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1 Week Ago AccuraCast vbmenu_register("postmenu_141249", true); This is just a forum. Opinions expressed here are not official!   Join Date: Oct 2004 Location: London, UK Posts: 115 Google Shares Mobile Search Volumes After more than 2 years filled with numerous requests for more stats on mobile search volumes and click estimates, Google has finally shared this data via a rather inconspicuous feature on their new Keywords Tool. Google shares mobile search volumes - accuracast.com/search-daily-news/accuracast-7471/google-shares-mobile-search-volumes-for-the-first-time/ This is really BIG for all mobile advertisers! Finally we can put a number and a value to mobile search advertising, and make a stronger business case to prospective clients.

September 30, 2009 Feedburner Goes All Permanent on Their URL Redirects If you've ever clicked on a link in your RSS reader and that link is associated with a site that uses Feedburner, you've probably noticed that the initial URL to appear in your browser's address bar was related to the feed and not the final URL. That's because Feedburner uses the URL to track the click. The redirect was a 302, a temporary redirect. But now Feedburner is updating the URLs to be permanent 301 redirects. Feedburner, which is owned by Google, says that the reason for the change was that some search engines index the feeds, which affects the popularity of a site. If you use Feedburner, you don't have to do anything special. The update is automatic.

Use the cross-domain rel="canonical" link elementThere are situations where it's not easily possible to set up redirects. This could be the case when you need to move your website from a server that does not feature server-side redirects. In a situation like this, you can use the rel="canonical" link element across domains to specify the exact URL of whichever domain is preferred for indexing. While the rel="canonical" link element is seen as a hint and not an absolute directive, we do try to follow it where possible

In the meantime, what should I do about PageRank sculpting? The first test results should be disregarded. This means that I, along with my co-workers at SEOmoz, recommend neither removing nofollow if it is installed (as we have seen detrimental effects for websites) nor adding it if you don't have it. Quite simply, we don't have enough information. (Which is why I ran the original test in the first place... damn)

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!

Why Doesn’t Rand Fishkin say the Words? October 2, 2009 by Roger · 2 CommentsFiled under: SEO General  There’s a very informative video on SEOmoz’s Whiteboard Friday about link volume verses link quality. At about the 5:00 minute mark you can see Rand Fishkin holding himself back trying not to say the B word … “buy links”. He does say barter. Does that mean exchange links for money? I guess it could. The sad truth is that if you are in a very competitive market like travel, car hire, hotels, and you aren’t a top 200 brand, the only way you are going to get on the front page of Google is to BUY LINKS. Cheap hotels Sydney is an example of the sort of search term you would probably need to buy links for. $1000 to $2000 per month for some quality links should do the trick which is still cheap compared to other forms of mass media, and I do see Google as a form of mass media. Yep, buy links. But that’s Blackhat you say and Google doesn’t like it I can hear some people say. It seems it’s OK to buy links if Google gets the cash via their Adwords money machine, but if you get caught selling or buying links, then watch out. Ever wondered why Google uses a very pale yellow background on their Adwords ads? Why not red or blue, or even a muted grey? You know the answer don’t you?  I suspect over 30% of the market don’t even know the difference between Adwords ads and organic links. What number do you believe? And if you believe the white-hat nonsense about not buying links you will still be spending time and/or money on article marketing, press release submissions, forum signatures, link exchanges, and other link-building methods.

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.

Jarrod u seem pretty convincing here. I sent a mail to Brigette (ur account manager) last month and asked some few simple questions regarding the services. Not a single answer was convincing enough to buy your services and that's when i decided not to purchase links through u. Here are the excerpts: Quote: 1. What if we decide to discontinue your service in the future? Do we lose all the purchased back links in that case? TLB: If you rent links, they would come down. However, if you purchase products that are permanently placed, we do not take them down. But you don't place text links permanently. Even your permanent package gives only 6 months guarantee. Quote: 2. How we can secure the ownership of our purchased links? What if the webmaster removed the link we have purchased after some time or what if he moved the link to some other location or some other web page or changed the anchor text of the link or added large number of other external links (may be from our competitors) and thus reducing our link weight or what if he made our link no follow or what if he deleted the web page or shut down the website? Can we claim any compensation or refund in that case? TLB: Each of our products has different minimums and guarantees. Our permanent links that are included in the “Booster Package” have a 3 month guarantee. During this time we have a script that ensures your link stays live. If, for some reason, it were to come down we would replace it free of charge. Beyond that, you would have no recourse. However, if you purchase a permanent link package, they have a 6 month guarantee that works the same way. Do you call this a convincing reply? Quote: 3. How you can ensure us that you will not get our website penalized or banned by Google through your back links? What if our website gets penalized or banned by Google because of the link you have purchased for us? What is your policy in that case? TLB: We take every step possible to ensure that does not happen. We do things very differently than most link building companies. We do not use software, feeds or auto generated code of any kind. Each of our links are manually placed on 100% SEO friendly sites. Everyone who is accepted into our inventory goes through an extensive approval process. We deny applications daily for not meeting the large number of criteria our Quality Assurance team looks at. Once they are accepted into inventory, their information is not posted on the web site. They are not allowed to post anything on their site that says they are affiliated with us in any way. They are not asked to and not allowed to backlink to us under any circumstances. We take the protection of our Inventory Partners and our clients very seriously. If a potential client goes to our website to view inventory, they will only see general information such as a description, page rank, site age, number of outbound links, etc. The only way to view the actual url is to sign a non-disclosure agreement. That is only done after speaking with a Customer Service Representative or Account Manager who would create the list for you. So, as you can see, for years we have done everything we can do to protect our inventory partners as well as our clients. Our goals is to make you successful so that we can continue with a long term business relationship. If we do not protect our partners and they get penalized, your links will not pass SEO value. Therefore, we take that very seriously. Your so called forbidden inventory is just one report away from Google web spam team. Once identified, everyone associated with it will bust like a bubble. IMO that's the risk rand was talking about.

Himanshu160, I only wish that I could replicate myself, wouldn't that be great. I would be happy to discuss other options with you outside of the forums or get you to one of our senior account reps. I do not handle very many sales and this isn't the place for it. As for our perm links, most of those are placed on sites that we do not control thus it becomes too costly to guarantee them forever. We have found that if they have stayed up for 6 months the churn rate is fairly low after that.. The 3 month guarantee is being offered at a cheaper rate and usually only used in our bundles. Again if it has stayed live for 3 months the churn rate isn't going to be very high after that. There are advantages to being on our controlled inventory but also some disadvantages. With our controlled inventory we can make sure every link we place stays up, those tend to be the links we charge monthly, although we have done some custom perm links on controlled inventory. The disadvantage is that if someone reports one of our controlled sites to Google it can loose value, of course some sites are at more risk than others because they sell a lot of links or they sell homepage links in the sidebar etc.. We do have inventory that is cleaner than others and we can even do exclusive deals so that you are the only one on the site. It all depends on your budget. For most low competition keywords one of our cheap link bundles is all that is needed. Sure some of the links will go down over time, and yes Google may devalue some. However there are always new links being built to replace the few that go down so the results are a nice increase in rankings over time.

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.)

There is no penalty for buying links! There, I said it. That’s what I believe is true; there is no such thing as a ‘you have been buying links so you should suffer’ penalty. At least, not if you do it correctly. I’ll make some statements about buying links that probably not everybody will agree on, but this is what I consider to be the truth. If you don’t publish your link buying tactics yourself and if your website’s link profile doesn’t contain >90% paid links, then: Buying links cannot get you penalized;Buying links from obvious link networks only results in backlinks with little to no search engine value;Buying links ninja style will continue to get you killer rankings;Selling links can only disable your ability to pass link juice or PR (but you might want to read this);Google will never be able to detect all paid links Just about every time the topic finally seems to be left alone, someone out there heats up the good old paid link debate again. This time, Rand Fishkin (unintentionally) causes the discussion to emerge once again. By showing the buying and selling link tactics of several websites on SEOmoz’ blog (this info has been removed now), he made it very easy for the Paid Link Police to add some more websites to the list of websites to check out while building the Paid Link Neglecting Algorithm. Several people got all wound up because of this, including (at first) me, because these sites would more than likely receive a penalty (just checked, none of them has been penalized yet). However, it is almost impossible for Google to penalize you for buying links for your website. At least, not if you didn’t scream “Hey, I’m artificially inflating my link popularity!” on your OWN website. David Airey penalized? Jim Boykin analyzed his penalty earlier and the same thing happened here. In some cases, it may seem that certain websites have been penalized for buying links. What in fact happened, is that the link juice tap of some obvious paid links has been closed, what resulted in less link juice, followed by lower rankings. In most other cases, you can buy all the links you want and not get penalized. You could buy the same links for your competition, right? And if Google states that Spammy Backlinks can’t Hurt You, paid backlinks probably can’t hurt you either. This basically is the same thing. The worst thing that can happen is that you buy hundreds of text links that only provide traffic. And, if you managed to buy the right ones, there’s nothing wrong with that.

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

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.

June 18, 2009 Evidence of Page Level Google Penalties? Richard at SEO Gadget showed how Google seemed to have penalized specific pages of his site from ranking in the Google index. The penalty seemed to be fair, in that there were nasty comments that slipped through his comment spam filter. The drop in traffic can be seen by the keyword phrases that page ranked well for. He noticed a ~70% drop in traffic for that phrase, which in his case resulted in a 15% drop in his Google traffic and a 5% drop in overall traffic. What I find extra fun is that a Google Search Quality Analyst, @filiber, tweeted: Google Page level penalty for comment spam – rankings and traffic drop http://bit.ly/JNAly (via @AndyBeard) <- interesting read! Of course that is not admission to this as a fact, but it wouldn't be too hard to believe that bad comments caused such a decline. Now, I don't think this would be considered a keyword-specific penalty, which most SEOs believe in, but rather a specific page being penalized. Forum discussion at Sphinn.

How Google Can Discover Paid Links A while back I did a post called 15 Methods for Paid Link Detection. Here is a list of the methods I discussed in that post: Links Labeled as Advertisements Site Wides Links Are Sold By a Link Agency Selling Site Has Information on How to Buy a Text Link Ad Relevance of Your Link Relevance of Nearby Links Advertising Location Type Someone Reports Your Site for Buying Links Someone Reports Your Site for Some Other Reason Someone Reports the Site you Bought Links from for Selling Links Someone Reports the Site you Bought Links from for Some Other Reason Disgruntled Employee Leaves Your Company, and Reports Your Site Disgruntled Employee Leaves the Agency Your Used, and Reports Your Site Disgruntled Employee Leaves the Company of the Site You Bought Links from, and Reports Your Site Internal Human Review There are two major methods I want to emphasize here. These are: 1. Your competitor can report you. It's the grim truth that your paid links can be reported by your competitor. There is a form built right into Google Webmaster Tools. Here is what it looks like: