Posts in Category SEO Link Building
Caution! Google Reducing Tolerance for Low Quality Links
The biggest reason a website ranks well on Google is because of its inbound links. This is also the #1 reason why websites don’t rank well! Google uses inbound links from other websites as a key indication of where to rank a website. Unfortunately many website owners use tactics such as buying links, link trading and automated submittal tools as a way to trick Google into ranking them higher. These methods worked years ago but not anymore.
Web Solutions does not use any link schemes as a method of boosting ranks, for good reason. Google has greatly reduced its tolerance for low quality links in its most recent updates. Before these updates it was estimated that Google penalized sites when 80% of its inbound links were considered low quality. Now that number seems to be at about 50%. Google considers a link to be low quality if the website it comes from is not relevant, if it is purchased, or if the webpage with the link participates in link schemes. Google has announced another update will be coming later this year, and it is presumed these links will be looked at even more closely.
Posted in Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SEO Link Building, SEO Spamming Leave a comment
Are Footer Links Better for SEO than Paragraph Links?
Question: Are footer links better for SEO than paragraph links?
Answer: No
Why:
Back in the day the flow of PageRank was spread “evenly” across the links on a web page. No matter where a link was placed on a page, such as in the paragraph or in the footer, each link received the same amount of link juice. However, this does not apply anymore today.
Today’s algorithm change from Google adds emphasis to where the link is actually placed upon the web page. Thanks to what is called the “Reasonable Surfer Model,” each link on a page is calculated with a different weight depending upon how noticeable it is to the web surfer. A good example of this would be to open up any webpage and scroll down the page only looking at the links displayed. Which links are more noticeable first? They would most likely be the larger, more dominant links on the page that get your attention. Google gives a higher flow of PR to these more dominant links because of their importance of getting the surfer to where they want. They also believe that links within the paragraph, also called editorial links, are more likely to be more relevant and withhold a greater reputation.
Footer links will always receive less of a flow of PR to them than editorial paragraph links because they are positioned lower down the page.
Posted in Organic SEO, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SEO Link Building Leave a comment
Why You Should Rank for Long Tail Keywords
On April 28 to roughly May 30th of 2010, Webmaster’s world announced a new algorithmic change code named “Mayday”. This quality change, which is one of over 400 that Google releases per year, was implemented to make long tail search queries more relevant to the surfer. A long tail search is a search that contains more direct keywords than say someone just searching for “football uniforms” and instead would be something more like a search containing the words “Nike men’s football uniforms”. When a surfer enters a long tail search, Google understands that the surfer has a good guess of what exactly he or she is searching for and it is much more important here to show more relevant search results.
After the release it affected many sites, either boosting or decreasing their ranks. Google’s explanation to this was simply that it was not a temporary algorithmic change and that it was implemented to give more credit to the websites who had greater domain authority and offered better original content on its individual pages. The result to the change was pages on websites with lower authority decreased in ranks. They declared it as a quality win as most long tail searches were now querying better matches.
Listening closely to what Google had to say on their Mayday algorithm change gives an assumption that websites who have original and quality content along with authority will rank higher. Taking this and putting it into SEO terms means that link building strategies, on and off page, need to be geared towards long tail keywords.
The chart below shows an example of the list of key phrases a website ranks for. The key phrases to the left are the highly competitive, but highly searched for key words, while the key phrases to the right are the less competitive, less searched for long tail key phrases. A look at the chart shows that even if a site is getting 5-10 referrals for that long tail search, when you add up all of the small searches, they exceed the big boys.
In addition, these long tail keywords are also easier to rank for and as well convert at a better rate because they are more specific. If a site is ranked for “football uniforms” it will get a lot of traffic, but if it is ranked for “Nike men’s football uniforms” it will get much more qualified traffic looking to actually buy a football uniform.
If you need help deciding which long tail keywords to go after comment below and we will help you do a free keyword analysis for the homepage of your website.
Posted in Organic SEO, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SEO Keyword Research, SEO Link Building, SEO Local Leave a comment
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