Link Building Blog, News and Articles - Textlinkbrokers.com/blog

Check your backlilnks a lot of webmasters are reporting a Google backlink update. Hopefully a Pr update will be coming soon!

link:www.yoursite.com (just type this into Google to see who is linking to you)

For Yahoo type link:http://www.yoursite.com

I recommend doing both because Google does not show all of your backlinks on purpose.

If most of us thought Google’s popularity as a search engine is reducing after the Florida update, they are in for a little surprise!

A new study says that Americans are increasingly satisfied by the results hauled in by their online search engines - especially when they Google something.

The survey observes - "Google retains its status as the industry leader with a stellar score of 82, not surprising for a site that has entered the lexicon as a verb,” said online satisfaction expert and study sponsor Larry Freed in a statement. “Google has not rested on its laurels, but instead has taken the stance of aggressive innovator."

http://www.inc.com/criticalnews/articles/200408/search.html

This link gives direct access to the overture view bid data: overture view bid

Ok go to this page in Overture and select which country you are in. Then just fill out a few quick bits of (fake) information and you will be taken to a keyword suggestions page. Enter in your keywords and Overture will give you some very handy data.  A whole lot more than they offer in their basic tools to the public. You can see your search term, its monthly search volume, the top bid for each term, and est. of clicks, est. of CPC and the est. of total cost. You can also see terms that get a lot of monthly search traffic, which are not being bid on. So you can get good traffic for cheap.

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This article was written in August 2004 and was speaking mostly about High Pagerank Monthly Links.  At the time I saw a lot of people spending massive amounts of money on monthly high PR links without any consideration of whether or not the links were actually working.  It can get real costly if you buy a lot of links and only half of them work, but you dont know which half since you bought them at the same time.  In that scenario it would be impossible to tell which links you should keep and which ones you shouldnt

It is just as good of an idea today as it was back then to build links slowly over time.  Too many links at once is a good indicator to the search engines that someone is artificially trying to inflate their rankings.

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The tiered approach to buying links is a simple concept that will save you money. Buy a few links, see how they effect your rankings, and then buy a few more. If you buy tons and tons of links all at once there will be no way of knowing how many links you actually needed to get to the top of the rankings.

Selling text ads is a normal practice probably since websites began to be used for commercial purposes. When Google came up with its PageRank algorithm, and people started to have access to the PageRank value through the Google toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com), they also gave (unwillingly?) the possibility to measure the value of a page.

Google owns PageRank and does not allow anybody to buy, sell or trade PageRank. Often people mistake buying, selling and trading links for buying, selling or trading pagerank, but there is a fundamental difference.

"Many webmasters are seeing significant drops in traffic, up to 80% in some cases within the last 24 hours. In contrast others are reporting significant rises in the SERPs which indicates a big change (which imo is not sandbox related).” Seroundtable has a question and answer
form to fill out if you have been effected. This will help to figure out a pattern perhaps. 
Seroundtable

If selling PageRank is illegal as per Google, why does Google show such ads in Google Adwords? There was an interesting discussion on this very issue sometime back in WMW

AdWordsAdvisor (AWA), a Google Adwords representative at WMW provides a first-cut feedback on this.

Advertising to assist with PageRank isn’t a problem. Selling PageRank, however, is another thing - and ads/sites are reviewed on a case-by-case basis along these guidelines.

Here is a link to AWA’s comments.

Here’s a robots.txt tutorial to help you make sure you have your robots.txt files are properly set up. Mistakes can be costly.
Here’s a handy robots.txt validator

This article on directory submissions gives a good overview of directory submissions with specific tips on Yahoo!, Looksmart, The Open Directory, Gimpsy, GoGuides.org, IllumiRate,JoeAnt, Skaffe,Web-Beacon,WebSavvy,Web World, Wherewithal/Xoron, WoW and Zeal.

Rusty Brick has published a very helpful Guide to Search Engine Friendly E-Commerce Catalogs

Post by Brett Tabke of Webmsterworld says “Bob Keating has left the ODP. The ODP now has one part time (3 hrs a week) working on it. That employee is due to leave the company within the month.” and also points out comments by AOL’s director of search “AOL will not put one dime into the ODP”.

It is sad if it happens and hope the biggest open directory on earth continue to exist for a long time to come.

Here is the link to that post ODP On Verge of Collapse?

This is an excellent article on the importance of landing pages when driving new traffic to your sites. 

“Conversions more than doubled, rising to 0.7%. “We were like, ‘Oh, we got something here.’ We lose fewer people by getting them immediately to where they want to go,” he says. “But the registration page was built as a segue from the home page. It wasn’t optimized to let people know what we were.”

Marketing Sherpa Article

As of today it has been 64 days since the last recorded Page Rank update on the Toolbar. This is the longest recorded time between updates ever!

Since 2000 there have been 49 recorded updates, the longest between them before now was 61 days. Click Here to see a full list of every recorded PR update.

As you can all see TextLinkBrokers.com has launched its 5th version of the site! We hope all of you find it easier to navigate and use.

Everyone is welcome to leave feedback on the new site design and functions at our forum.

Google Guy has stated that Google recognizes the ‘if modified since’ header & encourages webmasters to use it. Here’s the webmasterworld post by Google Guy.

Leaving it out can lead to crawling problems.

Here is a forum thread worth reading.

And here is a great tutorial on HTTP status codes.

And here is what Google’s guidelines have to say.

This interview with Google’s Craig Silverstein is old but still worth reading.

My favorite quote:

“The point of view that PageRank is dead is kind of a very static view of the world. It will always continue to be a part of our ranking scheme but, over time, as we develop new ideas on how to do ranking, as we tweak existing ideas, as we think about new ways to have them play together--the role of any one of the techniques that we use will obviously change.”

What is the definition of SPAM

SITES POSITIONED ABOVE MINE

This Keyword Directory must have been a lot of work to compile. Its nice of Aleksika to offer it for free.

This is a nice study by gorank.com that merits reading. Read Article

Greetings everyone. This is Robert starting off the new Textlinkbrokers blog. We intend this to be a place to share SEO news, new developments in the field, and anything else our visitors would find interesting. Check back often & we’ll try to have something new for you whenever you return. Our role models for this blog are http://www.seobook.com and http://www.seroundtable.com - fantastic sites we visit every day because there’s always something great to read there.