I made an attempt to make this list a practical one, not trying to push in the other 101 link building tactics that you wouldn’t find useful in today’s Web 2.0 SEO world.

And you will find 3 categories here – first, Innovative Link Building Strategies will house the best strategies that hadn’t been exhausted by people. Not-so Innovative Link Building Strategies are worth a shot, but might not work as well as the first. And the last, Bad Link Building Strategies that can possibly hurt you houses some strategies and practices you should probably avoid.

So, Enjoy!

9 Innovative Link Building Strategies

Build a useful Firefox extension, and have a support page on your site for it’s users. The initial effort might be a bit hard but with an innovative idea, it can really pay off. Be sure to build a plugin that your specific niche finds useful.

Add Technorati tags to your posts. I have developed a tool called Technorati Tag Generator which will simplify this process.

Create a good Squidoo lens. Squidoo lenses tend to rank really well in search engines and also pretty easy to monetize as well. But it’s important that you create a good informative lens to maximize the SEO value passed through links back to your own blog.

Review not-so-well established affiliate products. It’s really easy to gain a higher place in search engines for these product. And these pages will perform well in SERPs when people are searching for product reviews since there’s not that much competition.

Comment on much smaller blogs in the same niche. Some of these bloggers will be willing to collaborate with you and frequently link to your blog to show their appreciation.

Write about startups and link to them. These companies often have news pages where they acknowledge the people who talked about their product. I myself had gained links this way with a few startups like Plurk and Woopra.

Collaborate with other bloggers to promote each other. The progress can be slow but effects can be really rewarding. In a few weeks, all of the blogs in the circle will equally gain search engine exposure.

Create Wordpress themes. Well, you actually must have some designing and coding experience to do this, but the results are just phenomenal! If you are ready to make an initial investment, get it easily done by a freelance designer.

Compose linkbaits. There’s a whole community of bloggers wanting to link to you. Composing a linkbait that other people perceive as “good quality content” is not the easiest thing to do, but it’s one of the best.

11 Not-so Innovative Link Building Strategies

Gain social media exposure. Some social media sites pass out dofollow links on published content and links on personal profiles. Be sure not to exploit them because there are hordes of loyal members in them that can take you out before you spell S-E-O.

Do some dofollow blog commenting. But be sure to contribute well constructed non-spammy content to that blog to avoid being stamped as spam. At all costs, refrain from providing classic two word appreciation for the article.

Submit your feed to RSS directories. You can pretty much gain a few backlinks from these with minimal effort. The SEO value passed through these is not the best around, but still good.

Do press releases. These are very much like one-time article submissions. But they are picked up by search engines and treated with relative importance so, the initial effort might not hurt.

Do guest posts. There’s a right way to do this and a wrong way to do this. Some bloggers think that doing a guest post on a PR6 site is really good because they’ll get a valued link to their blog. But it’s the exposure and the other few hundred links that you’d get to your blog from the large readership of that PR 6 blog that counts.

Run blog contests. Everyone does it, and it has guaranteed SEO effects. The exposure to your blog and gaining new readership are just two of the by products of running a successful blog contest.

Do forum posting. Again, this is a debatable subject. But the added benefit here is that these links can pass enormous amounts of traffic as well as some SEO value.

Do article submissions. The effect of this is debatable but, it has some effect alright. Some say article directories are on the way out and it’s not entirely untrue. It takes a lot of time to compose articles and submit them, not to forget.

Request reciprocal links. Keep your reciprocal links to a minimum and don’t include a “links page” within your blog/site that would contain links to dozens and dozens of other sites. A few sitewide links that are relevant to your subject matter would be just fine.

Submitting your site to link directories. Contrary to popular belief I think this method is on the way out. It can consume a lot of time and because pages are so full of links, they don’t actually pass that much value to the site it’s linking to.

4 Bad Link Building Strategies that can possibly hurt you

Submitting your site to Link farms. It’s widely accepted that planting a mass number of links in single page has demeaning SEO consequences. Putting up a link farm on your own site is more damaging.

Interlinking sites on the same IP. If I have 5 sites being interlinked to each other and all of them are in the same server, with the same IP address, they would pass no/very low SEO juice.

Buying up a massive number of links at once can hurt you temporarily. It’s best to increase the number of links to your site while maintaining a natural link profile. Going from0 to 500 links overnight can really hurt you.

Blog Spamming. When you’re spamming wordpress blogs, it’s be really easy for you to get blacklisted with your e-mail and domain name after a few bloggers marking your comments as spam. If that happens, most of your comments on wordpress blogs and other sites that use Akismet would be treated as spam.

Loading image

Click anywhere to cancel

Related Posts

• 5 Ways to improve your link popularity
• Google Sandbox – Myth or Fact?
• Optimize your site for Google! Tips and Tricks!!
• How to engage in effective forum marketing to promote your blog.
• 7 Things that you shouldn’t be doing when starting up a blog!

But it’s amazing how many people fall into this trap day after day – not quite knowing what the consequences are. And as someone who had experienced them first hand, let me tell you that they are not so easy to go through with.

What is Google Sandbox?

SEOs believe that when you do ‘certain things’ that would necesarily mess with Google’s algorithm – like gaining a lot of links in a relatively short period of time for a new site or an established site, the site would be sent to a sandbox where it will be spending some time, not getting traffic from the relatively high traffic keywords that you might be targeting.

A thing that many SEOs do is to start a brand new sites and order large chunks of new links from other sites through a test link marketplace right? Well, this “sandbox” had been very successful in preventing SEOs doing just that. Simply said, this is a mechanism to reduce the weight of the “might-be-paid-for” links that a site gains.

It’s debatable how much time a site would spend within this sandbox, but most SEOs believe it to be 6-8 months. Not something that you want to be sent into right?

How to prevent/minimize the effects of Google Sandbox?

1. If you’re already in the Sandbox, patience is the key. Don’t try ordering more links because you will ultimately be left in the No man’s land longer by the search giant.
2. Try maintaining a natural link profile. Don’t order too many links too soon. When you get around 1000 links within a single day for a brand new site, anyone can see something fishy is going on there.
3. When you’re starting a new blog, register the domain as soon as possible and set up a temporary home page. Then, link to it from another site that is already indexed in Google. This will ensure that by the time you get your whole site online, it will already be in the Google’s index.
4. If you should go ahead and buy links, make sure you put quality before quantity. It’s better to get a few good quality links than a lot of high quality links.

Avoid this one when you can. It’s quicksand in there you know.
Related Posts

• The only way to beat Google in the long-run!
• 7 Things that you shouldn’t be doing when starting up a blog!
• 5 Ways to improve your link popularity
• Google Webmaster Tools – making life easier for bloggers!
• Optimize your site for Google! Tips and Tricks!!

Things are almost back to normal and I will be starting to post on ROCKFUSE regularly from now on.

One of the main reasons that I have not been posting much is because during the past few days I’ve been engaged in writing a blog seo e-book., which I’m planning to give away as a free download to all of my subscribers – new and existing. The book is a refined, improved version of the articles I’ve published on this blog, and a few articles I wrote exclusively. It mainly focuses on beginners in the field of blog marketing. But anyone reading the book, I believe can learn a few things about seo.

Download it with the blog-seo link that will appear at the end of this or any other post of ROCKFUSE that is in your feed reader or e-mail client, as displayed in this screenshot.

And also, about the Referral Contest, I’m almost done with the process of validating the entries. Winners will be notified within this week. Thanks for your patience.

Related Posts

• AffSphere: Free Traffic, Free Backlinks, Free Money for submitting your articles!
• Two things that inspired me to blog
• Sunday Shoutouts #2: Not too loud.
• 101 things I wish I knew when I started out blogging
• Be a ROCKFUSE contributor – Get exposure to your blog and Earn Money!

If you haven’t already signed up for Google Webmaster Tools, you can do so here.

Finding out where search engines spiders had major crawling problems

An unfriendly URL structure or certain rich media content may be giving the Search Engines spiders a bit of a hard time in indexing your blog. Google explains what they call “unfriendly URL structure”, here.

This can lead to a whole part of your blog not being accessible/indexed by search engines. “Diagnostics>Web Crawl” section can tell you exactly, what’s wrong and where.

Spotting problematic content on the blog

In the “Diagnostic>Content Analysis” section, you can see what exactly I mean by “Problematic Content”. Duplicate meta descriptions, Long meta descriptions, Short meta descriptions, Non-informative title tags and Duplicate title tags are to name a few.

Google Webmaster Tools will tell you exactly where these errors occur, so you can make your blog more search engine friendly.

Thorough analysis of the search queries

Google Analytics (or whatever your stats reporting software might be), can repost you the search queries that bring you the traffic. So can Google Webmaster Tools. And also, it can do something a bit cooler too. It can show you what search queries showed up pages from your blog. With this you can further optimize your pages to get more traffic, since you know that your blog has something that people are searching for.

You can see this in the “Statistics>Top Search Queries” section.

See exactly how Googlebot crawls your blog

Log on to the “Statistics>Crawl Stats” section, you can see how active Googlebot is in your pages. You can see the number of pages crawled per day, number of KBs downloaded and so on. If you’re suspecting that your blog has Search Engine Indexing problems, this section should give you the first clue in starting your troubleshooting.

Check out the link love

If you wanted to know what pages in your blog has the most external links pointing to it, well, “Links>Pages with external links” section can tell you that. This is a great method to analyze and promote your blog’s pillar content, since you have an exact idea of your posts’ external link count as indexed by Google. And what’s cooler? You can check out who’s linking to you too!

Sitemap Status

And finally, it’ll tell you all about your sitemap. If you haven’t already set a sitemap for your blog, read this on specifying sitemaps for your blog. If you’ve, then keep a close eye on Google Webmaster Tools to to check out the status of your sitemap. Having a broken sitemap can really be a negative factor for your Search Engine traffic.

Related Posts

• Google Webmaster Tools – making life easier for bloggers!
• 5 four-minute killer SEO tweaks that 90% of bloggers ignore
• Have you looked at your blog through the spider’s eye?
• Optimize your site for Google! Tips and Tricks!!
• Add a 301-redirect and save your blog!

There are so many thing in terms of SEO that bloggers know and don’t do. Not that they are ineffective nor black-hat. But just because it’s effect isn’t that big. But like the fish analogy above, what we fail to understand is that a lot of those methods collectively can really make a significant impact on the SERPs that you’re targeting.

Meaningful Image Alt Tags

If I had a nickel for every blogger not using image alt tags in their blogs, I wouldn’t have to work for the rest of my life. You know, when a search engine spiders a web site, it really can’t see the image. How it identifies what the image is solely by looking at the alt tag. The alt (Alternative) tag is used to give the description of the image, when the image is still loading or being hidden in the browser. But, by specifying a meaningful alt tag, you can significantly increase the keyword density of the page as well as pull off some hits from Image Searches.

Applying no-follow to PHP redirected links

When you’re using PHP redirects to direct your visitors to you affiliate links, be sure you’re not redirecting the search engine spiders. Search engine spiders absolutely hate this! (being PHP redirected – it makes them dizzy I heard) So, be sure to add rel=”nofollow” to all your affiliate links.

No-following the unwanted links

If you’re into advanced SEO, you might be already doing this. But if you’re not, just give it a shot. The theory behind Google’s PageRank is that it gives you credit for other linking to your blog, and takes that back when you link to other sources. And this applies when you’re linking to pages from your own blog too. (thought not so much as outbound links) For an example, if you display “10 popular posts” and “5 related posts” per each page, 15 links per page are so draining your Link Popularity away for no reason. Spot these and nofollow them accordingly. Let the spider find your pages from your XML sitemap.

Optimizing META Tags

If you haven’t thought of optimizing META tags in your blog, I recommend you first use a tool like this. It’s really critical that you have META tags – and that you optimize them too. Most of the people let META description be auto-generated. This is quite alright. But be sure to at least optimize your home page and other articles that you’re receiving a faint bit of Search Engine traffic.

Using Homepage Excerpts

When bloggers use homepage excerpts, they are not only trying to influence more page views but also trying to save their blogs from duplicated content. Search Engines will penalize you very badly is they find the same content in your homepage and the single posts that the homepage is linked to. For this purpose, you can use anything from Ajaxed WP to Excerpt Editor WordPress plugin.

Related Posts

• Optimize your site for Google! Tips and Tricks!!
• What Google Webmaster Tools can tell about your blog.
• Have you looked at your blog through the spider’s eye?
• The biggest collection of Wordpress SEO plugins that can multiply your blog traffic
• Google Webmaster Tools – making life easier for bloggers!

It’s the biggest collection of Wordpress SEO plugins, ever compiled – to date.

Add Meta Tags Wordpress Plugin

What it does: This plugin adds XHTML META tags to your WordPress blog. The addition of the META tags is fully automatic , but it also includes all those features a SEO-concerned publisher would need in order to have total control over those meta tags. You can add META tags to single posts, archive pages, static pages and everything else. Customizability is bit of an issue with these plugins.

Download: http://www.g-loaded.eu/2006/01/05/add-meta-tags-wordpress-plugin/

All in One SEO Pack

Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines and Generates META tags automatically. This is my personal favorite. If you’re too lazy to generate META tags, you can let the plugin do it for you. If not, you can always customize them individually and suit them according to SERPs.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

Another Wordpress Meta Plugin

The name says it all. Allows you to do the basic configurations of All in one SEO Pack. If you’re not happy with All in one SEO pack (though I can not think of a good reason for that), you can always use this META tags plugin to give your Wordpress SEO a boost.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/another-wordpress-meta-plugin/

Bad Behavior Wordpress Plugin

Simply put, this one keeps the naughty spam bots out of your Wordpress blog. Bad Behavior is a PHP-based solution for keeping unwanted blog, wiki, forum, guestbook and referrer spam away from your site. All these bots that are posting your content on splogs will have no entry to your blog. But do keep your eyes open since some users have claimed it also blocks a few useful bots to your site too.

Download: http://www.homelandstupidity.us/software/bad-behavior/

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator

This plugin creates a sitemap for your WordPress powered site. This is not just another XML sitemap plugin, but rather a true sitemap generator which is highly customizable from its own options page in the WordPress admin panel. Some of its features include: support for multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, choose what to display, what order to list items in, show comment counts and/or post dates, and much more.

Download: http://www.dagondesign.com/articles/sitemap-generator-plugin-for-wordpress/

Excerpt Editor

This eliminates one of the biggest SEO headaches – Content Duplication. Excerpt Editor provides a convenient place for creating and editing all excerpts. It can also add custom excerpts for pages (not possible without a plugin). Features: auto-creating excerpts when publishing new Posts and Pages, displaying customisable excerpts from the content for posts without an excerpt, appending excerpts from the latest posts to each Post or from the sub-pages to each Page, replacing the content for all archive and tags pages with excerpts.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/excerpt-editor/

FeedSmith Plugin for Feedburner

What can I say? The effect might be minimal. But if you’re using FeedBurner, it’s a classic!

Download: http://orderedlist.com/articles/wordpress-feedburner-plugin/

Category magic Wordpress Plugin

Categories are very helpful if you’re into Advanced SEO techniques such as siloing. Don’t ask me what that is – it’s best that you don’t know – Just kidding Category Magic allows you to do many magical things with categories. For example, it can display links to posts from a single category and even a random category. There are several plugins that can do that. Category Magic does more.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/category-magic/

Google Positioner

This is one of the coolest and most underrated Wordpress SEO plugins ever! After putting the right keywords in the right page, it is imperative to keep track of your keyword performance. With this handy-dandy plugin it is now possible to track your website for your keywords in Google. You can track through multiple regions and keep an eye on the competitors also…

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-google-seo-positioner/

Google Sitemap Generator Wordpress Plugin

I’ve mentioned this plugin countless times in my posts. This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search. It’s an absolute must have if you’re running a Wordpress blog – and if you’re serious about your SEO traffic. Refer to this article if you don’t know anything about making it work.

Download: http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/

HeadMeta Plugin

Yet another Meta Plugin for you. HeadMeta creates <meta> “description” or “keywords” tags for individual posts or pages. It can also create arbitrary <meta> or <link> tags. These are easily set on a per-post (or page) basis by simply adding Custom Fields.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/headmeta/

Karailiev’s sitemap

For some reason, if you’re not too happy with the Google Sitemap Generator, this will most definitely help. This plugin adds a XML sitemap to your blog. It’s used to show all your pages and posts to the search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. Doesn’t have as much configuration facilities as Google Sitemap Generator, but a worthwhile alternative.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/karailievs-sitemap/

KB Robots.txt Wordpress Plugin

When robots (like the Googlebot) crawl your site, they begin by requesting http://example.com/robots.txt and checking it for special instructions. Use this plugin to create and edit your robots.txt file from within Wordpress (using Options -> Robots.txt). It’s a simple plugin that let’s you edit Robots.txt within your Wordpress blog.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/kb-robotstxt/

Nofollow Links in Posts

Nofollow Links in Posts plugin enables you to add the “nofollow” attribute into links in a post within a specified category. This plugin is useful if you are doing sponsored posts. You can set the plugin to add the “nofollow” attribute for posts older than “X” days.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nofollow-links-in-posts/

Objection Redirection Wordpress Plugin

Redirects posts from what you don’t want to want you want. Also helpful if you’re trying to eradicate duplicated content in your blog. But the setting are a wee bit hard to grasp at first. Give it a couple of minutes’ concentrated attention and you’d do just fine.

Download: http://www.biggnuts.com/objection-redirection-wordpress-plugin/

Optimal Title

Rectifies one of the biggest SEO drawbacks of the default Wordpress settings. Optimal Title is a WordPress plugin that mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the ’separator’ to after the title rather than before. This allows you to have your blog name tacked on to the end of the page title instead of having it appear first. Which means. Title of your post, will appear before the blog’s name.

Download: http://elasticdog.com/2004/09/optimal-title/

Permalink Redirect

A WordPress plugin that replies a 301 permanent redirect, if requested URI is different from entry’s (or archive’s) permalink. It is used to ensure that there is only one URL associated with each blog entry. Another great way to save your PR from duplicated content.

Download: http://fucoder.com/code/permalink-redirect/

Permalink Validator Wordpress Plugin

Of all the Permalink Redirection plugins to save your from Search bots mistakenly assuming that your blog has duplicated content, this is the best. Does a lot of SEO modifications to your Wordpress blog, automatically, which would take several minutes and very high risk .htaccess edits – including, adding trailing back-slash if missing, adding or removing www prefix according to your permalink structure and forcing a correct 404 page instead of showing an empty search result when using an invalid URL.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/permalink-validator/

Platinum SEO Pack

Yet another alternative to the legendary All in one SEO which actually lives up to the term ‘alternative’. Has many of the All in one SEO features and more. Optimizing Post and Page Titles for search engines, Overriding any title and set any META description and META keywords, for any post or page, adding index, noindex, follow or nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet, noodp, noydir meta tags to any post/page – are just a few.

Download: http://techblissonline.com/platinum-seo-pack/

Really Simple Sitemap Wordpress Plugin

Does what the Dagon Design Sitemap Generator does – which is building a simple HTML sitemap for your blog. But, it’s not so customizable as I would like it to be.

Download: http://www.internetwealthmaster.com/wordpress-really-simple-sitemap/

Redirection plugin for Wordpress

Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation.

Download: http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/redirection/

Robots Meta Plugin

You don’t really need this if you’ve go the Platinum SEO Pack. But, if you’re using All in one SEO, this might come in handy because it makes the All in one SEO plugin complete with the Robots Meta tags – which by the way helps robots when they are indexing your Wordpress blog.

Download: http://yoast.com/wordpress/robots-meta/

SEO Friendly Images Wordpress Plugin

SEO Friendly Images is a Wordpress optimization plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set. Additionally this makes the post W3C/xHTML valid as well. ALT attribute is important part of search engine optimization. It describes your image to search engine and when a user searches for a certain image this is a key determining factor for a match. TITLE attribute play lesser role but is important for visitors as this text will automatically appear in the tooltip when mouse is over the image.

Download: http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/wordpress-plugins/seo-friendly-images

SEO Post Link

The SEO Post Link makes your post link short and SEO friendly. It removes common words that are unnecessary for search engine optimization of your blog post link. It doesn’t shorten your slug in a random manner. It only deletes the words which are not important in terms of SEO.

Download: http://www.maxblogpress.com/plugins/spl/

SEO Slugs Wordpress Plugin

The SEO Slugs Wordpress plugin removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve search engine optimization. Another alternate to the SEO Post Link Plugin.

Download: http://www.vretoolbar.com/news/seo-slugs-wordpress-plugin

SEO Title Tag

Title tags are arguably the most important of the on-page factors for search engine optimization (“SEO“). It blows my mind how post titles are also used as title tags by WordPress, considering that post titles should be catchy, pithy, and short-and-sweet; whereas title tags should incorporate synonyms and alternate phrases to capture additional search visibility. SEO Title Tag makes is dead-easy to optimize the title tags across your WordPress-powered blog or website.

Download: http://www.netconcepts.com/seo-title-tag-plugin/

Subdomains by Category

This Wordpress plugin turns all your categories into subdomains. It works on your post permalinks too. Only use this if your host supports it and only use this IF YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING. The advantage of having subdomains is that Search Engines tend to give subdomains more value than permalinks.

Download: http://wordpress-plugins.biggnuts.com/wordpress-subdomains-plugin/

WordPress Tweaks

WordPress Tweaks is a powerful yet simple plugin to help you push the boundaries of WordPress by fine-tuning its many aspects. This multi-purpose plugin specializes in simple toggle-on/off changes. It adds many useful settings pertaining to comments, posts, SEO, security, the administration back-end, and much more. Some tweaks can even replace plugins that you may already have installed.

Download: http://wordpress.jdwebdev.com/plugins/tweaks/

WP Page Numbers Wordpress Plugin

With page numbers instead of next and previous links users can easily navigate much quicker to the page they want. It is good for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as well, because it creates a tighter inner link structure.

Download: http://www.jenst.se/2008/03/29/wp-page-numbers

WP_LinkTools Wordpress Plugin

Publicize your posts and pages by adding the to the social bookmarking site Delicious, automatically as soon as you post them. It’s one of my personal favorites and a quick Del.icio.us link building super weapon. Highly recommended!

Download: http://www.dcoda.co.uk/index.php/tag/wp_linktools/

All of these plugins have the potential to boost your Search Engine Rankings with a little bit of analysis. However, as any SEO would tell you, don’t just install the plugin and wait for the magic to happen. If you’re trying to get on top of something and maintain it, you have to experiment and evolve.

I sincerely hope you’ll find these SEO Tweaking, Link Building, META Optimizing, Bot Controlling plugins useful – which by the way took me more than 5 hours to check, analyze and experiment

Technorati Tags: seo tools,website seo,blog and seo,blog for seo,seo friendly blog,seo,all in one seo,wordpress,plugins,meta tag,robots,search engines,serp,content,slugs,titles,keywords,optimize,search engine optimization,sitemaps,google,excerpts,dupliacte,penalize,yahoo

Related Posts

• What Google Webmaster Tools can tell about your blog.
• 5 four-minute killer SEO tweaks that 90% of bloggers ignore
• Add a 301-redirect and save your blog!
• Bold SEO Wordpress Plugin for better SEO Keyword Targeting
• Optimize your site for Google! Tips and Tricks!!

It seems like I’m not the only one to blog about the aftermath of the update this early – mind you, the update is still going on, so I don’t mean to be the one who takes the initiative to disturb the hornets’ nest – though someone surely will within this week!

To get the full picture, we will have to wait a little. Certain pages in ROCKFUSE which are ranking quite well still shows N/A. I don’t know whether this has the potency of changing – or whether Google is not finished yet with the whole cha-cha.

It was announced that few penalties would be lifted from Google’s side when giving the new PR. Though Mr.Cutts wasn’t specific, he might have referred to the biggest penalization there is – “Selling Text Links”. But don’t be so eager to buy that since few weeks back TLA(Text-Link-Ads) – which is the biggest Text Link Ad marketplace in the world was banned from Google.

Let’s keep our eyes open and see where this goes.

Related Posts

• Google Exposed – Is Google toolbar PageRank a fake?
• Track your PageRank changes with PageRank Alert.
• Add a 301-redirect and save your blog!
• Sunday Shoutouts! – SERP Changes, Contest Update and Weird AdSense!
• Google Sets and it’s freaky AI prediction capabilities

Have you ever had those random commentators that go through a bunch of your old posts and comment to get on top of your “Top Commentators” list, and have a nice bunch of keywords as their anchor texts? Yeah.. Those are the people. Commentators that quote a part of your post itself to make the comment worthwhile and leave a zillion of them at random posts, knowing that your blog is do-follow? That’s them.

Alright! So, the real question is, “Is it ethical?”. I mean, they are not doing anything illegal. They are just contributing to your blog by creating much needed content. And, it’s not illegal to comment on your old posts, even though their prime objective is to get on top of the top commentators list.

What they are doing is definitely not black. And I can’t say it’s white. Then again, if you have a do-follow blog or a “Top Commentators” list, it just means that you’re readily bribing the those SEO-holics to do their thing right? So in a way, you might not like the smoke, but you definitely put some hay there because you like the fire.

So as a final word, I used to think that these people were ruining the quality of the blogosphere and slowing down the growth of it. And many of us still think so. Then I realized how wonderful they are than the jerks who use comment-kahuna to leave 1,349 automated “Nice Post!” comments on my blog. You’re willing to give them some juice for their comment, so as long as it’s not spam, “write the check and be happy about it”.

Of course, you can try applying no-follow tags to all your external links. But then, even white hats won’t bother to comment on your blog! SO, how do you handle these gray hats?

Related Posts

• How to build your blog through reader comments
• How do you Respond to Negative Reader Comments?
• SezWho – Does it work?
• I will not comment spam you since I’ve no idea about your niche
• How you can fire up your blog with Ajax

(Image Credit: Karen B)

So today, I’m going to give you guys a bit of a search engine optimization tip. It might get a bit geeky around here:)

Some of us may heavily rely on search engine traffic and some of us might actually care lees about it. But, whether you actually care about the search engine traffic that you get or not, one SEO factor that you probably should give a damn would be Google Page Rank.

Why? Well, Google Page Rank is not all about getting you Google traffic. It’s a widely accepted yardstick for measuring a blog’s popularity. You get more Google juice for more people linking to you. But, this is just old information. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you guys what you already know.

Now, to something some of you might actually have no idea of. Do you know that domain.com and www.domain.com are two totally different web sites in the eyes of Google? Yeah! You heard me. And if not taken preventative measures, this can so totally mess up your G-Factor?

Well, let me tell you why it’s so much of an issue. When other bloggers link to your blog, it can be with or without the leading WWW. The people linking to your blog with the WWW will help your www.domain.com’s page rank and the other people will help domain.com’s page rank since they are not linking with the leading WWW. Which ultimately means, The page rank your blog deserves gets split between your www address and the address without the leading www.

How can I prevent this and get the total Page rank I deserve? Don’t worry. The solution is simpler than you think. If you don’t already use Google Webmaster Tools, then I say it’s high time that you did. If you haven’t already set-up Google Webmaster Tools for your blog, then follow this article.

Alright! – Now, to the solution…

Step 1: Navigate to your Google Webmaster Tools dashboard. You can access it at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/. You’ll meet with your dashboard screen and your sites list. If you have registered your blog here, you will have to verify the domain. If you can see the ‘verify’ label next to your site’s name, then go ahead and verify it. It won’t take you long and it’s absolutely necessary for the next step.

Step 2: Select your blogs URL from the list and navigate to the ‘Tools’ section from the navigation bar at the left side of the page. You’ll be presented with the following screen.

Step 3: Click on ‘Set preferred domain’ from the list of sub sections that you’re offered. If the option is not selectable, that means you haven’t verified your blog yet. Go back to step 1 and verify your site.

Step 4: Select the option to ALWAYS regard the address with the leading www as the same as the address without the www.

That’s it. You’re done. Told you it was more simpler than you thought.

As a final word, I should tell you that the same thing can be achieved using a 303-redirect as I’ve shown here. But one of the major drawbacks of the 303-redirect is it increases the server load by tonne to redirect a spider/visitor every time it/he/she hits your blog. Rather than editing a file that has the weirdest file-name ever, (.htaccess), isn’t this way easier?

[tags]Google, Page Rank, PR, Optimize, Google Webmaster Tools, 303 redirect, leading WWW[/tags]
Related Posts

• Add a 301-redirect and save your blog!
• What Google Webmaster Tools can tell about your blog.
• Google Webmaster Tools – making life easier for bloggers!
• Optimize your site for Google! Tips and Tricks!!
• Here’s a method that is helping hundreds of people increase their website’s earnings!

I’ve heard this questions countless times on walkthroughs, blog posts and forums. Conventional SEO(Search Engine Optimization) tell us that it is really a fake PageRank that is being displayed in the Google Toolbar. I don’t think anyone had come up with hard evidence to prove or deny this, but a lot of conspiracy theorists(including me) support this claim. It it likely that Google develops it’s own ranking of a page, that is not disclosed, through it’s algorithms. A rank other than the one displayed in the Google toolbar.

Why it is likely for a Secret PR to exist and to be undisclosed

Google’s main intention had been and still is to serve the most relevant content to the millions of search queries submitted daily. And the PageRank of a web site quite frankly sums up the quality of the site itself, evaluating it against the search query. So, in a nutshell, that’s how Google works.

Recently, sites that sell Text Links and Sponsored Reviews had been the targets of Google PageRank drops. I’m sure you might have heard countless stories on the blogosphere how blogs of PR6 went to PR4 and PR2 went to PR0. Just because a blog sells Text Links, doesn’t mean that the content becomes irrelevant to the extent that Google should rank it low now, does it?

So, in that case, these recent PR drops really defeated Google’s main purpose of content provision… Or did it? Would Google really be so stupid to penalize a blog on it’s ‘real’ rank for a few outbound links and lose the trust of the millions of Googlers by not providing them with the most relevant content? I don’t think so. In fact, that’s probably my main point to support the proposition of this question. It is very likely that Google is having it’s own secret PR hidden within the secret servers of Googleplexes.

Why would Google have the undisclosed PR?

Remember how many bloggers stopped selling text links on their blogs after the last PR drop? Remember how worried they were? Well, Google had done it. Their main intention was to make sure people respect the ‘nofollow’. Because of this, many bloggers adopted to the ‘nofollow’ usage and went by Google’s way. Few who didn’t do so, refused to bow down to the big G. At the end of the day, bloggers used outbound links sparingly, took the magical ‘nofollow’ very seriously, and helped Google by not messing up their algorithms for consistency.

Or was that what really happened? Is there another side of the story? I think so. So, here me out.

Let’s imagine Google is a nation with nuke warheads. (It really isn’t that hard to imagine something like that since they can wipe out most of the things we take for granted today within a split second) Like all of ‘em, a nation displays it’s nuclear firepower by demo rocket launches and so on. Just to let all of the others know that they have the capability of doing something nasty. And when they want to be taken seriously, they might go to the extent of actually doing something nasty. Likewise, Google has the fire power, and when they want web owners to take them seriously, they will actually go to the extent of launching a demo strike. This demo strike being “the fake Google Toolbar PR drop”.

Now why do I call this a demo strike? Wasn’t it “the real strike”? No, sorry. Don’t think so. Why?

Take a look around. Google launched the demo strike and almost everyone listened! Everyone took the search engine giant’s requisitions very seriously. Much like a nuclear nation being taken seriously after a demo ballistic missile experiment. Did Google really want the 3rd party (the people who search through Google) to be harmed? Did Google really want to provide those people with irrelevant content just because the 2nd party (we, the bloggers, the webmasters) messed up? Nope. They are smarter than that.

They threatened us with the PR drop, got us to listen and change our ways, pretended if we didn’t do so, we’d actually be stricken. And this whole time, they had their own real undisclosed ranking system running in the background. The toolbar was just a fake mask to make us dance to their beat. They achieved emphasizing the importance of outbound links, and didn’t get the backfire since dropping the actual rank was something they never did.

Disclaimer – or not!

This is just something that popped into my head and I’ve got no hard enough evidence to prove it, except for the fact that it really makes sense about what SEO experts had been saying lately. I’m not portraying Google as an evil corporate entity., Oh no! I love Google too much to do that. But, could this really be true? Would love to hear your opinion.
Related Posts

• Optimize your site for Google! Tips and Tricks!!
• Google Sandbox – Myth or Fact?
• 5 four-minute killer SEO tweaks that 90% of bloggers ignore
• 5 Ways to improve your link popularity
• July 2008 PageRank Update – An early analysis