Building Mailing Lists, List Building, Social Media, Niche Marketing

Google Doesn’t Care if You USED to Get Links

You may have gotten some good links in the past, but don’t count on them helping you forever. Old links go stale in the eyes of Google.

Do you still get links to old content? Tell us why you think that is.

Google’s Matt Cutts responded to a user-submitted question asking if Google removes PageRank coming from links on pages that no longer exist (for example, GeoCities pages that have been shut down). The answer to this question is unsurprisingly yes, but Cutts makes a statement within his response that may not be so obvious to everybody.

“In order to prevent things from becoming stale, we tend to use the current link graph, rather than a link graph of all of time,” he says. (Emphasis added)

Now, this isn’t exactly news, and to the seasoned search professional, probably not much of a revelation. However, to the average business owner looking to improve search engine performance (and not necessarily adapting to theever-changing ways of SEO), it could be something that really hasn’t resonated. Businesses have always been told about the power of links, but even if you got a lot of significant links a year or two ago, that doesn’t mean your content will continue to perform well based on that.  WebProNews has discussed the value of “link velocity” and Google’s need for freshness in the past:

Link velocity refers to the speed at which new links to a webpage are formed, and by this term we may gain some new and vital insight. Historically, great bursts of new links to a specific page has been considered a red flag, the quickest way to identify a spammer trying to manipulate the results by creating the appearance of user trust. This led to Google’s famous assaults on link farms and paid link directories.

But the Web has changed, become more of a live Web than a static document Web. We have the advent of social bookmarking, embedded videos, links, buttons, and badges, social networks, real-time networks like Twitter and Friendfeed. Certainly the age of a website is still an indication of success and trustworthiness, but in an environment of live, real time updating, the age of a link as well as the slowing velocity of incoming links may be indicators of stale content in a world that values freshness.

Do you think link freshness should play a role in search engine rankings? Let Chris and WebProNews know.

So how do you keep getting “fresh” links?

If you want fresh links, there are a number of things you can do. For one, keep putting out content. Write content that has staying power. You can link to your old content when appropriate. Always promote the sharing of your content. Include buttons to make it easy for people to share your content on their social network of choice. You may want to make sure your old content is presented in the same template as your new content so it has the same sharing features. People still may find their way to that old content, and they may want to share it if encouraged.

Go back over old content, and look for stuff that is still relevant. You can update stories with new posts adding a fresher take, linking to the original. Encourage readers to follow the link and read the original article, which they may then link to themselves.

Leave commenting on for ongoing discussion. This can keep an old post relevant. Just because you wrote an article a year ago, does not mean that people will still not add to it, and sometimes people will link to articles based on comments that are left.

Share old posts through social networks if they are still about relevant topics. You don’t want to just start flooding your Twitter account with tweets to all of your old content, but if you have an older article that is relevant to a current discussion, you may share it, as your take on the subject. A follower who has not seen it before, or perhaps has forgotten about it, may find it worth linking to themselves. Can you think of other ways to get more link value out of old content?

Do you get fresh links for old content? Why do you think that is? Share your thoughts with WebProNews.

Related Articles:

> Google’s Treatment of Twitter and Facebook Links
> How Press Releases Can Be Great For Search
> Link Building for Bing Rankings: Dos and Don’ts

About the author:
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003. Follow WebProNews on Facebook or Twitter. Twitter: @CCrum237

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SEO is a race. And in any race learning from your competitors makes you a better runner. Even when you’re running first it’s sometimes good to look back and check the runner-ups. And if you’re not the yellow jersey guy, you absolutely should examine the leaders: their gear, their training, their strategy. In SEO the most interesting thing about your competition are their links.

Whether you like it or not SEO is still pretty much about links. Good link profile can make up for almost any lack of optimized content and other onpage flaws. Love or hate, the best thing you can do about it is embrace the fact and run with it.

So let’s go through some tricks that will enable you to look deeper into your competition’s link profile granting you access to the restricted areas: their locker room, dirty laundry and even the briefing hall where they plan their link building strategies.

Let’s Talk Competitive Link Research

Finding out where your competitors’ links come from is not all that hard. You just go to Yahoo! or Google and type in link:www.your-competitor.com to get a list of inbound links to the site.

Yahoo’s much better in that respect as it tends to give more extensive and accurate data. The problem here is that there’s a limit of 1,000 links per website which is often not enough as the fattest link sources get left behind the limit fence. Here’re some tips to break through to the other side.

Note: If you’re lazy like me skip to the end of the article where I’ll share a tool that does it all much quicker.

Trick 1: Search for Links to Particular Web Pages of a Competing Site

Alongside with link:www.your-competitor.com search for

link:www.your-competitor.com/products.html or
link:www.your-competitor.com/services.html

and so on.

Trick 2: Exclude Internal Links

You may examine the internal linking structure of your competition if you want to gain some insight on their navigation and marketing steps. But as we want to find more external links, let’s exclude the internal ones.

You can do this by adding -site:site.com operator to your search query. Type in:

link:http://www.your-competitor.com -site:your-competitor.com or
linkdomain:www.your-competitor.com -site:your-competitor.com

and you’ll get a list of external backlinks only.

There’s a dropdown option in Yahoo! site explorer that does the same.

Trick 3: Exclude Links Coming from Certain Domains

The -site: modifier lets you exclude links coming from specific sites. So, whenever you see a large chunk of links coming from the same domain add -site:thisdomain.com modifier to your query and the links from this site will get replaced with new ones.

You can add -site: multiple times in one query so that you have something like this:

link:http://www.cnn.com -site:cnn.com -site:en.wikipedia.org

Trick 4: Check Links Coming from Certain TLDs

This is a little known trick. The site: modifier actually lets you get a list of links coming from domains with certain TLDs: .com, .org, .edu, .co.uk and so on. Just type in

link:http://www.your-competitor.com site:.gov or
linkdomain:www.your-competitor.com site:.gov

and you’ll get a list of .gov sites linking to your rival.

Note: Do this in Yahoo! regular search, not site explorer

Trick 5: Exclude Links Coming from Certain TLDs

This is an even lesser known trick. You can exclude certain TLDs from the results with the -site:.tld modifier. Usually the biggest chunk of links comes from .com’s so add a -site.com modifier and you’ll get lots of new link data.

Trick 6: Use Different Combinations of the First 5 Tricks

Try link:http://www.your-competitor.com/page.html -site:your-competitor.com -site:.com
Or link:http://www.your-competitor.com site:.org -site:wikipedia.org

Give it a thought and I’m sure you’ll come up with lots of your own. Feel free to share your findings in the comments.

Trick 7: Use the Above 6 Tricks in Different Search Engines
Don’t limit your searches to Yahoo! and Google, go to AltaVista, Alexa, (Bing doesn’t give you link data, so forget about it) but then there’re Exalead, Excite and tons of regional search engines. Search them, remove the duplicates and you’ll have a goooooooooooooooogol of competitor’s links to study.

Note: Some search engines have a different set of operators so you’ll need to type domain: instead of link:.

Getting It All Done Fast

This sure seems like a lot of work and it is. Moreover, getting the links list is only the beginning and the easy part of competitive link research. Once you get the list you need to analyze each link, weed out poor quality sites and only leave the ones you can get a link from. Now THAT’s a lot of work.

I’m too lazy to do this all by hand, besides I value my time too much to waste it on such kind of work. That’s why I use SEO SpyGlass an advanced link analysis tool that employs all the tricks described in this article (plus some more advanced ones I don’t even know) to get up to 25,000 links per domain, which is much, much more than any other tool can get.

SEO SpyGlass also finds all the data I need to analyze the links:

    • Google PR of the domain and linking page
    • The URL and title of the linking page
    • The anchor text and description
    • Whether the link is still on the page (sometimes the link gets removed but search engines will
       think it’s there till they reindex the page).
    • Whether the link is no-follow or dofollow
    • How many other links are on the page
    • How much link value the link passes
    • And some other data like TLDs, domain age, country, etc.

If you want to do competitive link research seriously, I’d strongly recommend trying SEO SpyGlass out. And of course you can always use my tricks whenever you want to run a quick background check on that new guy on your block.

Note: This article first appeared on Site-Reference.com

About The Author
Get more link building advice and SEO software to help you implement it. Richard Gilmore is an Internet marketer, freelance SEO, author and addicted guitar player.

 
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What is a canonical page? Why specify a canonical page?
A canonical page is the preferred version of a set of pages with highly similar content.

 
It’s common for a site to have several pages listing the same set of products. For example, one page might display products sorted in alphabetical order, while other pages display the same products listed by price or by rating. For example:

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&trackingid=1234567&sort=alpha&sessionid=5678asfasdfasfd

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&trackingid=1234567&sort=price&sessionid=5678asfasdfasfd

If Google knows that these pages have the same content, we may index only one version for our search results. Our algorithms select the page we think best answers the user’s query. Now, however, users can specify a canonical page to search engines by adding a <link> element with the attribute rel=”canonical” to the <head> section of the non-canonical version of the page. Adding this link and attribute lets site owners identify sets of identical content and suggest to Google: “Of all these pages with identical content, this page is the most useful. Please prioritize it in search results.”

How do I specify a canonical page?
To specify a canonical link to the page http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish, create a <link> element as follows:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish"/>

 
Copy this link into the <head> section of all non-canonical versions of the page, such as http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&sort=price.
If you publish content on both http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish and https://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish, you can specify the canonical version of the page. Create the <link> element:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish"/>

Add this link to the <head> section of https://www.example.comproduct.php?item=swedish-fish.

Is rel=”canonical” a suggestion or a directive?
This new option lets site owners suggest the version of a page that Google should treat as canonical. Google will take this into account, in conjunction with other signals, when determining which URL sets contain identical content, and calculating the most relevant of these pages to display in search results.

Can the link be relative or absolute?
The rel=”canonical” attribute can be used with relative or absolute links, but we recommend using absolute links to minimize potential confusion or difficulties. If your document specifies a base link, any relative links will be relative to that base link.

Must the content on a set of pages be similar to the content on the canonical version?
Yes. The rel=”canonical” attribute should be used only to specify the preferred version of many pages with identical content (although minor differences, such as sort order, are okay).

For instance, if a site has a set of pages for the same model of dance shoe, each varying only by the color of the shoe pictured, it may make sense to set the page highlighting the most popular color as the canonical version so that Google may be more likely to show that page in search results. However, rel=”canonical” would not be appropriate if that same site simply wanted a gel insole page to rank higher than the shoe page.

What happens if rel=”canonical” points to a non-existent page? Or if more than one page in a set is specified as the canonical version?
We’ll do our best to algorithmically determine an appropriate canonical page, just as we’ve done in the past.

Can Google follow a chain of rel=”canonical” designations?
Yes, to some extent, but to ensure optimal canonicalization, we strongly recommend that you update links to point to a single canonical page.

Can rel=”canonical” be used to suggest a canonical url on a completely different domain?
No. To migrate to a completely different domain, permanent (301) redirects are more appropriate. Google currently will take canonicalization suggestions into account across subdomains (or within a domain), but not across domains. So site owners can specify a canonical page on www.example.com from a set of pages on example.com or help.example.com, but not on example-widgets.com.

About This Article:
This article is from Google Webmaster Tools / site management – “About rel=”canonical” – Webmasters/Site owners Help” – Explained by Matt Cutts

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Here is something that I just saw on a website called Screenr (excellent site, works with Twitter and a must see itself …).

Here is a short video tutorial on a way to shorten your own domain URLs yourself without using a URL shorting service.

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