, RESOURCE BONANZA BAR NONE! (If you enjoy it, subscribe – there’s lots more where this came from .)

The SEO Business

What makes Web sites credible?

Proposal layout and design

Five Simple Ways to Make Your Proposal More Competitive

Canada Business – Starting a Consulting Business – Interesting item for my fellow SEO consultants here (more…)

I wanted to write about bigger picture strategies – plans featuring big ideas – rather than tactics. What follows is a mix of such plans and big picture ideas that, while not quite tactics, don’t fit as strategy either. At the same time, I’m trying to be more concise, so this is shorter than other things I’ve been writing. (more…)

Last month, I attended StartupCamp Montreal and Yulbiz, and I’ll be discussing the people from Montreal’s business community whom I met below. You’ll recall that I spoke at FacebookCamp Montreal. Now, most of you reading this are not in Montreal (though considering the attention my competitors pay this blog, perhaps that’s not quite so) – so why should you care? Well, two reasons. (more…)

Today’s scratchpad is going to cover some new how to ideas in link building, the ROI on Google’s user generated content (UGC) properties, influence and then do some linking oot n aboot. If you enjoy this, please subscribe. (more…)

I was chatting with Ann (she of the SEO Smarts) the other day about measuring social media efforts. What follows are a few ideas on how measure that, as well as a related metric that might help you identify linkerati who’ve visited your blog. If you like this post, I encourage you to subscribe. My other material is just like this. (more…)

Formal writing is really frustrating because it requires you to dress up simple ideas in complete sentences, edit your work for grammar and spend an unholy amount of time writing what it would take you a few minutes to express verbally. When you come up with new ideas or discover new stuff as often as I do, that can get really frustrating.

So I’m hereby inaugurating what I hope will be a regular column here: Scratchpad (scratchpad picture courtesy of one eye fish). I’ll share my latest ideas, in a raw scratchpad type format and be paying even more attention than usual to your feedback. (The Post #88 reference was the pre-naming version of this post’s title and I found it quite appropriate to an informal column.)

For this first issue, I’ve got

1. New uses for Google’s Keyword Tool External,
2. Mined ideas from Google’s Press Days 06 and 07,
3. Revelations of what the PPC arbitrageurs (more…)

A girl I was close with in high school wanted to get her nipples pierced. I’d heard some horror stories about nipple piercings and decided that I’d do some research on the topic to try and dissuade her, assuming she’d learn from others’ mistakes. (more…)

I’ve decided to start a semi-regular link love thing sharing items I’ve recently come across that I’d like to share with you folks as being valuable resources. This “Linking Oot N Aboot” column name comes from David, who remarked to me upon seeing a picture of me in a suit with a poppy: “You’re a canuck too?!” Yep, sure am! And though I don’t have the maritime/Atlantic Canada pronunciation that we seem to be famous for, I’ll shamelessly use my country’s national slang for the hell of it. (more…)

Eli wrote about desert scraping, which is the practice of digging around expired sites on archive.org, grabbing their content and reposting it on your own sites. Cloning expired sites is a similar idea that (more…)

I’m often asked about the Google’s Supplemental Index (SI) and how to get pages out it. Consider this post directions to the exit, the light at the end of Google’s dark tunnel, the “this way to the egress,” if you will. (Ok, so I like my hype, but I promise it’ll be worth it.)

If you’re impatient, click here to get the solution to getting your page/pages out of the Supplemental Index and skip the background info. I think you’re better off with a full understanding of the SI, but I’ll leave it up to you.

As Aaron Wall puts it in his excellent SEO Book, search engines are frequently developing new ways to save computing power. When you do things on a large scale and have billions of websites and web pages to work with, as Google does, getting your computers to run more efficiently will save you money. Lots of it. The Supplemental Index is a way for Google to save money by being more efficient with its computing.

To understand how to get your pages out of the Supplemental Index, you need to understand why they’re there to begin with. In other words, you need to know how the SI works. So let me explain.

When somebody performs a search with Google, what happens behind the scenes is something like this.

1. Google looks at the keywords.
2. It compares them to the pages in its index (think of a library’s index card system).
3. Google determines which pages are most relevant and ranks them.
4. Finally, the results are displayed to the searcher.

It’s incredible, but Google really does do all that in fractions of a second.

(This is a simplified explanation of Google’s processes, based on what Dan Thies wrote at SEO Fast Start. If anyone has the precise page’s link, I’d appreciate a comment pointing it out, as I’ve lost it. Wouldn’t want that page to end up in the Supplemental Index, now would I?)

The second part of the process gets exponentially more expensive for Google every day, as more sites and pages go online. Their computers need to run through more and more content. Google hit upon the idea of using a Supplemental Index as a shortcut in this process. By putting pages of lesser importance in the SI, Google has fewer pages to assess and rank at step two. (Then, only if Google feels its main index has too few pages to allow it to do a good job, will Google resort to the Supplemental Index. It supplements their main index when this one is thin for a particular topic.)

Amazon also had Supplemental Index issues at one point, as Tamar Weinberg pointed out in this picture. It’s nothing to feel bad about. (Note that Google no longer labels pages in the supplemental index as such.)

So how does Google determine if a web site or web page is of lesser importance? The behemoth of search considers how likely a web surfer is to arrive at that page if they randomly click links in a never ending browsing session. The more likely someone is to visit your page through links on other websites and on your own, the more important your page. This idea is the foundation of Google, better known as PageRank. See Danny Sullivan’s article on PageRank (which he seems very enthusiastic about ranking for the keyword “PageRank,” based upon his linking practices on Search Engine Land) for more info.

The solution to getting your web page (or web pages, as the case may be) out of the Supplemental Index is to get more links to them. These can be links from within your own website, but it’s usually better – particularly with newer, less established sites – to get links from other websites.

If your site is non-commercial, it generally shouldn’t be difficult to get other sites to link to your inner pages, increase your PageRank and help you out of the Supplemental Index. But if your site is commercial, people are generally less willing to link to your pages. For example, the average webmaster (who isn’t an affiliate) has no incentive to link to a product page.

(As an aside, it would make sense for Google to count affiliate links towards determining whether a page belongs in the SI or main index. This despite the fact that they might be considered paid, PageRank manipulating links – which Google despises – otherwise).

So what do you do if you’re a merchant? (I owe this upcoming generous tip to Lorisa, who runs a Montessori schools materials site, featuring CD-Roms, teacher tools and more.)

Ironically, you create more pages!

Just not on your own website.

The pages you’ll create will be what’s commonly referred to as “User Generated Content.” For example, the photo-sharing site Flickr lets people upload pictures that then get an individual page (the picture at the top of this post comes from this Flickr user, as a matter of fact). Flickr’s users generate its content. And they link back to their own sites, or other pages they like, from their Flickr profiles, photo pages and so on.

A particular type of user generated content site – which I detailed in my article The New Directory – is likely more useful for getting these links than other types of site. This is because the quality of the user generated content is controlled by member ratings and reviews. While I again encourage you to read the article and learn more, I’m happy to provide you with the easy solution: a list of sites accepting user-generated content where you can get links to your site’s pages.

• Squidoo is a perfect example of The New Directory.
• Gooruze is similar, but focused on the internet marketing niche.
• SEOmoz is like a second home to me. I’d be crazy not to point out their great user generated blog Youmoz.
• Still in marketing, search marketing social media site Sphinn gives you a nice page – do see my profile and add me as a friend.
• eBay gives users About Me pages.
• Myspace is a classic and should need no explanation.
• Ezine Articles, for what it’s worth, lets you have a profile page. I’m not sure Google care much about Ezine Articles, though, because contrary to the New Directory, their quality control is nil.
• Dofollow blogs allow you to leave comments where the author’s name links to a page of his/her choosing. These links are counted by Google, as opposed to most blogs, which use nofollow (I’ll implement dofollow once I choose the right plugin). Courtney Tuttle has a good list of Dofollow blogs.
• Wordpress lets users create blogs of their own on their site. (I also recommend using the Wordpress software if you want your own full-featured blog with plugins such as dofollow. This blog runs on it.)
• PR offers free press release distribution. I’d link to PR Web too, but they don’t offer a free service, so no link love. (Told you being commercial was tough!)
• Search for “your product” and “social networking” on Google. Try related searches like “your industry” + “social networking,” “your industry” + “social media,” “your industry” + “forum(s),” “your product” + “file-sharing,” “your product” + “article distribution.” The sites you find will let you create a profile and links.
• At the end of the day, networking is still crucial, as I told Marketing Sherpa (PDF) (see tip #27). If you can get bloggers and journalists writing about you, that’s going to mean better links, traffic and copycat links from bloggers who repeat what they read in the daily paper.

First of all, submit to directories that review submissions before accepting them. The whole premise upon which modern search engines are built is that a link from one website to another is an editorial vote as to the quality of that website. (more…)

It is worth submitting your site to some directories, including paid ones. There are two reasons to submit to directories. First, you stand to gain text links that help with your SEO. Second, some directories will also send you traffic. (more…)