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Online links and politics – Are there similarities?

There was an earlier article that was developed which likened online websites with real-life communities. That article went so far to try and establish the similarity between real-life neighbors and online reciprocal linking neighbors. Now this article will talk about one way linking and how it is very similar to real-life politicking.

Every person in the planet has his or her own personal views, agendas, and political leanings. Some people may not support a particular politician without getting something from them in return, while some are just avid fanatics of a particular candidate just because they like what that politician represents.

Very similar to one-way links online – most of the well-informed websites would not think of directly linking or supporting another website without getting something (a reciprocating link) in return; while others directly link with a ‘popular’ site just because they like or love the content or what it has to say.

These “politicians” or what can be referred to as Future-High-PR sites often resolve to a lot of politicking or online strategies just to be able to get plenty of support from the masses. One of the more famous online strategies to getting one way links is through email marketing. Telling webmasters that the site or page has something great to offer their online visitors can sometimes prove very tempting and can merit an inbound link. Sending out HTML-based newsletters can also be very useful, especially if the outbound emails can be tracked and can be reconciled with the inbound traffic and generated links.

Another excellent strategy is through social communities. Posting messages on social networks about tempting offers or supporting a group cause do have its merits. Link baits on the social networks will also give the site the opportunity to expose their content more, and thus generate inbound traffic.

Those who will heed the “politicking” of these Future-High-PR sites would want to be closely associated with them, and thus inbound links will be formed. Posting link baits are very common on social networks. Utilizing link baits to get better traffic from a particular social class and age group which may be interested in what you have to say or to the content of your site can be categorized as potential inbound links.

Blog comment posting is also an excellent strategy to gain widespread exposure on blogging networks. Finding categorically related blogs and posting some “useful” message on their comment sections can be very beneficial. And one of the best ways to gain inbound links is by writing articles and submitting them to various article directories, while adding an inbound link to your site on the resource section of the article. That way, people will be able to trace where the article came from.

There are plenty of ways to get one way links. Using white-hat strategies is always encouraged. Black hat strategies can get you penalized or banned. It’s better to read and follow the guidelines set forth by the different search engines to have an idea on how they rank and track different websites online.

A linkfarm is any type of website in which there is no real content, service, or purpose, but rather just a load of non-related reciprical links to other places. Generally linkfarms are built to increase search engine rankings and turn a profit, which means they’re also generally littered with advertisements from affiliate programs the site owner has partnered with.

Linkfarms are not to be confused with Linkdumps, which are simply places people dump all kinds of links to content on various websites.

One of the things I’m constantly amazed at is how many web publishers miss one of the easiest ways to maximize their positioning in Search Engines by simply including the keywords that they’d like to be found for in their post titles.

I spend a lot of time looking at online articles written on blogs, newspapers and websites and some days it seems that every second or third one has a title that is either cryptic, clever or cute at the expense of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

To put it bluntly - when it comes to blog SEO I believe that your page and post titles are incredibly important. Google in particularly seems to value the words in your title incredibly highly.

Whilst I too feel the temptation to be clever with my post titles from time to time (and sometimes give into it) - I know that if I don’t get traffic from search engines then a fairly significant part of my income will disappear.

So if you’re writing about a new ‘Pink Widget’ have a think about the words that a potential reader will use to search for in Google to find the information you’re presenting. How would you search the net for information on ‘Pink Widgets’?

Without a doubt we’d all include ‘pink widget’ in the search we did. We might refine it by including a third word like ‘price’, ‘review’, ‘advice’, ‘problems’ etc (which may be worthwhile words to include either in the title or body of content) but the best words to include in the title are ‘pink widgets’ - if you don’t you’ve got virtually no chance of being found for that search term unless no one else is writing about them.

Keep in mind that research shows that people search the web a lot for names of products and people and that they are often quite specific their searches. If you’re writing about something specific make your title reflect this.

Of course it’s worth saying that it’s not as simple as just stuffing your titles with keywords - for one they need to make sense (no one will click on a link in Google if its a collection of unrelated words), secondly if you put too many words in your title you run the risk of decreasing their power and confusing the search engines and thirdly you’ll disillusion your regular readers if you mess with stuffing titles with too many words.

* AOL Search - A Google powered search engine used by AOL users also pulls listings from the Open Directory Project.
* AltaVista - the Internet’s first Web Index, has very comprehensive coverage and a wide range of power searching commands, which make it a particular favorite among researchers. It gets its listings from Yahoo! Search.
* All The Web - uses results from Yahoo! Search plus an index of tens of millions of pdf and doc files.
* Ask.com - (formerly Ask Jeeves) is a human-powered search service that attempts to direct you to the exact page that answers your question. If it fails to find a match within its own database, then it will provide web pages from their search engine.
* Excite - A popular web portal (a page that, in addition to search, includes news, sports, weather, email and much more) on the web. Excite uses a metasearch engine that searches Google, Yahoo and Ask listings.
* Google - Currently the most popular search engine, makes heavy use of link popularity as a primary way to rank web sites. This can be especially helpful in finding good sites in response to general searches such as “cars” and “travel,” because users across the web have in essence voted for good sites by linking to them.
Google is also known for a wide range of features including: cached pages, excellent spell checking, access to dictionary definitions, stock quotes, street maps, telephone numbers and more. The Google Toolbar is also very popular.
* HotBot - has advanced search features and presents listings from either Ask.com or MSN and the Open Directory Project
* LookSmart includes past and popular searches right on their home page. They also have a pay per click advertising program.
* Lycos - another web portal offers “personalized content” including free email, websites, blogs and photo sharing. They include listings from the Open Directory Project. A good looking site.
* MSN Search - Microsoft’s MSN web portal also offers free email, instant messenger, and a directory. It previously used Looksmart for its search results but now provides access to Yahoo’s listings.
* Netscape Search - Netscape Search’s results come primarily from Google and the Open Directory Project.
* Open Directory Project - Uses volunteer editors to catalog the web. It was acquired by Netscape in November 1998, and the company pledged that anyone would be able to use information from the directory through an open license arrangement. Netscape itself was the first licensee. Lycos also uses the information for its main service and within Lycos-owned HotBot. Here’s more information about Open Directory.
* Search.com - A metasearch engine owned by CNET, that searches Google, Ask.com, LookSmart and dozens of other leading search engines to bring you the best results.
* Snap - An innovative search company that offers previews of websites in search listings.
* WebCrawler is a metasearch engine that combines results from Google, Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com. They also offer a toolbar with Dictionary Search that you can download.
* Yahoo! Search - Once the web’s most popular search service is still a good alternative to Google. Yahoo is the oldest major web site directory, having launched in late 1994.

Search engines, such as Google, create their listings automatically. Search engines crawl through the web. Search engines eventually find your site and index the pages they find. Page titles, body text (ie, great content), META tags and other elements all play a role in what gets indexed. People then review the results of what was found by the search engine, based on keywords they type into the search engine.

A directory such as Yahoo! Directory depends on human editors to create its listings. You submit a description of your site to the directory for editors to review. A good site, with good content, will be more likely to get reviewed than a poor site. A search of a directory looks for matches only in that directory’s index.

Yahoo! also has a search engine that includes spidered websites along with their directory listings and “Sponsor Results” which are pay per click ads, similar to Google’s Adwords. Originally Yahoo! displayed only listings from their directory. Then in 2002 they added search engine listings from Google. In 2004 they started using their own search engine based on AltaVista’s technology. A few years later they acquired Overture (formerly GoTo) which was the first pay per click program.

The number and quality of links pointing to your website are terribly important to your Google rank. There are a number of different strategies and techniques to pursue at this stage. Some of our highest-ranking examples on this list have made a habit of including a small credit link back to their site on the websites they design. Those links add up quickly, especially if they are included on a page footer that appears on each page in a client’s website.

First, make sure your site, especially your homepage, is frequently updated. Google seems to like frequently changing websites, this might be why weblogs tend to score very well at Google.

Second, make sure to have a lot of incoming and outgoing links (especially to and from big, relevant, high-quality websites). If something can be a link, make it a link! By doing so, Google will rank you pages higher as others who are not that embedded. This link relevancy system is called Google Pagerank. You can check out your pagerank at pagerank.net. Pagerank works on a scale from 1 to 10. If you have a rank of 1 or 2, you’re likely to be way down the search results. If you have a higher rank, your site will appear at the top of the search results, even if there are a lot of competitors for your specific keywords or business.

Third, make sure your site is clean and correctly formatted, preferably in web standards / xhtml. Avoid certain technologies the Google robot doesn’t understand. Don’t use a frameset for your website. Robots may skip frames or only index the upper one (refering will be a mess anyway). Avoid javascript or Flash menus, only a.href links are followed by a robot. Additionally, all javascript and comments are skipped by search robots.

For the same reason, full-flash websites should be avoided if search accessibility is important (actually, if ANY accessibility is important). If you do feel the strong need to use Flash, all you can do is to make sure you have a keyword descriptive URL and page title.

Website linking structure and number of links pointing to your site or page is crucial to ranking High in Google and if you rank good in Google, chances are you’ll do good in Yahoo and other search engines but top 3 search engines that will bring most traffic are Google, Yahoo and MSN. Analyzing your competitors is important and included in Free SEO tips because search engines do analyze incoming links to your website as part of their ranking criteria which is called Page Rank (PR).

So what other websites are doing to rank on top of search results. In order to find out you need to gather a significant amount of data about the top ranking sites for whatever keyword or phrase you are trying to optimize your page for, like:

1. Competition’s rank in the Search Engines Results for given keyword
2. The number of incoming links to the site’s home page, not including

internal links.
3. What keywords they use in the title tag
4. Number of links containing keywords in the link text
5. PageRank of linking pages
6. The Alexa traffic ranking

Most of this information can be collected free by querying Google and Yahoo (Read about it in this Analyzing Individual Keyword Phrase article) and using free seo tools but it is very time consuming and you can’t get all data in one place.

I use This SEO Tool that can easily crawl a Web site and compile statistics on keyword usage throughout the site with single click of a mouse and all data is displayed in one window.

Since web pages drive search engine rankings, Black Hat SEOs began duplicating the content of entire web sites under their own domain name, instantly producing a ton of web pages (kind of like downloading an encyclopedia onto your web site). Due to this abuse, Google aggressively attacked duplicate content abusers with their algorithm updates, knocking out many legitimate websites as collateral damage in the process. For example, when someone scrapes your site, Google will look at both renditions of the site, and in some cases it may determine the legitimate one to be the duplicate. The only way to prevent this is to track down sites as they are scraped and then submit spam reports to Google. Issues with duplicate content also arise because there are a lot of legitimate uses for them. News feeds are the most obvious example: a news story is covered by many websites because it’s the content that viewerss want to see. Any filter will inevitably catch some legitimate uses.

It’s believed that Google has implemented a time penalty for new links and sites before fully marking the index, based on the presumption that 100,000-page websites can’t be created overnight. Certain web sites, or links to them, are “sandboxed” for a period of time before they are given full rank in the index. Speculation is that only a set of competitive keywords (the ones that are manipulated the most) are sandboxed. A drifting legend in the search engine world, the existence of the Sandbox has been debated, and is yet to be confirmed by Google.