Won't move on till I sort this

[laurenceh]

May belong in seo but will get more of a response here I feel and I really don't want to move on till I get advice or reassurance on this.

I have been told by a good source in SEO not to worry about this but really don't want to spend anymore time trying to build links if something is not working.

When I first built my first site I bookmarked the home page and inner pages to about 20 socialbookmarking platforms, I commented on about 8 blogs as a trial, I then submitted to about 300 odd directories my main url, outsourced somebookmarking for one of the inner pages I am promoting, and have also bookmarked a top ezine article of mine with a link to my url to the same bookmarking sites.

However, when I check SEO Quake, backlinkwatcher Googlewebmaster tools and one other link checker I only find between 3 and 5 links to my site.

I realise that links are not picked up all at once but these links have been being built for at least a month so I thought a few more might have been picked up.

I really want to step up the promotion but want to make sure that nothing is wrong with my linking or site before finding more blogs and getting link packets, web 2 properties etc.

Any idea what I may be missing?

[askloz]

you're not pointing links to the places where you got links from, so 90% of your time has been wasted.

[laurenceh]

I thought that the whole point of bookmarking etc was to get a backlink?

[Alexa Smith]

Originally Posted by askloz

you're not pointing links to the places where you got links from

I would certainly hope not. Those would only be reciprocal links, surely, and not worth as much?

[steveweber]

Also, backlink discovery tools are notorious for being inaccurate.

Google webmaster tools does not show them all. I can check yahoo exploer and see 2 or 3 times as many backlinks. I know good and well that Google sees those links too; they just don't show them.

[Chris Koltai]

Directory links are notorious for taking a long time to show up, and in my experience don't have any huge effect on your rankings. Your mileage may vary.

Anywhere else that you build links, you should either social bookmark the page your link is on, or use a site like html2rss.com to turn the address into an RSS feed and submit it to various aggregators. In addition to helping your link get spidered, this will also add a bit of link juice to the page, giving your link a little bit more weight.

Also, it doesn't hurt to use a site like pingomatic.com to ping the page that the link is on, as that often will attract the spiders.

[bgmacaw]

Originally Posted by laurenceh

Any idea what I may be missing?

Instead of waiting for your links to show up, build more links to your site. Spending time fretting over if and when links will show up in various tools is an exercise in frustration and will distract you from taking action.

[askloz]

Ok...

everyone craze's over that you should get links from authority sites, why? cos they're crawled a lot. more their crawed, more chances the page will get indexed with your link in it. if there's no cached page with your link in it, then the link will not count.

but having saying that, just because a site seems to be an authority site, doesn't necessarily mean it'll be treated as one. many factors come into play, ie,how much content is being added to the site, how many backlinks does the site have, yada yada.

you may of been witness to an article not being indexed in ages, like a week, a month or what ever.

getting one link to your site from one source is only the first step of MANY for SEO.. 99% of the ppl out there are doing it wrong, sad to say.. they think its about getting your desired keyword with your link on a page pointing to yours and move on to find another place to get a link from. far from it.

ppl need to think about not only making their site an authority, but, making YOUR page with YOUR link on a 3RD party site, an authority page. If you dont, then it's gonna receive minimal relevancy score.

For instance... I could compete with you for the same keyword, you could go out there to 100 places, and I could go out to 10% of those places, and point links to those places and rank higher than you in lesser time and I know my links will count cos I forced google or any other search engine, to index that page.

Originally Posted by laurenceh

I thought that the whole point of bookmarking etc was to get a backlink?

And nup, bookmarking original concept was to allow ppl to "share" their fav's... not for SEO

BTW, that's my name too, glad to see you spell yours with a U, does my nut in when peeps spell mine wrong

[askloz]

Hey Alexa,

Nah, surely yes that reciprocal linking is a pain in the butt cos they can remove your link.

But a link is only good if it's indexed. You'll be surprised at how many places out there dont have their pages indexed. One can not trust a website owner that they have a SEO Friendly site, you have to assume they are the worst webmaster on the planet and force your links to be counted.

the easiest way and fastest way, is once you know where your link is, copy it, head over to digg and mixx dot com and SB it. give it a day, and those pages will be indexed.

I used to go to about 1400 social bookmarking sites (via software), and run a backlink check. I noticed that approx 28-31% or so were indexed, the rest no where to be found. Since all of these social bookmarking sites had the same url layout structure, I took note of which sites that wasn't indexed, worked out what my page URL was without going to all the other sites that didn't index my page yet, plug that into software, blast out again, then boom, within a week, over 90% of them were indexed, and rankings became stable ever since, through every google dance.

Originally Posted by Alexa Smith

I would certainly hope not. Those would only be reciprocal links, surely, and not worth as much?

[laurenceh]

Originally Posted by askloz

Ok...




For instance... I could compete with you for the same keyword, you could go out there to 100 places, and I could go out to 10% of those places, and point links to those places and rank higher than you in lesser time and I know my links will count cos I forced google or any other search engine, to index that page.

Are you saying that us pointing links from our pages out to authority sites would count in our favour more than us going and getting inlinks from 100 random places or have I read this wrong?

I understand the importance of getting relevant links rather than just placing a poker link for example on a gardening website.

I get that part its just the follow/nofollow, amount of links vs quality of links etc that blows my mind a little. SEO does appear to be a real mish mash of opinions.