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Internal Links Listings Sitelinks have been around for years, about five to be exact. Another important SERP feature that has also been around this long are site's internal links in the SERP listings. The occurrence of this isn't always deemed by branded or domain related searches as well as having a first place listing. These horizontally placed links located between the SERP listing description and URL are most often a mirrored replication of the anchor text of the text links you possess on your home page. To perform optimally at getting Google to display these, make sure the text links are placed in the first few paragraphs of copy to help increase your internal page CTR. Also, ensure that the anchor text is identical to the destination pages overall keyword focus. Having placement of internal links in Google SERPs is Google's thumbs up that you have a proper internal linking to keyword strategy.

Hierarchical Category Links One of the most recent SERP listing features you can use gauge Google's perception of your site are the hierarchical breadcrumb links placed in the URL line of SERP listings. These began to appear half a year ago and, like the internal link placement above, also don't require first place ranking, brand, or domain related searches to appear in SERPs. Receiving the hierarchical category links are achieved by utilizing a network of breadcrumb navigation across the internal pages of your site. To create an optimal process of breadcrumb linking, make sure you've applied your keyword strategy alongside the information architecture of your site content. Your URL structure should include keyword rich and content relevant category/folder naming conventions and ensure that site content falls into the appropriate categories. Furthermore, having a breadcrumb navigation in which the category links closely mimic the folder path of the URL helps to indicate to Google how the content of your site flows and that you have taken steps to properly deliver site content to search engines as well as users. Taking into consideration these Google SERP features will allow you to gain insight as to how Google understands the most important elements of your site from an SEO standpoint.

What are Google Sitelinks? Google Sitelinks are displayed in Google search results and are meant to help users navigate your website. Google systems analyze the link structure of your website to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information. Sitelinks are completely automated by Google’s algorithm. In short, Google Sitelinks are shortcuts to your main pages from the search result pages. When do Google Sitelinks show? Google only shows Sitelinks for results when they think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your website doesn’t allow Google spider to find good Sitelinks, or they don’t think the Sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, they won’t show them. Although there are no certain answers to this question from Google, the following factors seem to influence whether Google displays Sitelinks or not: Your site must have a stable no.1 ranking for the search query. So Sitelinks show up most often for searches on brand names. Your site must be old enough. It seems that websites under 2 years old don’t get Sitelinks The number of searches - it seems that the search keywords aren’t searched often enough don’t get Sitelinks The number of clicks - it seems that your site has to get many clicks for the searched keywords It seems that Sitelinks don’t show to search queries consisting of two or more keywords The number of links - links are important everywhere in the SEO world, aren’t they? The inbound links with the relevant anchor text seems to influence the chance of getting Sitelinks How can we get Sitelinks for our website? If you can meet the above mentioned criteria, you’ll have a big chance to get Sitelinks shown for your site. But you can also improve the structure of your website to increase the possibility and quality of your Sitelinks. Google seems to use the first level links on a website for the Sitelinks, so make sure all your important links are on the homepage. The links should be text links or image links with an IMG ALT attribute. JavaScript or Flash links are not considered for Sitelinks. Also, it seems that Google likes links that appear at the top of a webpage. So try to put your important links at the top of the HTML code and then re-position using CSS. Overall, build your website following SEO best practices and rank no.1 for your most important keywords will ensure the Sitelinks appearances and help users to navigate your website.

Up first is Rand Fishkin. Rand says he asked to be kicked off this panel because he doesn’t endorse buying links and he doesn’t do it anymore [Hear that, Google. SEOmoz doesn't buy links. SO KEEP MOVING.]. He offered to go last…but everyone else bullied the moderator into making him go first. Poor Rand. Always the innocent bunny in a pack of wolves. Unfortunately, the projector is broken so we have no screen. Something about a plug that doesn’t work.  So…we’re doing question and answer first while they send someone to try and fix it. I’ll throw the questions at the bottom.  Back to Mr. Fishkin. He tries to be very clear about his shift in position about paid links. He doesn’t think not buying links is right for everyone, it’s just what’s right for his clients and for SEOmoz.   Rand says he falls into the “Operator of Interest’ category. Meaning, he’s profiled for being an SEO. The problem with paid links: Algorithmic detection is getting better than ever before. Penalties are hard to diagnose. Manual link penalties are also a threat Google’s’ Webspam team invests (A LOT of) time and resources in shutting down effective paid links. [Agreed. And almost an unhealthy amount.] Competitors have significant incentive to report link spam. (Don’t be a rat.)

Authority Comes With Age The main ingredient of authority is time. Websites gain authority by behaving themselves for some time, having links pointing to the site for a longer period, and having other authority sites linking to them.

Subdomains start out with the same authority as their www parents, but when they start out linking intensively to low or negative authority websites they can lose theirs without affecting the rest of the domain too much. This effects the choice between using subdomains or subdirectories, because activities within a directory influence the entire (sub)domain it's on.

Links from authorities aren't easily acquired because they're careful when linking out. Use the Bing operator "linkfromdomain:authority.com" to discover what they already link to. Discover why those sites are being linked to and, by emulating that strategy, you might get great authority links.

Paid links are always controversial. I found it interesting that "direct link purchases from individual sites/webmasters" was considered by your panel to be the fifth most effective link building tactic yet "link acquisition from known link brokers/sellers" was the second highest negative ranking factor. Any thoughts on this? Does this reflect the fact that even though paid links in general have a bad reputation, they're still widely employed? I think that's correct. Link buying and selling is still a very popular activity in the SEO sphere, and while the engines continue to fight against it, they're unlikely to ever weed out 100% of the sites and pages the employ this methodology. Link acquisition via this methodology is incredibly attractive to businesses and something the engines have also instilled as a behavior - with PPC ads, you spend more money and get more traffic. It's not unnatural that companies would feel they can apply the same principles to SEO. While I think the engines still have a long way to go on this front, I also believe that, at least at SEOmoz, where our risk tolerance is so low, the smartest way to go is to play by the engines' rules. Why spend a few hundred or few thousand dollars renting links when you could invest that in your site's content, user interface, public relations, social media marketing, etc. and have a long-term return that the engines are far less likely to ever discount.

About an hour ago, I attended a session about purchasing links to influence your search engine rankings. I have always thought of buying links as black hat SEO and Rand reconfirmed my belief this morning. I wanted to quickly summarize his presentation on purchasing links, why you shouldn’t do it, and what you should do instead. Believe it or not, Google employs a team dedicated to searching for webspam. They invest lots of time and resources into finding and shutting down effective paid linking opportunities. This is the number one reason why you should never participate in paid links. Once Google finds you, you are done!

you do want to kind of think and possibly even test what page on your website to link your Google My Business listing to. Often people link to the homepage, which is fine. But we have also found with multi-location businesses sometimes it is better to link to a location page.

we have found that review quantity does make an impact on ranking. But that being said, we've also found that it has kind of diminishing returns. So for example, if you're a business and you go from having no reviews to, let's say, 20 or 30 reviews, you might start to see your business rank further away from your office, which is great. But if you go from, let's say, 30 to 70, you may not see the same lift.

Can selling text link ads in the sidebar using TLA or Direct-Link-Ads result in a Googlge penalty? I use to use TLA before for one of my sites but stopped using them for the fear of Google dropping the sit because i heard a few rumors on webmaster forums of this happening. Is this concrete or not? Are people still using TLA or DLA or some other similar? C7Mike#:3930956 4:52 am on June 11, 2009 (utc 0) Yes, you may receive a penalty for purchasing links that pass PageRank. See Google's Webmasters/Site owner Help topic for more information: [google.com...] Automotive site#:3930991 6:42 am on June 11, 2009 (utc 0) Well, I was actually going to use one of thoose to sell and not purchase. Anyway, I am going to apply to BuyandSellAds and see if I get accepted there, but I heard they mostly accept tech related sites. C7Mike#:3931237 2:25 pm on June 11, 2009 (utc 0) You may receive a penalty for both buying and selling paid links that pass PageRank (see [google.com...] I have had a few sites lose their PR because they published links through TLA. However the content was still good enough that advertisers have continued to purchase links on those pages through TLA inspite of the lack of PR, and at a substantially lower rate.

Will Selling Links via Text Link Ads SLAM your PageRank? Report abuse uploadjockey Level 1 1/6/10 I have read the FAQs and checked for similar issues: YESMy site's URL is: http://www.uploadjockey.comDescription (including timeline of any changes made): Removed Text Link AdsLast we started to sell links via text-link-ads.com for some additional income.I cannot say for certain that this caused the problem, but it seems like it did. Our PageRank has dropped from a PR4 to a PR0 in less than a year.Our traffic has dropped from over 75k+ unique hits a day to just barely 20k+Am I missing something? Is there some other violation that I could be missing that is killing our ranking results?Thanks

The content on the specific URL you link to is important and impacts ranking in the local results.  For most businesses, it makes sense to link to the homepage since that URL has the most authority, backlinks, and relevance.  However, for some businesses that qualify to have multiple listings, using a strategy like this can help provide better results.