Should You Get That Link?
By Sujan Patel with No Comments
So you see a website on the internet, and immediately, you think to yourself “I want a link here”. I mean it’s a website – as long as it isn’t selling paid links, it has to pass some kind of juice or be of some value to you, right? Not really. Besides the standard evaluation practices, here are a few other tips to determining whether or not a link is worth acquiring.
Is there duplicate content on the page? Sometimes a page can appear natural but actual be full of torrid, useless duplicate content. Google tends to dislike websites with too much of this. It’s a good idea to grab a piece of text and search for it in Google to see if the site comes up first for the result. If it doesn’t, there’s good reason to not pursue acquiring a link – it may pass no value anyways, even if the website still ranks for its own domain name or title tag.
What’s the cache date? So you found a link page on a personal page on some random EDU site in the middle of nowhere. Try searching for it in Google. Is it even indexed? If it is, when’s the last time it’s been cached? If it’s a top or 2nd level page on the domain and it hasn’t been crawled in a long time, it’s a strong sign of the following things :
- The website owner no longer maintains the site.
- Google hates the site.
Based on all of these factors, it’s probably a waste of time to even send out a link begging e-mail now that you’ve gotten here. Your response rate is probably super low, and even if it gets posted, it’s probably of no value to you. Even if it is, you likely won’t get the benefit until months later, and it will only be incremental at best.
How does the MOZrank and PageRank match up? SEOMoz’s relatively new website valuation tool MOZRank is a good way to compare SEOMoz’s opinion to Google’s. If the MozRank SEOMoz gives is two or so points more than Google’s, there’s a good chance that the page has been devalued by Big Brother. It should never be the other way around, as SEOMoz does not penalize sites for their transgressions – it just views websites as poor based on standard link valuation policies.
A lot of link evaluation is gut feel and experience. While these tips won’t solve all of your link evaluation issues, they should help push you on the way to getting great, supportive juice to your website today.
SEO Success for the Not-So-Social Business
By Ross Hudgens with No Comments
Unfortunately, not every business website has the ability to spread virally. No matter how hard you try, creating true link bait for nails or rocks is a virtual impossibility. Link begging is unlikely to succeed because no blogger or webmaster feels your product brings value to their readers – after all, boring business products just aren’t their thing.
This doesn’t mean you’re left out in the cold. Every other business in your vertical has the exact same problem! Once you recognize this, you’ll find that success is definitely achievable – it’ll just take a slightly different route.
Perform in-depth, rigorous keyword research. Utilize every tool you can, such as Keyword Discovery, Ontology Tools, and Google’s Read More
Welcome to the New Single Grain Blog
By Ross Hudgens with No Comments
Single Grain is very excited about the redesign of our website and with it comes a new attitude, purpose, and excitement about the future. We are extremely excited about the current outlook for Single Grain, and we are especially excited about what that means for internet marketing, the clients we work with, and the people that read our blog.
After a slight lull in our blogging efforts in 2009, the Single Grain blog has a new purpose and dedicated staff devoted to giving you the best content and information in the internet marketing space. While the voice and long-term makeup of the blog have yet to be established, you can be certain that we will do our best to bring you all the entertainment and learning our brain matter can conjure up.
SEO Loves Content
By Sujan Patel with No Comments
Every SEO, when doing an initial evaluation, loves when he or she comes across great content. Sometimes, websites have other minor errors that prevent them from getting ranked well in the engines, but generally, one of the main things they lack is great, relevant content.
Content isn’t as simple as writing stuff on the page. Content means creating excellent, relevant writing that shows keyword relevancy to the engines, increases usability to its users, and offers “link bait”, content worthy enough to draw links from people that visit the website. Read More
Choosing a Quality Link Builder
By Sujan Patel with 3 Comments
So you’ve got a quality website, a good monetization strategy and superb, constantly updated content. Google sees you, but they don’t see you as nearly relevant enough to rank as high as you’d like in the rankings. Quite simply, Google is telling you that you need to link build.
If you’re like many business owners, you don’t have the time to do research on how to link build, or manually do it yourself. You don’t have a SEO in-house, and even if you do, he’s too busy to spend the sufficient time needed to get your URL air-dropped all over the internet. Read More
