What Exactly is PageRank?

PageRank is an algorithm invented by the founders of Google that assigns an “importance” rating to every page that it indexes. It is on a logarithmic scale from 0-10. This means that each of the 11 ratings is 10 times higher than the previous one. For example, PR 4 is ten times higher than PR 3. PR 8 is 100 times higher than PR 6.

Essentially, pages with a higher PR are more important, or more specifically, more popular, than pages with a lower PR.

What Determines PageRank?

When Google crawls a hyperlink, it counts it as a “vote” for the destination page from the source page. By linking to that page, the source page is saying “I endorse this website. It is good.” Importantly, however, each vote is weighted, so all votes are not equal. What makes a vote worth more? A higher PR of the source page of course. So pages with a higher PR have more influence in boosting the PR of other pages with a lower PR. So it is not just the quantity of links that influences PR, it is the quality of those links too.

Is all this confusing? It can be if you are unfamiliar with the concept. Let’s look at it with an illustration.

Example PageRank illustration

In this illustration the coloured circles represent pages on different websites. The numbers inside represent the PageRank of that page. The arrow represents a hyperlink. You can see that site A has 6 inbound links with a PR of 3, while site B has only 4 inbound links and a PR of 4. This is because the sites that link to site B have higher PRs themselves. They are more authoratative in the eyes of Google, therefore their links are more important.

Why is There Such A Buzz About PageRank?

We use more than 200 signals, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important

Google say it themselves, they use more than 200 factors to rank a page in the search results and PageRank is just one of them. So why do people focus on PageRank so much rather than the other factors? In my opinion there are two main reasons.

The first is that simply, PageRank used to be the most important factor. It may still be the biggest factor, but it certainly isn’t as important as it used to be.

Secondly, is that PageRank is the only factor that can be quantified. Sure, the data we get from Google can be anything up to three months out of date, but it is the only data we have. Google may use 200 different factors to rank a website, but we don’t know what these factors are or how Google ranks our sites according to these factors.

Where Do I Find My PageRank?

There are a many tools out there on the Internet that give you the PageRank of your chosen page. A quick search will help you find one. You can also get the PageRank of a page by installing the Google Toolbar. You will see a little green bar that indicates the PageRank of the current page. You can hover over it to see the value.

Both of these methods use the same source so should give you the same result. Bear in mind that the data is only refreshed a few times each year, and the data you see can be up to three months old. When Google puts its data together to determine the search result listings, it works with its current, up to date information. We webmasters have no way of getting this fresh data, so have to rely on the old, stale data that Google gives us.

Incidentally, if you want to know when Google updates its Toolbar PageRank, Matt Cutts, a gGoogle engineer, usually posts confirmation on his blog or on Twitter. Subscribing to his blog and following hime on Twitter would be very advisable if you are keen on tracking your own PageRank.

In Summary

PageRank is a useful metric in establishing how popular a website is, but it is not the only thing that matters. Keep in mind that it is just one of over 200 factors that Google uses to rank your web pages.

After reading through it I have to say that it is an excellent introductory guide to the basics of SEO. It would very firmly go on my new webmaster reading list. It is clearly designed for the beginner, but as an experienced web developer even I appreciate a run through of the basics every now and again to refresh me. It runs through all of the advice using a fictional baseball card collector’s website as an example.

Some of the key advice given in the document includes:

• Create unique, accurate page titles
• Make use of the “description” meta tag
• Improve the structure of your URLs
• Make your site easier to navigate
• Offer quality content and services
• Write better anchor text
• Use heading tags appropriately
• Optimize your use of images
• Make effective use of robots.txt
• Be aware of rel=”nofollow” for links
• Promote your website in the right ways
• Make use of free webmaster tools
• Take advantage of web analytics services

All of these topics are wrapped up nicely into a 22 page pdf file.

Reading More Into Google’s Advice

Despite being aimed at beginners, there are a few little nuggets of information that the more experienced developer might be interested in.

The first that caught my eye was Google advice to “take advantage of” an image’s filename. I have never really thought of how Google indexes images, but it seems from this advice that the filename plays at least some part in this.

There is also confirmation of things we already suspected about Google, but weren’t completely certain, such as Google love affair with the blog (“Blog about new content or services”) and how important it is to have your site registered for local search (“Add your business to Google’s Local Business Center”).

So the guide is not just useful for the beginner, it is a recommended read for everybody.

Take a look at the example below for this website:

Google Webmaster Tools Error Details

You can find the information in Webmaster Tools by clicking on Diagnostics > Web Crawl > Not Found. This screen will tell you how many people link to each non-existant page. If you click the figure, it will list all the URLs that link to each page. As with a lot of the data available in Webmaster Tools, you can also download it.

Redirecting from these non-existant URLs to ones that do exist is a great way of boosting the number of inbound links to your website. Links that point to non-existant pages will not help you rank in the search engines. Using a 301 redirect to point these links to a real page will help your rankings. Matt Cutts describes these as “free links to your site.”

Previously, it was very difficult to find the sites that linked to non-existant pages. This is a great addition to the webmaster tool collection and will become a very valuable resource for webmasters to increase the number of links to their site.

Advanced Yahoo Search Operators

Search engines are incredibly advanced pieces of software. The basic interface that we see and the speed at which they work often makes us forget that. Since search engine databases hold such vast quantities of information that they put in place special features that allow you to refine what you search for. These “operators” are very useful when optimising your website for the search engines.

Yahoo is probably the most popular place to get accurate information on which websites link where. The information on Google is very unreliable, as is MSN/Live. Yahoo’s Site Explorer also gives us a goldmine of useful linking information.

This article will help you to use the advanced search operators in Yahoo Search to optimise and analyse the links to and from your website as well as those to and from your competitors websites.

Why Do I Need To Analyse My Competitors’ Links?

If you find a useful, relevant and popular website that links to one of your competitors, you need to ask yourself “why is this site not linking to me?“

It is also useful to find out which “power” sites are linking to you. Sites such .edu and .gov sites are widely regarded as more important to search engines and it’s easy to find where these sites link to. (Note: it is not the actual .edu and .gov extensions that make a site more authorative. Sites like these simply tend to among the more established and linked-to sites on the Web) Perhaps you want to find out which .info sites are linking to you with spammy keywords.

Important note. When Yahoo returns results in its regular listings and in Site Explorer it lists nofollowed links along with followed links and doesn’t differentiate between them. You will have to check the links manually or use a special tool to check if the links are followed or not.

What Operators Can I Use?

Let’s get started on the actual operators themselves.

Link:

Use link: to find documents that link to a particular URL. Link: requires you to use a full domain including http://.

Example: link:http://search.example.com/

This operator will find any page that links the specified page. The example above will match http://search.example.com only. It will not match links to http://www.example.com, http://search.example.com/blog or http://help.search.example.com.

When you use the link: operator you need to be careful when choosing to use www or not in the domain. If you look for links to http://example.com, a page that links to http://www.example.com will not be returned unless the webmaster has set up a redirect, which many of them do.

Linkdomain:

Use linkdomain: to find pages that link to any URL on that domain and on any subdomains.

Example: linkdomain:example.com

This will match pages that link to http://example.com, http://www.example.com, http://search.example.com and http://search.example.com/blog.

Important note. When you do a search using link: or linkdomain: you will be redirected to Yahoo Site Explorer. Although this is a great tool, often you don’t want to be redirected. To avoid this happening, simply add one of the other search operators or some search text to your query.

Site:

Use site: your search to a particular domain and all its subdomains. Whereas link: and linkdomain: were looking for links to a site, the site: operator is conducting a search within a particular domain. For this reason, you need to use additional operators to your query or add some search text. If you just use site:example.com by itself you will be redirected to Yahoo Site Explorer.

Example: site:example.com horse.

This will search the domain example.com for the phrase “horse.” It will also match results on search.example.com and help.search.example.com.

Example: site: search.example.com horse.

This will match results on search.example.com and help.search.example.com but NOT example.com.

Hostname:

Use hostname: to find all documents from a particular host. It won’t search the subdomains of this host.

Example: hostname:example.com horse.

This will find results for the query “horse” from example.com. It won’t search blog.example.com.

Example: hostname: search.example.com horse.

This will only find results from that particular subdomain. It won’t find results from example.com or help.search.example.com.

Url:

Use url: to find a specific document in Yahoo’s search index. This operator does not search a domain, it simply locates the page and provides a link to it. It is useful to determine if a specific page is indexed.

Example: url:http://www.example.com.

The full URL is required. In the above example url:www.example.com would not match any results. With this operator you need to be careful about whether you include www or not. This is one of the reasons why webmasters are encouraged to make a site with or without www resolve to the same page.

Inurl:

Use inurl: to search the actual URLs in the search index for the search terms.

Example: inurl:horse.

The example above will return any page with the term “horse” in the URL. The search term will be highlighted in the results. You can use inurl: in isolation without any other operators or search terms.

Intitle:

This operator will search the page titles for the search terms.

Example: intitle:horse.

The example above will return any page with the term “horse” in the http://newwebmasters.net/link-building/40-quality-website-promotion-tips/ http://newwebmasters.net/link-building/40-quality-website-promotion-tips/#comments Mon, 01 Sep 2008 17:36:38 +0000 corbyboy http://newwebmasters.net/?p=247

Boost your rankings

Here are some of the newer website promotion tips that I have come across recently. Some you may have heard of but there are plenty of good ones here. There is no rehashing of old ideas here so you won’t find advice such as “submit to article directories.”

They are roughly grouped into categories.

Smart Blogging

1. Tag your blog content. This is particularly effective in getting your fresh content on the Technorati tag pages, which are frequently spidered by the search engines. With Wordpress, you can just use the built in tag system.
2. Post comments on other blogs. A lot of blogs list the top commenters on their sidebar. This potentially means a link on every page of the blog. Take a look at the image on the right which shows how Google Webmaster Tools reports these links.


Links on many pages from a single blog comment

3. Start your own blog on eBay – Any links you add are followed by the search engines. See my attempt at the New Webmasters eBay blog. People seem to spam these blogs quite a lot so somebody must be reading them.
4. Blog on Yahoo! 360. Links are followed by search engines. See my New Webmasters Yahoo! 360 Blog

Offer Something in Return

5. Run competitions and offer prizes. There are plenty of sites you can list your contest on:
   • Contest Blogger
   • My Blog Contest
   • Contest Beat

Become Part of a Community

6. Create a Squidoo page on your authority topic. Link to other resources as well as your own site. These links don’t pass ranking authority but the interest it generates may lead to other natural links.
7. Post on forums. Use a signature on your posts too. Make sure they are within the guidance set out by the forum and that they only contain a couple of links. Although they may not be authorative in the search engines you can generate a lot of visitors by regularly posting and ensuring people see you link. It is also best to focus on a few forums that you post on regularly where you can get a reputation and people will become interested in what you have to say. It is especially useful if the subject of the forums matches the subject of your website.
8. Don’t be afraid to have controversial opinions. If you disagree with people let them know (in a nice way). You may even stir up trouble and this will cause people to link to you. Use this with caution.

Link Out Appropriately

9. Link to other sites from your blog. It usually creates a trackback on the linked-to blog. Although these are usually no-follow, the interest they can generate is worth it.
10. Embed videos from YouTube. If you are one of the top five referrers they will link you. It is a no follow link but still useful as people may follow it to see how the content is being used.
11. Link between your own websites. This is especially useful if you have a “hub” website. Link from this hub to all the other sites in your network. Don’t do straight forward reciprocal linking, espcially if the sites share an IP address.
12. Reciprocal link exchanges. These are fine so long as you don’t overdo them. They must be highly focused on the same subject as your website. Put them within the content so they look as natural as possible and make sure the link to your site is treated the same. Avoid putting links on a seperate “links” page.

Stay Ahead of the Competition

13. Jump onto new topics early. The first people to post reviews and tutorials for Adobe AIR were given free books and lots of exposure on the Adobe website
14. Interview a prominent blogger or webmaster. Get them to link the interview from their website
15. Analyse who links to your competitors. See if there is a way you can share some of those links. Use the search term “linkdomain:competitor.com” in Yahoo!
16. Don’t forget offline promotion. Try business cards, flyers and even pencils with your URL on them. Maybe even put your URL on a sticker and put it on your car or front door of your house.
17. Make it easy for people to link back to you. If you sell a product, add a note on the transaction receipt that asks people to link back to you if they are happy. Cheeky? Yes, but can be highly effective.

Sponsorship and Affiliation

18. Review a service provider or product. Ask them to link to the review on their testimonials page
19. Ask your business partners to link to your site
20. Find out who has linked to your site in the past and then contact them directly in the future with upcoming stories or exclusives
21. Sponsor a local or national event to get a link from the website or printed on flyers
22. Make a donation to open source project with a supporters page
23. Make a donation of US$1000 or more to the W3C and get your link on their supporters page for a year. The page is not followed by search engines and is basically just a spam farm, but it might be worth it for the visitors.


W3C Supporters page spam

24. If you produce a website or do some design work for somebody ask for a link back in exchange for a discount.
25. If you sell a product launch an affiliate program. As well as people linking to your website with their affiliate link, this may increase your overall exposure as people will be promoting your product for you

Submit to the Right Sites

26. Exchange reviews on Review Back
27. Submit to Killer Startups
28. Submit to I Am Bored
29. If your site offers a significant feature submit it to an appropriate niche site. For example if it is W3C standards compliant submit it to W3C Sites. If it has a beautiful CSS design submit it to CSS Vault

Create Loveable Content

30. Create likeable content for the social media people. Titles such as “Top 10 ways to …..”, “10 myths about ……” do well. These types of article are heavily linked to and do well on Digg. You can also submit your lists to List Universe
31. Create a “guru list.” List the top experts on a particular subject. You can even rank them if you wish. People love to be flattered and many will want to link from their website if you are saying nice things about them
32. Create exhaustive lists on a specific topic. Articles such as “101 Grungy Photoshop Templates” and “50 Essential iPhone Apps” are good examples.
33. Make sure grammar is checked and spelling is correct. Otherwise it looks sloppy
34. Build Tutorials and submit to the appropriate directory sites. This is particularly effective with Photoshop tutorials or web development articles.
35. Create themes or plugins. Create addons for content management systems such as Wordpress or Joomla and submit them to the appropriate sites. There is a good article on Link Rain about how to promote your Wordpress theme. Remember to include your link at the bottom with some good keywords.
36. Widgetbait. Create widgets such as surveys, IQ tests or games. People can add them to their site and link back to you. You can also do this for Facebook or Myspace. Some good examples are the Flixster movie quizzes on Facebook or the McLovin ID maker. Googles latest linking advice is that the keywords must be relevant and you can’t link to third party sites.
37. Create a collection of tools on a niche subject. SEOChat is a good example.
38. Create Wallpaper or screensavers. Embed with your company logo or URL on it and submit to the appropriate directories
39. Conduct surveys with easily to digest headline results. Headlines such as “80% of drivers hate personalised number plates,” or “cheddar voted Britain’s favourite cheese” are very linkable.

Use Social Media Effectively

40. Don’t bother with social media unless you are going to participate. Add friends and vote on their submissions and they are likely to return the favour. Stories don’t get to the front page of Digg just because they are good quality. There are a number of power users that heavily influence the popular stories.

Live Search keeps improving all the time

MSN has recently upgraded their Webmaster Center to provide additional tools. Previously they provided basically no information but now they provide some excellent tools and some great nuggets of information. We will look at them in this article.

Websites Overview

Overview of Live Webmaster Center

The first page you arrive at will list all the websites that you have previously registered. You can see the authentication code that must be present to use your site at Live Webmaster Center. You can also see whether you have verified the site by XML tag or by meta tag.

From this page you can also add a new website by clicking “Add a site.” Click the URL of the site you want to access.

Website Summary

Summary page for your chosen website

The next page gives the summary of all the information that Live has about your website. Some excellent statistics are listed here. You can see when was the last time the Live crawler accessed your website. You can also see how many pages are indexed and whether your website is blocked or not.

Live now lists an interesting metric called “Domain score.” This is how authoratative Live regards your website to be. It is rated from 0 to 5.

Underneath Site Status you can see the top five pages on your website. Presumably these are ordered by Page score. You can see the last time Live accessed each of these pages and whether they are blocked.

Website Profile

Website profile page

On this page you can give Live the address of your website sitemap. You can change how your website is verified. You can also add an email address so that you can be contacted if there are any crawl issues with your website.

Crawl Issues

View crawl issues with your website

On this page you can see any issues that were encountered when Live crawled your website. One of the most useful parts of this section is that you can filter the errors by subdomain or folder. According to Live’s help files filters can only be applied when 1,000 or more errors are found. In practice this doesn’t seem to be the case however.

You can lists pages that were not found (404 errors), pages that were blocked by robots.txt, pages that have long dynamic URLs and unsupported content types. The first 20 results will be listed here but you can download the first 1,000 in csv format.

Backlinks

Website backlink data

The backlink feature lists all the incoming links to your website. Only the first 20 results are displayed, but you can download the first 1,000.

Filtering to get Useful Data

The filtering tools in this section are very useful. First of all you can exclude all internal links. Type in your website domain into the filter box. Check the filter radio button and choose the “Exclude” option. This will now list all the external links to your website.

You can also filter the results by tld. For example you can list list all the .edu domains that link to your website. Check the filter radio button and type “.edu” into the filter box. Choose to “include” this extension.

Outbound Links

View outbound link data

This page lists all the websites that your site links to. As before only 20 pages are listed but you can download 1,000. These results can be filtered in the same way that the backlink data can.

Keywords Tool

View keyword performance

This is a mysterious tool that shows in which order pages are returned for a certain search term. The results do not give any indication at which number the pages appear in the search results, just in which order pages from your site are returned. The page score and last crawled date are also returned for each page. For the time being the real usefulness of this page is questionable.

After the lastest update, Live Webmaster Tools certainly is much more useful. It need some improvement, particularly in the keywords search section. The algorithm to determine page score also needs tweaking. Too many pages are being returned with page score five. Overall though, an excellent improvement.

Keep those robots at bay

As much as webmasters are desperate for search engine spiders to crawl their pages, there are often times when you want a page or section to be ignored. They might be non-content pages such as terms and conditions or a privacy policy. They could be test pages or just private pages that you don’t want to share.

This article will show you all the different ways to keep search engines away from your content. The most appropriate method to use for your own situation is up to you.

Robots.txt

The standard way of preventing search engines accessing a page is to block it using a robots.txt file. It goes in the the base directory of your website.

You use the following syntax:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /sessions/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

The * under User-agent means that the rules apply to all spiders. The Disallow rule lists the directories that should be excluded.

You can do other things with robots.txt:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

These rules in this example mean that Googlebot is allowed to access the entire site (note how there is nothing after Disallow). Every other user-agent is blocked. There are more advanced examples of how to build a robots.txt file at robotstxt.org.

There are two important things to remember about using robots.txt. The first is that a spider can ignore it. This is particularly true for robots harvesting email addresses or scraping your content. The second is that anybody can read the file. Don’t use robots.txt to hide secret information, as a quick glance at the file will tell you where all those secret directories are.

You should also be aware that even though search engines won’t spider the site, the URL can still appear in search engine result lists, especially if the page is linked to from another site.

META Tags

You can use meta tags to control how spiders index specific pages. They look something like this:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />

The options that you have concerning robots are:

• “index” – which tells the robot to index that page
• “noindex” – tells the robot to not index that page
• “follow” – the robot should follow all the links on that page
• “nofollow” – the robot should not spider any links from that page

The default is “index,follow” so if you want your page spidered and the links followed then you can omit the tag.

When using a meta tag to “noindex” a page you will not have the problem of the URL appearing in the search engine results. It will be completely omitted. Remember that a page that is not indexed will still be crawled and unless you have also specified “nofollow” in your tag, the links on that page will be spidered too.

Nofollow Links

You can use “nofollow” on a specific hyperlink to stop search engine spiders from following that link and crawling the page. It is supported by Google, Yahoo! and MSN/Live You use the following syntax:

<a href="http://example.com/page.html" rel="nofollow">Example.com</a>

This syntax was originally created due to the problem of comment spam on guestbooks and blogs. The original idea was that a site could be linked to without passing any PageRank or link influence.

While this method is useful to prevent a spider following a link to a page, remember that it only affects the specific hyperlink it is attached to. If another link without nofollow points to the same page then that link will be followed and the page will still be indexed.

Password protected pages

A common way to keep private pages secure is to protect them with a password. Since the page cannot be accessed without the proper credentials, search engine spiders cannot index the page. As with some of the other examples, the URL may still appear in search engine results if a link to the page is found.

The following code shows you how to protect a page with a username and password using PHP. It uses basic HTTP Authentication:

<?php
if (!isset($_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'])) {
    header('WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="My Realm"');
    header('HTTP/1.0 401 Unauthorized');
    echo 'Text to send if user hits Cancel button';
    exit;
} else {
    echo "Hello {$_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER']}.";
    echo "You entered {$_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_PW']} as your password.";
}
?>

To read more about authentication in PHP visit php.net

Offline Pages

It may seem simple but keeping your web pages offline is the perfect way to prevent them being indexed. Maybe they can be put on an intranet rather than fully online. If collaboration or viewing over the Internet is essential then this method isn’t suitable, but on many occasions it is.

Remove URLs From Search Index

Google and Yahoo! both have tools that allow you to remove specific URLs from their search index relatively quickly.

Google Webmaster Tools

If you have registered with Google Webmaster Tools then you can use this to remove a URL.

1. From the dashboard click the website that contains the URL.
2. Then click “Tools”, followed by “Remove URLs.” Google will give you some tips about getting your URL removed and keeping it like that.
3. The URL you want to remove should be blocked from further spidering. If you don’t ensure this then the page will simply be indexed again at some point in the future. Once you are certain this is the case, click “New Removal Request.”
4. You then choose what you want to remove. You can remove and individual URL, an entire directory, a whole site or the Google cached copy of a page. Make your selection and click “Next.”
5. Enter the URL to be removed and click “Submit Removal Request.”

Yahoo! Site Explorer

To use Yahoo! Site Explorer you need to verify your site.

1. From the Site Explorer homepage either search for the URL you want to remove or click “Explore” and locate it manually.
2. Click [Delete URL/Path] next to the URL you wish to remove. Any URLs below that particular folder will also be deleted.
3. You will be presented with a confirmation page which will list all pages to be removed. You can edit this list to keep certain URLs. Click “Update” to create a new list.
4. Click “Yes” to confirm your deletions.

A note on removing URLs with webmaster tools. Using Google and Yahoo’s webmaster tools requires you to verify your site. The deletions will only stay in effect as long as your site is verified. If at any point your site becomes unverified, your deleted URLs will return to the index.

Another important note. When you remove a URL, make sure it is blocked from further crawling via one of the other methods listed above. Otherwise your deleted URLs will be reindexed soon after they are removed.

Links are what make the web

Building quality, one way links to your website can be difficult, time consuming and frustrating. It is generally agreed that the best way to build links is to build them gradually over time, relying on natural links to your original, frequently updated content.

There are, however, a few shortcuts to building up links. They are not easy ways to make your site popular, nor are they guaranteed to work for everybody. They are simply some casual tips to help you obtain a few quality inbound links.

Submit Articles to Digg

Google absolutely loves Digg. The site is spidered very frequently and the domain has a lot of authority in terms of link building. Even stories with no diggs will still be spidered, so long as there is a navigational path for the spiders to use to reach it. Google cannot use the number of diggs as any sort of authority when ranking a URL, yet….

For the best long term effects only submit good quality articles to Digg. Or better yet, let your users submit the articles that they think are worthwhile. You will quickly get a reputation as a spammer if you keep posting unpopular content.

Other Social Networking sites

Submitting to social bookmarking and social networking sites can be hot and miss for some people.

Some social bookmarking sites such as Delicious and Twitter use “nofollow” on their links so they cannot influence rankings. Other sites, such as Furl, do not.

Having your links on a few social network profiles may also be useful in building up the number of links. For others it is simply not worth it. While some, such as Facebook, do use “nofollow” on their links, some do not. However, the weight that these links carry is relatively low, despite the authority these domains actually carry.

“Widgetbait”

“Widgetbait” is a term thrown around for an object that is added to a user’s website or blog. This item features a link back to the author’s website. If the object is installed on many thousands of websites, this results in many thousands of backlinks. The classic examples of widgetbait include online quizzes, IQ tests or horoscopes.

While these links are valuable to some, for others the quality of the link and the traffic it brings is just too low. If the text of the link bears no relation to the page in which it is contained, Google becomes suspicious. Additionally, the text that links back to the site must relate to the widget, and, the link must go back to the author’s website, not a third party site.

A classic example of spammy widgetbait would be an IQ test that features a text link to an online dating site. Google would soon hear of this and the sites involved, including the sites distributing the widget and the site being linked to would be penalised.

The Best Kind of WidgetBait: Just Build Something Useful

The best type of widgetbait is to simply create something that people want to use. Classic examples of this are Winamp Skins, modifications for forum software such as Invision Power Board and plugins or themes for Wordpress. Why are these good ideas? They will result in you being listed on the official website of each respective product. These sites are popular and the links they feature carry a lot of influence.

Find high PageRank Sites that allow Backlinks

This excellent tool from Seo Chat allows you to perform a web search and sort the results by PageRank. You can look for websites relevant to your content from which you may be able to get backlinks. Good examples include forums and blogs. Always ensure that these sites do not use “nofollow” on their links.

What About Directories?

Web directories used to be incredibly helpful in building up the number of incoming links to a website. The usefulness of directories is decreasing over time and many people question whether there is any worth in pursuing directory submissions at all. The two notable exceptions to this are the Open Directory Project and Yahoo! Directory. The following list outlines the main problems with using directories. Ultimately, it is up to you to decide if it is a strategy worth pursuing.

Does it Check the Quality and Topic of Submissions?

Any free-for-all web directory that has not been penalised by Google is just one site review away from being so. These are nothing more than spam farms. The directory’s editors should at least check the site to verify the given information and ensure the site is legitimate.

On a similar note, web directories should generally be targeted to a specific audience. Most general web directories that have no specific focus will not be of any use to you.

Can it Still Pass PageRank?

While PageRank is far from being the answer to every SEO question, it is still a useful indication as to how “useful” Google thinks a page is. Bear in mind that the most up to date Page Rank is at least a few months old. Use the following strategy to determine if a site has been penalised in Google:

1. Search for the website’s title in Google
2. Search for a large block of text from the site’s homepage
3. Search for the actual domain in Google

If the site doesn’t rank for one and two, but it does for number three, it has been penalised in Google and probably won’t be able to pass PageRank. If it does not rank for any of these steps, the site has probably not been indexed by Google.

Any directory that has been penalised by Google has done something against Google’s guidelines. Don’t associate your website with any directory like this. Google is seriously cracking down on paid links. Any spammy web directory, particularly those that charge for links, are in the firing line as far as being penalised by Google.

Does a Link on this Directory Actually Mean Anything?

Don’t submit to a directory just for a link. Make sure the link is worth your time. A link is not worth having if:

• The specific category pages are not indexed,
• There are too many links on a single page – having too many links on a single page with dilute down the ranking influence that is passed, or
• The directory has very little traffic to send to your website

If you decide to use a web directory, this article entitled 50 Page Rank 3 Or Higher Free Website Directories is a good resource. Just remember to assess the quality of the directory first.

Areas to Avoid

Two of the main places that people try to spam for backlinks are Yahoo! Answers and Wikipedia. Both of these sites use “nofollow” in their links. There is often misunderstanding and false information given about this, but it is true for both sites. If the situation ever changes or you need to verify it for yourself, simply look at the source code on each website. The new service from Google, Knol, also uses a nofollow meta tag to prevent any links being followed.