Link Exchange Service Network

Early this morning, Google Fellow Amit Singhal was interviewed by Danny Sullivan at Chris Sherman on stage at SMX London, the sister conference of Search Engine Land. Singhal discussed a variety of Google search-related topics.

We were hoping to get a some in depth discussion about Google’s recent Penguin update, but apparently that wasn’t a major point of conversation. Daniel Waisberg liveblogged the discussion at Search Engine Land, and Penguin only came up briefly. Here’s the relevant snippet of the liveblog:

Danny talks about Penguin and asks how it is going from Google standpoint, are search results better? Amit says that in the end of the day, users will stay with the search engine that provides the most relevant results. Google’s objective was to reward high quality sites and that was a success with Penguin. One of the beauties of running a search engine is that the search engines that can measure best what the users feel is the one that will succeed more.

From Google’s perspective they use any signal that is available for them, more than 200 of them. They have to make sure they are accurate and good. They will use any signal, whether it is organic or not.

Google’s Matt Cutts also recently said that Google has considered Penguin a success, though plenty out there disagree.

If you want Google’s advice on Penguin recovery, check out these videos Matt Cutts says to watch, these tips he endorsed on Twitter, and of course Google’s quality guidelines.

Google has clearly placed a lot of focus on freshness in recent months, and that continues with the company’s big list of algorithm changes for the month of April. It will be interesting to see if there is a noticeable improvement in results following these changes.

Have you notices freshness-related improvements yet? Let us know in the comments.

Here are the changes Google listed today for the month of April, related to freshness:

• Smoother ranking changes for fresh results. [launch codename "sep", project codename "Freshness"] We want to help you find the freshest results, particularly for searches with important new web content, such as breaking news topics. We try to promote content that appears to be fresh. This change applies a more granular classifier, leading to more nuanced changes in ranking based on freshness.
• Improvement in a freshness signal. [launch codename "citron", project codename "Freshness"] This change is a minor improvement to one of the freshness signals which helps to better identify fresh documents.
• No freshness boost for low-quality content. [launch codename “NoRot”, project codename “Freshness”] We have modified a classifier we use to promote fresh content to exclude fresh content identified as particularly low-quality.
• UI improvements for breaking news topics. [launch codename "Smoothie", project codename "Smoothie"] We’ve improved the user interface for news results when you’re searching for a breaking news topic. You’ll often see a large image thumbnail alongside two fresh news results.
• No freshness boost for low quality sites. [launch codename “NoRot”, project codename “Freshness”] We’ve modified a classifier we use to promote fresh content to exclude sites identified as particularly low-quality.

Notice that two of those are pretty much identical. Not sure if that is a mistake or if there is a subtle difference. That is the two about no freshness boosts for low quality. One of them says “content” and the other says “sites”, but the descriptions are the same.

Either way, it’s a noteworthy change, and it will be interesting to see if there is a clear impact.

As I’ve written about recently, I have found freshness to be outweighing relevancy in results sometimes, but I don’t necessarily think it’s been in relation to actual poor quality content – just when an older result makes more sense than a newer result, even if the newer one is high quality too.

Image: Parents Just Don’t Understand (via Fade Theory)

As the Web progresses, so does the refinement of the top search engines and the algorithms they utilize to ascertain important content in cyberspace. Relevant is the key word here, which means valuable to the searcher and the most likely to be exactly what they are searching for. Rolling into 2012, search engines such as Yahoo have begun to understand that keyword matching is only an aspect of the formula to determine relevancy, and that the value and the authority level of the web page is turning into a larger determinant of search relevancy.

That brings us to your link building approach as a webmaster, small business owner, or online entrepreneur as we commence 2012. The following five link building suggestions get you the backlinks and relevance you will certainly need this year:

1. Multiple, Applicable Links

All of us want a million backlinks to our blogs, and trust me, with a little bit of cash, you can get them. There are lots of linkbuilding deals at Fiverr.com and sites such as The Hoist that will sell you literally hundreds of links. Trouble is, Google is looking for quality which means pages linking to yours must be complementary, in the same market space, and in some way associated to your content. Your landing page should somehow be an offshoot of the ideas presented on the linking site. If that site has to do with gourmet foods and your page is addressed to unwed parents, that sort of link will likely not help you a great deal and in fact can harm your Google rank.

So just how can you get them?

* Get in touch with site owners wanting to swap links for starters, usually done in a resources page. This is still a strong technique and has been around for years.

* Leave blog remarks on posts with the same material as yours, specifically authority sites (more on this later).

* Distribute your original articles for publishing on news and blog sites that are a normal match to yours.

* Post relevant links to your website on social media portals like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The best are links to blog columns or landing pages relevant to Twitter trends or hash-tag lists and LinkedIn discussion groups.

2. Neighbors Like You

The world of online search is going local and is placing more and more focus on local sites. Even if your company is not constricted to where you reside (like an online SEO website that may be able to work for clients globally), it is more useful than ever before for local companies to be linking to yours. Socialize in your Chamber of Commerce and encourage link exchange, keeping in mind that the more similar these companies are to yours (and they’re local), the better off you are. If your SEO establishment is in San Diego, encourage your local links to say “SEO San Diego” to ensure your link is pertinent to their audience.

3. Submit Your Work

There are two primary kinds of authority sites in the internet world: big, highly trafficked, content specific sites (consider Inc.com, Wall Street Journal), and educational and governmental sites. Search engines are still giving lots of credit to university .edu sites and .gov pages, especially the federal government (who knew).

The major ways to obtain backlinks from these sites are to provide valuable, one-of-a-kind content in the form of articles or to post comments to content already on these websites. If you’re lucky enough to hand in great content and get yourself published on a high-authority content site, that is worth its weight in gold to your link building efforts.

Don’t throw away your time with auto-posting, scraping applications that are going to write nonsense responses for you. They’ll post, but in most instances will be deleted in the monitoring of the site. You can browse the web and find listings of good PR .edu and .gov websites (ones with a PR of 4, 5, 6, 7) that allow for forum postings with backlinks. Buyer beware and regularly test the domains, applying PR Checker.

4. Anchor Text Strategy

This is one thing you can most easily control using Article Marketing tactics, where you submit content for syndication and publication on high ranking sites. The actual words in your hyperlink, called anchor text, have to be pertinent to both the page on the site that is featuring your work and also to the destination website that the link goes to. That means that, if you are linking “click here,” you’re skipping half the benefit of this linking technique.

So how does this work? Going back to our example of the gourmet cooking site, you publish an article on that blog about your favorite ways to use cooking sherry, then throughout the body of the article you link your red wine reduction recipe to, you guessed it, a webpage that consists of exactly that. Give that guy a prize!

5. Landing Pages

We just talked about how your landing pages ought to be pertinent to the link. You ought to also be linking to various pages on your website, commonly referred to as deep links, and not only your homepage. This method ought to be easy if your website is structured properly with a product page for each product and an article for each idea you may be linking to. This informs the search engines that your domain is material rich on numerous pages, and that is vital to you earning the relevance trophy.

Is doing these things simple? Nope, but that’s exactly the point. You are doing it the right way, and that practice will reward link builders in 2012.

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Karl Walinskas is the CEO of Smart Company Growth, a business development firm that helps small to mid-size professional service firms build competitive advantage in an online world of sameness. His Smart Blog covers leadership, business communication, sales & service, online marketing and virtual business, and was recently named by Buyerzone as one of the Top 20 Business Blogs of 2011. He is the author of Getting Connected Through Exceptional Leadership, has been a featured expert for Inc.com with articles published in Selling Power, America Online, and SiteProNews to name a few, and blogs frequently for Rank My Website, a top San Diego SEO Services firm.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

5 Key Link Building Tactics in 2012 — A SPN Exclusive Article