Pittsburgh SEO Blog

Interestingly, today I can across another free SEO forum where you can ask questions about SEO to another top level SEO company based in the UK as well as it’s other users. I think this is a great idea! Providing people with a forum to ask you questions about SEO and providing that service for free is really great. You can read more about their release of this free forum on their press release.

I’ve checked out their blog and I don’t see to many people posting questions so now is you’re chance to get your questions answered.

I’ll take up one of the posted questions I’ve found there,

I have a site and have a reciprocal link system in place where I get a link and so does someone else. I have been told that this is bad practice… does anyone have any opinion on this?

From my experience I don’t believe reciprocal link system such as link exchanges are that valuable. I’ve been finding that they actual can bring no or little value back to the linking sites. Why..? Well, for one Google has sated that engaging in link schemes in order to increase PR is against their quality guidelines. Now I don’t know how exactly they do it but I’m sure Google is checking sites to see if they are engaging in a link exchange. It’s rather easy to detect this. Plus on top of that most link exchanges you get a link from a web page that has no PR or little PR and is full of other links on the page so what little PR might have been on that page is broken down among a ton of other sites. In fact I go more into detail about link exchanges and how they are devalued on my new blog in a post titled Why Link Exchanges Are Devalued, you should check it out.

Today Google PageRank was updated again, at least for my sites. It seems like PageRank updates these days isn’t as important as it once was. PR is becoming less of an important factor in SEO, even though it’s still important there seams to be much less emphasis placed on it by Google in their SERPs.

It also seems that less people are paying attention to it. I would expect to hear from someone or see it in the web news somewhere but I haven’t noticed it hearing about it anywhere before I noticed the change myself. Maybe I’m just looking more at that type of thing being that I have a few brand new sites I’m working on, as normally I would not bother to really look at it even though the PageRank is displayed on my toolbar for every site.

So it’s really tough to say what this PageRank update means, if it will mean anything at all. I’m doubting it really changes much, as all that green bar really is, is just a benchmark or sign post to say “Hey so and so’s web page is somewhere around here in regards to links and authority”.

On another note, I did seam to see that prior to this update many sites seamed to be lowed in PageRank from where they once where. Maybe Google is making the criteria harder for PR..?

I just discovered the new Yahoo social media site myweb.yahoo.com called “My Web”. It’s basically a social bookmarking website where you can bookmark sites you like. The bookmarked sites show up in your profile.

Now for the goods! You’ll get a do follow link back to your site from the details page of the sites you submitted. So it’s not as great as having it on the main page of your profile and if your bookmark shows up in any categories, searches, or other pages on “My Web” but at least there is a link that will count.

Also, I’ve been searching around for info on how to get your bookmark featured on the homepage but have not found out how that works yet. So if you have any info on that let me know!

Another very cool feature with “My Web” is that it will save a view of what the web page you’re bookmarking looks like when you bookmark it. This could be very useful for viewing edits you’re made on a site. You could bookmark it at each step and then look back through the bookmarks to see what it looked like before.

I recently have noticed that my backlinks for websites in my Google Webmaster Tools where not showing any links for the past few months or so. This seemed a bit odd and I thought well maybe they are doing some sort of update and I’ll just wait in see. Well, yesterday I just ran into a post on the Google blog about how this was actually a mistake and it has been fixed.

So I checked by Webmaster Tools account and there my links where - they are now showing in my account. Wow, so there was an issue that I guess I should have reported. Luckily someone else reported it and now it’s fixed.

You can read this short post Google made about it at http://webmaster-forum-announcements.blogspot.com/2008/12/resolved-backlinks-data-is-now-up-to.html

This is a blog in response to SEO Black Hat’s blog this past week on Bounce Rate being a factor by which Google rankings website in their search results. SEO Black Hat suggested that bounce rates are something that Google looks at in determining your ranking for search terms. I totally disagree with this statement.

First off how could Google detect this, they would need to have a some sort of script installed on your website such as Analytics. Which not everyone has installed on their website.

Second and even more convincing why Google is not using bounce rates is that SEO Black Hat’s reasoning why Google is using bounce rates was that they looked over their Google Analytics account and noticed that the visitor stats go down exactly with the bounce rates. Really everyone should be seeing that. Bounce rate is a measure of people leaving your site so therefore you are going to see the number of visitors corresponding with your bounce rate - its simple statistics. If you have more visitors of course your bounce rate is going to be higher as more people are likely to bounce and visa versa.

On top of all that I have a very low bounce rate on some of my sites and they are not all on the top of Google. If such a thing where a factor that it would be easier to get them there but I have found it’s not any easier than other sites that have a very high bounce rate. So this myth is debunked!

Just recently I came across an amazing web page on analyzing your competitors backlinks and I wanted to share with you some of the points that they went over and elaborate on some of them.

The biggest thing I pull form their article was the use of operators when searching yahoo for a competitor’s backlinks. In the past I have not used this to much when researching on the competition, instead I’ve many used programs that allow me to see link details besides the old “link:SiteName.com” operator. But I can see how this could give you a much exact idea of what your competitors might be doing with their links.

In the article they really where focusing on links deep links (links to pages within your site) with this formula. But here is the query you’ll want to search with on Yahoo. Just replace SiteNameHere with your site and KeywordHere with your keyword and you’ll be presented with a list of websites linking to that website which contain the keyword.

linkdomain:SiteNameHere.com -site:SiteNameHere.com “KeyWordHere”

The example in the article was:

linkdomain:SiteNameHere.com -site:SiteNameHere.com -link:http://SiteNameHere.com -link:http://www.SiteNameHere.com KeywordHere

Using this (the first operator example) you can figure out what places your competition is using to get their links from and you can easily determine if they are actively getting links. To determine if they are actively getting links you’ll have to look at the types of sites that show up in your search. Are these sites that seek out website and add the links to them or are they sites you have to make some sort of effort to get your site linked back to from? And look at when the page was created and, if possible, when the link was added. Is it recently or a while ago?

Lastly another important thing to look at is the number of links the have for that given keyword. Aaron Wall suggests that you should calculate this inner page keyword link ratio (or as he calls it deep link ratio) - which is actually for calculating number of inner page links. With this percent ratio you can compare that to other competitors and your own site. Then using the average as something to get your site up to.

Aaron Wall’s formula is as follows:

deep link ratio = (# deep links) / (# all links) X 100%

So actually our formula will best described as:

ratio keyword on page link = (# keyword on page links) / (# all links) X 100%

Now that we have that data calculated out another vital piece of data would be to analysis the anchor text. Although I have not said much about this in my post this is a very vital piece of data when analysis your competition. Although in the article they suggest using linkdiagnosis.com I prefer SEO Spy Glass. Which is a program you install on your computer that can research and analysis link data such as PR and anchor text.

Here is a link to the original article, Analyzing Your Competitor’s Backlinking Strategies

After doing a lot of searching for nofollow blogs I started running into directories for nofollow blogs and thought it would be beneficial to everyone to have a list somewhere of these directories rather than just the blogs that I found.

For those of you that don’t know what nofollow is, it’s a attribute that can be placed in the code of a web page link that tells Google not to reward PageRank to that particular website or web page the link is for. And if you don’t know what PageRank is it’s Google system of ranking the popularity of a website or web page based off the number links pointing to that page or website.

So here is the list of directories and some general lists on other websites for blogs that don’t have the nofollow link attribute. Happy commenting! And let me know if you know of others. I’ll keep adding more that I find or hear about.

Directories:

• dofollowdirectory.com
• dofollowblogs.com
• followlist.com
• dofollowdir.com
• dofollow.us
• myblogfollows.com

Webpages with a blog List:

• www.sitepoint.com/forums/showpost.php?p=3814460&postcount=1
• bloggers-directory.blogspot.com/2007/11/list-of-dofollow-blogs.html
• www.bumpzee.com/no-nofollow/blogs/
• www.digeratimarketing.co.uk/toolshop/DM_BlogsThatFollow.pdf
• courtneytuttle.com/blogs-that-follow/
• indiaseo.info/internet-marketing/140-dofollow-blogs-seo-tips/
• www.jimkarter.com/list-of-dofollow-blogs
• nicusor.com/do-follow-list/
• www.minterest.com/list-of-over-250-dofollow-blogs/
• www.terrazoa.org/2008/04/02/45-dofollow-blogs-pr0-to-pr7/
• www.tips4web.com/get-backlinks-from-huge-list-of-dofollow-blogs/
• tucsonseosolutions.com/dofollowlistoflists
• www.hostsgate.com/blog/link-building/dofollow-blogs-list-with-high-pr-part-1
• www.whydowork.com/blog/blogging-tips/558/

Did you know you can track downloads, JavaScript actions, AJAX, external links and more in Google Analytics. I just stumbled onto this nifty feature of Google Analytics and wanted to share it with others.

With a simple piece of JavaScript developed by Google that can be added to links, other JavaScript, and of course AJAX. The script consists of a call to the Google Analytics page tracker that when called records a visit for what label you’ve given. In addition to that code you’ll need to have the new Google Analytics tracking code at the bottom of the page you’re using this on (the newer Analytics code is the non-urchin or legacy tracking code).

The JavaScript snippet looks like this:

pageTracker._trackPageview(’Your_Label_Here’)

Simply replace Your_Label_Here with the page you want the visit to count for or make up a page or label you’d like the visit to be recorded as.

How to implement this tracker into a link:
Here is an example of adding the tracker into a link.

<a href=”http://www.pittwebsite.com” onclick=”javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview(’external-links/pittwebsite.com’);”>External site</a>

I just came across some great sites that can help in writing articles to help promote your site. I’ve been looking for a quality site or sites that would add in helping me with these things and just got informed of these sites by one of my clients.

As you can guess writing articles is time consuming and is one of those tasks that you might want to outsource to others. Well these 2 sites will help make outsourcing article writing and posting a snap.

textbroker.com - offers an article writing service where you can submit your exact content needs and have a writer create exactly what you need. The offer a lot of helpful features for those in need of content creation. You can add in the keywords you want your article/text to cover and include, the exact number of words, and all content prior to sending to you is read over by staff there at textbroker.com for quality and checked to make sure it’s original and not a copy from somewhere else.

articlemarketer.com - offers article submission services, for $22.50 a month you can submit as many articles as you want and they’ll get your articles placed on article sites though out the Internet. Although I’m not sure that I’m totally for this services as I don’t think having duplicates of your article content on multiple sites is a good thing but I’m sure there some helpful features they can offer.

Social media type of websites are becoming increasingly popular on the Internet. And chances are you’ve ran into one of these sites while surfing the net. If you’ve participated in a discussion by commenting or posting to a blog or forum (message board) online you’re actually participating in social media.

The term social in social media simply means that there is an interaction between humans and media is the material on which something is presented, and in this case it’s a website.

Now that we’ve got that totally cleared up let’s look at some very useful social media sites. I’ve compiled a list below of some sites that you might find useful. The usefulness of these sites depends on what you need and want. As you look through the list you might find that data or information you’re looking for on the web would be easier to find by simply navigating one of these sites below.

YouTube.com - YouTube allows users to submit videos that everyone can see and watch. Thus creating an interactive environment with the website and it’s users. As well some videos that are submited can be commented on - thus making the social aspect much greater.

Facebook.com - An interactive community where you can get your web page for own personal or business use and socially interact with others by adding them to your friends list and posting messages back in forth on your web page.

Myspace.com - Essentially the same as Facebook.com

Wikipedia.com - An open content encyclopedia project where those that know about a subject are encouraged to add information and other can browse to read about various subjects.

Digg.com - A bookmarking site where anyone can signup and submit websites that they think are great and vote on other submitted sites. When one votes on Digg.com for a website it’s called to “digg” or “dugg” a website. The more people that have dugg a website the more “diggs” it has and the higher it’s listed on their website.

Any Blog (web diary) - Any type of blog is social media because it allows for users to interact with the one writting posts that go up on this blog by submitting comments. Although some blogs do not allow comments - this is a gray area wheither it would still be considered social media.

Forums (message boards) - Most all forums are a form of social medial as they allow interaction by posting messages. And some forums have messages organized by different topics or categories.

Google Groups - This a message board type system that Google setup where someone can start a group and allow members to make posts and have discussions so that the entire group can read what’s said.

Well those are just a few examples of the many hundreds and even thousands (and quite possibly much more) of these social media sites out there.