8 replies to this topic

[Pete L]

Hi,

I have noticed that Google displays higher PageRanked sites with some sort of relevancy and does not show links from forums or guest books as much, if at all. This is from using the "LINK:www.mysite.com" entry in Google search. I noticed that using other SEO tools or simply using "mysite.com: enclosed in quotes will show up those other links. What I'm getting at is this. Do you feel adding links to social bookmarking sites is...

1) Time WELL spent or...

2) Time, well... spent!

I'm happy to do the work as long as I know the results will be there. I mean could you imagine someone working for weeks and finding out they submitted to all links made with "nofollw" tags? OUCH! Anyway, I'm considering adding my links to some bookmarking sites while I wait for the more relevant link trades, etc. but I wanted to find out what others here feel is the effectiveness of them before I get too involved.

Thanks,

Pete

[Randy]

First, with regard to

LINK:www.mysite.com

searches on Google, don't trust those. It's notoriously inaccurate. Even Google themselves admit they don't show every link they know about.

Second, I hope I'm misunderstanding your question.

If you're proposing going around and creating accounts in all of these different places just to drop your link in the profile or whatever, that's just spam. Not to mention that as you've already mentioned lots of place nofollow those as a default action.

In other words, if you're not planning on actually contributing something to the SM site, forum, blog or whatever you shouldn't be creating an account there. Only create one in those places where you're going to be an active participant.

[Pete L]

I just wanted to know if you join some and use them, are they just as link-worthy as getting a back link from a "regular" website? Maybe a better way to put it is this: Are all pages that allow links, guestbooks, forums, bookmark sites, and websites all treated equally by search engines like Google?

Thanks,

Pete

[adibranch]

i used to despise social bookmarking sites,, they're the tool of bloggers and adsense abusers.. but, whlst being a fairly low quality ranking link, they have their uses.

I have accounts on some of them, and when i create an article landing page for a term i generally add it to the social bookmarking / article sites too... it definitely doesnt do any harm and it has been known to generate indexing of a new page within hours, sometimes minutes... although all the times i've checked i've only seen this twice, so probably just got lucky.

Forums are a great way of getting good relevant links, as the subject is hopefully exactly that of the receiving page. Not only that, but you'll find you get a lot of clickthroughs from the thread. Keep it on topic and relevant and you may even find yourself helping people out , rather than just blatantly spamming the forum for a link. This is why most forums have a mininum post count.

Guesbook links.. no.. too spammy for me. Dont degrade yourself. This is the last resort as far as i'm concerned.

Nothing wrong with links on these type of sites in general. Nothing right about them either.. they work, they're not spammy, they just arent very professional.

[Jill]

I have noticed that Google displays higher PageRanked sites with some sort of relevancy and does not show links from forums or guest books as much, if at all. This is from using the "LINK:www.mysite.com" entry in Google search.

Please see the pinned thread about Google's link: command at the top of our link building forum.

[bobmeetin]

Also see this post which talks a little more about backlink checking tools: http://www.highranki...tool_comparison and this table which I made up when I became oh so curious... http://dottedi.biz/c...comparison.html

Edited by bobmeetin, 15 June 2009 - 01:44 PM.

[Pete L]

Thank you for the replies. I took Sunday off and went to the beach, hoping the salt air would clear my head. I only ended up sighting a dead seal; well, at least I was having a better day than it was. I find it helps to find the positives in things in all experiences. Oh, and don't feel too bad for the seal, it was probably the one responsible for attacking a number of swimmers last year and actually Nipping a couple of them. You see, the seals around here are supposed to be several miles away, at the islands. My guess this one was too lazy to make the trip back. That's kind of like those of us who are too lazy to find good links. (See, eventually I tied this back on-topic.)

Anyway, I appreciated the comments from adibranch. I think what I will do is expand the use of the forums I use that relate to my site but find ones that support linking. That is a win-win situation. I’ll also take the same approach for bookmarks. Guest books, no.

I want to state that I really appreciate the mods at High Rankings. I agree with the over-all theme here, which is to build good site content, good site structure, and ask yourself is what I'm ding good for my visitors? After all, that is the goal of all search engine algorithms. As those algorithms improve over time, sites who adhere to the High Rankings principles should get better and better rankings.

"Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. Together they are powerful beyond imagination."

-Albert Einstein

Anyway, I'm no Einstein when it comes to SEO, but I'm glad to know there are a few of them around here. I especially appreciated reading about the advice in the Google pinned thread to not put bad outgoing links on a site. That made a lot of sense. The discussion on "nofollow" was great, too.

I have one additional question about in-site links to your own pages vs. outbound links to other sites. I get that search engines start thinking "link farm" when too many outbound links are present but please tell me (providing it is the truth, of course) that search engines ignore the number of in-site links to your other pages. I mean I need several of those to cities, well over 100 and they are all one one page. I'll keep it that way, because it is best for the visitors but I would like to know if it is accepted well or not by search engines, just so I have the knowledge. What say you?

Thanks,

Pete

[torka]

I get that search engines start thinking "link farm" when too many outbound links are present but please tell me (providing it is the truth, of course) that search engines ignore the number of in-site links to your other pages.

Actually, they think "link farm" when they come across a network of domains, all of which link to every single one of the other domains in the network. That's pretty much the definition of a link farm. The number of "off domain" links on a single page doesn't have anything to do with link farming (unless all those pages are linking back to you and also linking to each other as well).

What the spiders think when they come across a page with a lot of outbound links on it is: "gotta make a note of those links for somebody to follow up on."

(Which is pretty much the same thing they think when they come across any page with links on it, internal or external, no matter how many links there are.)

The SEs expect you to have internal navigation. Sometimes, especially on large sites, that internal navigation gets pretty "linky." But it wouldn't make any sense for them to penalize a site for having robust internal navigation. So they don't.

SEs don't ignore that internal navigation, not at all. It counts perfectly well -- and can be an excellent source of good keyword-rich link anchor text pointing at your interior pages. In fact, for most sites, your own "on site" links are the primary means by which those internal pages get "link juice." Without those "on site" links, for many sites, there would be almost no way any interior page could rank for, well, anything, because they just don't have enough "off domain" inbound links otherwise.

Use as many links as make sense for your human visitors. Use them in a way that makes sense for your human visitors. The SEs will sort it out.

--Torka

[Pete L]

The SEs expect you to have internal navigation. Sometimes, especially on large sites, that internal navigation gets pretty "linky." But it wouldn't make any sense for them to penalize a site for having robust internal navigation. So they don't.

Thanks Torka,

It wouldn't make sense to me that they would penalize you for your own internal links. but I that was just my assumption. I try to avoid the "A" word whenever possible; so, thanks so much for clearing that up for me.

Pete