I can't link to it, or the experiment will be ruined but there's a site, http://www.memoriesbox.com, that has PR 6 from sig links and a few links from forum messages. A google search link:http://www.memoriesbox.com shows 813 backlinks from a handful of forums (I'm not crazy enough to count but seems like fewer than 10). Kind of makes you wonder. If there's a forum that prunes its messages or that doesn't pass out PR, why not look for a forum on the same topic that does?
Near the end of June, I wrote about my main ESL site's index page. It was #46 in Google for "ESL". Well I haven't been doing any work on that site really. I haven't even been doing link exchanges because I was so overwhelmed with emails. I finally have my WSNlinks directory up and am finally getting back to linking.
But somehow, I've increased to #39 for "ESL". It may have something to do with anchor text from an acitve message board that links to my site from every page. Anchor text is also behind Google bombs.
Also, a blog that links to my site from every page recently went up to PR 6 which may have made ESL go more attractive to Google.
Then come the less likely theories. There are rumors that older sites benefit from their age in the Google algorithm, but this is probably myth. Age of links is another rumor I've heard. A link that goes to your site for a long time is more of a vote than a new link... There's an interesting thread that raises both issues on Devshed's forums.
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I received a request for a link ad today, so I went searching through my ESL blog to see if I had anything suitable. Most blog entries were PR 2 or 3 (which I expected), but I found two that were PR 6: Do blogs help? and Hurried Learning and one PR 5: Call Symposium
After checking backlinks and finding nothing special, I wonder what's going on here.
When I wrote about getting off Google's blacklist, my travel blog was #8 for "travel plan idea", 82 for "travel idea", and nowhere for "travel plan".
With no new incoming links, the rankings are improving... sort of. #4 for "travel plan idea", 134 for "travel idea" (still #1 for allinanchor:travel idea). This can't be explained by Google's blacklist - Why would they have me at #4 if I were blacklisted?
It does sound like the Google sandbox, but I've been wondering about that since June and the site has been up since January. Plus other sites of mine have not been affected as badly (sites with fewer links did better).
I must be getting penalized for linking into a bad area. When I first started the site I found many travel link exchange systems and I used a few figuring it was a quick way to get hundreds of links. Now I wonder if that was a smart idea. I think I'll be setting up a WSNlinks directory and deleting all my old links - maybe it's time to start over.
Oh and there is one other difference. The travel blog has been my least active. Less fresh content might mean longer sandbox time. Anyway, you know there's something weird going on when Yahoo sends you 283 visitors and Google sends you 3!
I wrote about the fluctuations for the search term NFL Giants yesterday. Today my Giants blog seems to have settled down at #13! Why a drop from 4 to 13, you ask? Good question.
What's strangest is the extremely poor quality results Google is showing instead. For example there are two articles from Yahoo! sports about old Giants games. Now if I want a site about the Giants, I don't want a several weeks old news article about one game...
Then there's a New York Giants bowling ball. If my site's not more relevant than that, then I should be locked up.
So why the change you continue to ask. Still a good question. I'm still #1 for allinanchor: nfl giants. I picked up some new links from blogspot blogs. I thought those would be extra helpful because of their template system. Usually a link from a blogspot blog = a link from every page of that blog. Perhaps Google thinks I'm now buying sitewide ads and is punishing me for it. I do have reciprocals going to each of the blogspot blogs which isn't normal when buying ads, but that's the only thing I can think of.
Linkworth.com is a site where you can buy and sell text links. I started fooling around with the Linkworth link popularity tool which counts the total number of backlinks different search engines show. I'm not really impressed. My Giants blog which has a few blogs linking to it shows link rank 3, while my ESL site which has hundreds of different sites linking to it shows link rank 2. In case you were wondering, ESL go has PR 6 while NFL Giants has PR 5. I think what it fails to take into account is that you need links from all over the web to impress the search engines. See links from different IPs for more information.
I've noticed my Giants blog ranking #4, #10, and a few places in between the past couple of days for the search term NFL Giants on Google. The interesting thing is that my other sites don't seem to be moving around much.
My wife and I recently signed up as Nuskin distributors (Nuskin is a network marketing company). I love their products (they even cured my eybrow dandruff) but I hate their web sites (which are touted as high tech, part of their Big Planet technology division).
For starters, Nuskin doesn't want to share search engine traffic with us distributors; they (Nuskin Enterprises and its divisions) have fully optimized sites but distributors are restricted to sites with session IDs that can not be removed. I've also been told that it's against company policy to set up a site that sells Nuskin stuff that's not running the poor Nuksin Nuskin shopping cart and hosted on overpriced Nuskin servers.
The site can be set up relatively quickly, but even setting up GWP is not bug-free. And once it is set up you've got great products and a great compensation plan but no traffic. Since we can't get search engine traffic to the site directly, I am considering Adwords and other advertising options. I'm also working on a new site which will be optimized and will link to the shopping cart for people who want to buy. More on the development of that new site later though...
For now if you want to see what we're up against, our Korean Nuskin page is located at: a href="http://faq.mynuskin.com/cgi-bin/gwpweb/igwp/splash/splashInit.jsp while our English Nuskin page has a URL like this: http://faq.mynuskin.com/cgi-bin/gwpweb/igwp/splash/gwpFrame.jsp?BV_SessionID=@@@@1370046850.1100662382@@@@&BV_EngineID
=ccchadcmmikdfmecefecehhdfjfdfkf.0&cntryOID=185336&toURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nuskinusa.com%2Fcgi-bin%2Fnsweb%2Fhome%2Fen%2Fns_home.jsp%3FgwpID%3DCEEXEeCECCHDHFCIDEHGBOAYA88VTVEV3t&nextPage=%2Fproduct%2Fen%2Fns_shopOnline.jsp - I don't even know how to remove the session ID from the URL to make a working link.
Obviously it's no good when your site goes down. We try to avoid this by getting a reliable host. So it's pretty infuriating when your site goes down because your domain expired. You might be thinking that I must be a chump to let my domain expire, but it's not my fault. I use registerfly (will be transferring my names soon), put renewals for expiring domains in my shopping cart, click checkout, pay through pay pal (they always decline my perfectly good credit cards), and figure I'm done.
Apparently not. Although there's no indication, the domains are not renewed yet. You now have a bunch of money uselessly sitting in your account and you have to renew the names again. Here's a transcript from a conversation I just had:
Client Care Representative: Hello, Welcome to Registerfly LIVE CHAT, This is Client Support Representative Andrew, How may I Help you?
jamestrotta: I renewed several domains through paypal, but they now show up as expired and the paypal funds are just sitting in my account
Client Care Representative: Now try to renew again the funds in your account will be used for that
jamestrotta: I don't see the renew option
Client Care Representative: On the top of the page you will see the tab Domain Names
Client Care Representative: Under that Renew domain option is there
jamestrotta: They only show up as expired when I try to change DNS. Under the actual domain name profile it said active. I see what you're talking about
Client Care Representative: The domains are not renewed yet
Client Care Representative: You have just added funds in your account
Client Care Representative: Now you will have to use the funds to renew it
jamestrotta: I realize that now. I need to know why they weren't renewed when I put them in my cart and went through the paypal process.
jamestrotta: I even put a note on the paypal transaction which domains were being paid for
Client Care Representative: generate a ticket our second level support will renew the domains for you
jamestrotta: I would like to know why they weren't renewed wen I had the renewals in my cart and checked out through pay pal. I need to know that registerfly is reliable
Client Care Representative: When you do the transaction with paypal money is added to your account
Client Care Representative: then you have to use the money to renew the domains by doing the transaction again
jamestrotta: Why have the shopping cart in the first place? Normally when you put something in the shopping cart and pay for it you're finished.
jamestrotta: Why wasn't I warned that I ahd to do it again?
Client Care Representative: When you use credit card transaction will be done instantly but with paypal you will have to process it again
jamestrotta: And why wasn't I warned about that. On other sites you don't have to do the transaction again when using pay pal
Client Care Representative: Sorry but at our site when you use paypal you will have to do the transaction again
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I recently got an email about a link exchange; the proposal was for me to link from my homepage in return for a link from his PR 6 links page which was ..../links/links.html or something.
I said no because Google has experimented with not counting links from "links" pages. He said he'd heard that wasn't true. Well, it's not true now. But it could be in the future.
I'm reasonably certain that in June Google stopped counting or reduced the value of links from pages with "links" in the URL. They stopped this experiemnt and went back to normal, but I personally feel there is a good chance that this will manifest again; it makes sense for content rather than reciprocal link schemes to have more influence on SE results. Links from content pages should count way more than links from links pages (IMO).
Here's an interesting research study by Junghoo Cho and Sourashis Roy at UCLA, which found that popular sites get more link partners than new sites by virtue of their high search engine rankings. If a site is popular then everyone knows about it and it gets more link partners. If a site is unknown nobody knows to link to it.
A personal example (and yes using a personal example is a fallacy of thinking): remember the new site SEO I wrote about regarding my father's Collectible Car Show Photos? A search on Google or Yahoo for link:http://www.nashnut.com shows no results. Alltheweb shows two backlinks, both from pages on www.nashnut.com. Now it does have a few links; I got it into a few free directories and linked to it from this blog once before but you see the point - it isn't accumulating links because my father hasn't done any linkbuilding.
Now I haven't done any linkbuilding for my ESL site in the last few months. But I have hundreds of emails that I need to respond to one of these days about link exchanges. I get more every day. I am in the enviable position of getting way too many link exchange requests. I have finally set up a directory (which I wrote about yesterday) to make things more manageable. Now I reply to people and tell them to submit to the directory. For some reason most don't, probably because it's not showing PR yet.
Anyway, I digress. The point is that popular sites get lots of linkbuilding opportunities. New sites don't. That means that new sites will have to work pretty hard to attract link partners. It's also bad for the web. New sites might have good content but they still won't get links unless someone does a lot of work. And if they don't get links they won't do well in the search engines and no one will see this great content.
Although I should point out that even with just a handful of links nashnut.com is getting about 60 uniques a day, and some from Google and Yahoo for weird search terms like "1933 Auburn Car".
So my links pages on ESL go were driving me crazy because I had to do everything manually. I set up a new language directory using WSN links. Here's the official description:
Fully templated and translatable PHP/MySQL links portal script. Features unlimited custom fields, member system, voting and review systems, file uploads, markup codes, database backup, censor, advanced usergroup permissions including options to require manual validation of submissions, search engine friendly URLs, etc. Includes link checkers for reciprocal, duplicate and dead links.
My directory is still new and is PR 0, but should 5 when Google gets around to it. Nevertheless it shows up in backlinks. I checked the backlinks for one of my sites and there was my PR 0 directory URL. What's even stranger but more promising is that when I did a search for "ESL blog" (detailed in my previous entry: a few links) the language directory page about ESL blog was in the top ten! Now there's a page three categories deep in a PR 0 directory showing up in SERPs; that's pretty good.
If you read the comments about uncovertheweb and biz-directory, you know that many top directories use that expensive script. WSN links is something like 36.00 for three licenses (12.00 each time you use it) so that's what I'll be using when I start my own paid inclusion directory. I'll also be using it to mangae the reciprocal links for all my sites.
If you plan to customize it, customer service (via message board) won't hold your hand, but it's easy to install and they will help you on the message boards. I still managed to customize mine a bit by fooling with the css. It doesn't come set up for SEO. You can set it up for search engine friendly URLs and static links by clicking a couple buttons. There are help articles to walk you through it.
If you have a page that targets some not-too-competitive keywords, you probably only need a few links from external sites to see a big jump in search engine ranking.
A few weeks ago I did a search for "ESL blog" in Google. My ESL blog used to be number one, but had dropped to #9. That's pretty bad for an uncompetitive keyword phrase which is in the title of my blog (and thanks to Movable Type every page of my blog has ESL in the anchor text linking back to my main stie).
I got a few more links (only one more as far as I know), and now I'm #3. That's not #1, but it's much better considering how little work I did. It also pushed me up to PR 6 which is kind of cool (even if PR isn't all that important it helps selling text links). The new link was from my new language directory which is still PR 0 but already shows up in backlinks and search engine results!
A great looking new directory. The premise is brilliant: You get 4 links on the category page; 1 to your site and 3 to content pages of your choice. You also get 4 links on a "business card page" plus links on "new sites" and "search results" pages. Currently only 24.95 to submit your site, but this is a new directory and the price is likely to increase as PR increases.
http://www.seo-search-engine-ranking.com/ad_network_222.php