Loading...

Too many Blog Comment Links can be Harmful

Many webmasters and website owners today have changed their focus from reciprocal links to non-reciprocal / one-way links due to the importance Search Engines give to one-way non-reciprocal links. There are a number of strategies that can be adopted to increase the number of one way, incoming links to a website. One of these, which you’ll come across, while reading many link building and development guides, is Blog Comments.

Leaving Useful Comments on blogs related to your niche is no doubt a very good idea to get links and users to your website. It is the easiest and most targeted method through which people will find you and will link to you if you provide useful comments and are a regular visitor to those blogs.

However, there is a very fine line in using Blog Commenting the ‘Ethical Way‘ and the ‘Unethical Way‘. If most of the incoming links to a website are from Blogs, and specifically from Blog Comments, Search Engines might end up penalizing your website.

Search Engines now consider websites that have a high percentage of links from Blogs as ‘Bad Neighborhood‘ sites. Domains that have a high occurrence of links that appear to be from blogs may be penalized by Search Engines. It may be normal for blogs and forums to have lots of incoming links from blogs, but for many commercial websites, a large percentage of links from blogs could indicate an attempt to increase search engine rankings through blog comment spamming.

So if you have a new website, and you plan to promote it and bring traffic and users to it through blog comments, make sure you have some other methods of attracting links to your website also, to even it all out. Incoming links from Blogs only can be harmful for your website.

Killer Link Building Strategies Mini Guide

I finally took out the time to write my own guide for some great link building strategies. The guide is now online at Killer Link Building Strategies. It still needs a lot of additions and I need to cover more topics in more detail. I’ll keep updating it regularly and make it the ultimate guide for link building for all the newbies out there learning link building and how to collect links for their websites.

I’m also thinking of making an even better and detailed version and maybe put it on my site in the form of an e-book.

Social bookmarking service Del.icio.us Firefox Add-on

Del.icio.us has recently launched the new and updated Add-On for Firefox which makes bookmarking websites easier and fast. Del.icio.us had been loosing a lot of its users owing to its slow speed to Bluedot.us, a competitor site, but recently, Del.icio.us has made significant speed improvements by their new bookmarking Add-On for Firefox which will prove to be beneficial for them.

The latest Del.icio.us Add-On for Firefox can be downloaded here.

Get Rid of Blog Comment Spam

One of the blogs I manage had started getting lots and lots of Comment Spam. I tried a number of spam protection techniques, including Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin, but it didnt work out. Even disabling ‘Add Comment’ and making it available to only registered users didn’t work out. The number of Comment spams to the blog increased to 5 comment spams every 5 minutes, which was really annoying.

I finally found the solution to all this when I came to know that most of these Blog Comment Spams are generated by Trackbacks and Pingbacks.

You can use the Simple Trackback Validation Plugin to get rid of Comment Span, or simply un-check the check box for Trackback notifications from your WordPress Admin panel under the ‘Options >> Discussions‘ tab. This will disable pingbacks and trackbacks on any new posts that you add to your blog.

Once you’ve updated the options, you’ll need to modify the pingback status for your old posts by running a simple SQL query in the SQL Tab of phpMyAdmin after selecting your Blog Database:

UPDATE wp_posts SET ping_status=’closed’ WHERE ping_status=’open’

Alternately, you can run the simpler version of this SQL query

UPDATE wp_posts SET ping_status=’closed’ 😉

This will set the ping status for all your previous posts to 0 and will help you get rid of thousands of unwanted spammy Blog Comments.

PR Increase for Internal Page!

I just noticed and found that one of the internal pages of my site got PR 4 recently! The page is for Search Engine Friendly Directories which gives a list of many directories, free and paid, where you can submit your website. The page jumped from PR 0 to PR 4 due to the links coming back to it. Some data centres still show PR 0, whereas the others show Page Rank 4.

You can see the PR changes on different data centres using this PR check tool.

Website Promotion Tools – When To Use Them?

I recently came across a blog promoting SEO Elite as one of the best SEO and Website Promotion Softwares out there. Having tried the software myself, I also agree that the software has great potential of getting you up in the Search Engine Rankings and Top positions and also to get traffic to your site.

Then I visited the official site for SEO Elite and read all what they had written on their main page:

“Learn how I use this revolutionary software to consistently average over 15,000 visitors to my websites, per day – Using only FREE search engines traffic from Google, Yahoo, and MSN!”

After reading over some of the material, I realised that these softwares are worthwhile if you already have a website with some useful content on it, or you have something which you can sell to your customers to be able to actually benefit or earn from the traffic that these tools drive to your site. Such tools and promotion softwares are no good for newbies, who do not have any established sites yet.

So my tip for all the newbies out there is to focus on making a website first. If you have a website, which you regularly update daily and have been doing so for a few months, then these softwares can be very helpful.

If your site is very new and has very few useful content on it, much of the traffic you drive to it using these softwares won’t be helpful. In fact, the visitors will come and visit your site and loose interest and might not come back again.

Ways to Promote your Blog

Have you recently launched a weblog and are looking for ways to promote your blog?

Listed below are links to blog link directories, and blog feed submission sites. Links to other useful blog promotion articles are also given.

Also, these articles and links for Blog promotion will be helpful:

If you have any more links, please do share with our readers.

Earn $66.55 commission per sale!

If you have a webmaster related blog or website and would like to earn some quick cash by promoting a few adsense videos… heres your chance!

Sign up for an affiliate account and Promote Micheal Cheney’s Adsense videos and you’ll earn 75% commission per sale! Hurry before the offer expires (most probably on 27th March 2007) and start cashing in on one of the most talked about Adsense products on the Internet.

You can sign up for Micheal Cheney’s Affiliate program online.

Note: You need to have a Clickbank account for this.

PR 5 in a few months for your new site?

Is it true that an aggressive link building campaign can get you a PR 4 or PR 5 site in just a few months for your new site, without buying any links?

During the last 2 to 3 years, I’ve been working and managing a number of sites and finding link partners for them. I’ve found that hard work and persistence can easily get you a Google PageRank of 4 or 5 for your brand new site, in a few months, all with free link exchanges!

Getting things ready for your links campaign

It’s true about the aggressive link building campaign. What you really need is persistence and hard work. Firstly, add a links directory to your site / link pages, what ever you are comfortable with. These should be in place so you don’t have to go make new pages again and again whenever a new link request comes. You should spend some time looking around web directories and link pages to see the categories and sub-categories that you are planning to use in your links directory. A link submission form should also be added. Adding a links directory should be a few hours work, and a days work if you’re a little lazy.

Finding Good Link Partner Sites

When this is in place and functional, you can start finding good link partners. To find good link partners, you should see sites linking to other competitor sites, those that are ranking high on Search engines, those that accept links and have a links form on their site. Find websites that are already doing well on search engines for keywords like “your keyword + directory submission”, “your keyword + link exchange”, “your keyword + submit URL”, using several other variations and also using the allintitle, allinurl commands on Google. If you are having difficulty in finding good link partners, spend a few hours searching for websites that give you useful tips and tricks on finding good sites to exchange links with.

Other than these, you will be much better off if you contact a lot of low PR, industry related sites. These are sites that don’t even make to the top ranking positions, but actually exist with PR 4 or 3 or lower. You can easily find such sites through some directory, like the Yahoo! directory, or DMOZ, by browsing to the relevant category/sub-category, or using some other search engine like MSN and Yahoo. Most of these low ranking websites will be willing to give a link without you linking to them!

Your plan for finding and contacting webmasters

Try to add and review at least 100 – 200 sites every day. You should be working full time only on finding good websites to exchange links with. 200 websites a day makes 25 links/websites every hour if you work 8 hours per day. Once you have a list of 800 or 1000 link partners, start contacting them. You (or some resource) should be working on it full-time and contact as many partners for link exchange as you can. It will be a good idea if you use some tool like Arelis, by Axandra, to manage your links campaign. Now time yourself, and you should be sending 20 – 30 emails every hour to link partners. If you have a links manager tool, you should be able to send more requests per hour. This way you’ll have contacted the 800 or 1000 sites you collected in just 2 or 3 days. The more emails you send, the more likely you’ll get a response.

So, you should be spending 4 to 5 days on finding good link partners and then contacting them in the next 4 to 5 days. A few points that you should consider are that you shouldn’t be spending too much time on reviewing websites. You should be able to figure out in 1 or 2 minutes if you will be willing to exchange links with a website or not.

Plan and time yourself

This is the trick I’ve been using to get links. Just plan and time yourself in everything you do. You should start getting replies from link partners in a day or two, once you start sending those emails. You should be making 4 – 5 links or more on average per day easily if you use this approach. Some link partners are slow in responding. Others don’t inform you at all if they link back. But you will be able to find out the other sites linking to you once you start seeing referrals in your website statistics.

Avoid Search Engine Penalties

Repeat the process again for the next few weeks. Keep a target and achieve it. Say, 60 links every month. Make sure you rotate the link texts and descriptions often to avoid Search Engine penalties of getting lots of links quickly in a short period of time.

The good thing about this campaign is that most of the sites will link back without even asking for a link from your site. These will be free incoming links to your site and will have more weight as they will be non-reciprocal links.

Web Directory and Article Submissions

Apart from this, write articles and submit them to as many article directories as possible. A well written article should get you more than 300 – 500 links alone. And don’t forget to do directory submissions. They can help you boost your link popularity and help you get a lot of keyword rich text links. For a list of Free Search Engine Friendly directories, you can visit http://www.seo-reloaded.com/ . You can also find a list of Niche Link Directories.

 

Note: Please feel free to link to the article if you find it useful, or use it on your blog or article directory with a functional link to my SEO Blog and website, or submit it to article sites if you want, with the links intact.

Any comments and suggestions are welcome. You can submit your comments below. 🙂

Submit your Web Directory

I want to make a list of Search Engine Directories, and I want it to be the biggest list 😀

You will be able to see the complete list of directories on the Search Engine Friendly Directories page.

Please feel free to submit your directories for addition to the list. Both Free and Paid directories are accepted. You will have to submit the following information to get your directory listed:

  • Name Short name of the directory
  • Directory URL This should be the exact URL of the directory
  • Brief Description One to two sentences about your directory, sort of like a link description
  • Submit Link If your directory has a link submission page, please give its URL, else leave this field blank
  • Type Free, Paid, Register, Reciprocal
  • Theme General, Niche. If it is a niche directory, please specify the niche

You can submit your directory as a comment to this post, or send me an email at webmaster@seo-reloaded.com