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Recent lessons I Learned in Backlinks

by dndoseller
19 replies
  • SEO
    • |
After two years of doing SEO I decided that directories are the only kind of links I want.

1. They bring in the most real targeted referral traffic for my sites.
2. The particular page you get a link on actually has page rank most of the time.

The actual page that carries your link on a social bookmark site (even do follow) or all article sites (except EZA ocassionally) always has page rank of a big fat 0 - check it out and you will see. Sure the "home page" of a site may be pr 6, but NOT the page your link is in - and that absolutely matters to Google.

Plus social bookmark visitors have NO value. Same goes for your forum sig links - no page rank for the most part on the threads that your link exists in and mostly passerby traffic - although I still post to vent and share experiences. Same goes with blog commenting - more and more blogs are no follow and won't include your link.

* Finally, I am completely fed up and done with getting banned and accused of forum and bookmark spamming when I read the TOS and follow them. When you apply to a directory you either get accepted or you don't and then it's done with. Its simple and no stress. *

Now my daily routine for is:

Write and post article to my site
Get two directory links to homepage
Write and post article to my site
Get two directory links to home page
repeat until tired...

This is it and keyword search traffic is skyrocketing for me.
#backlinks #learned #lessons #recent
  • Profile picture of the author Angela V. Edwards
    Directories have been removed from Google's recommendations for getting backlinks. That's because some directories have become no more than "link farms". Be careful about that.

    As far as low to 0 PR pages inside of a High PR domain; trust me, those will help you. My article is on Page One of Google out of 12.4 million competing sites. Most, if not all, of my backlinks were on pages like that; new pages on a High PR domain. The idea that "this will not help you" is a fallacy.

    Here is what one of my customers told me his friend, who works for Google, has to say about the issue:
    I can't say much without violating my NDC, but I can definitely say this: the PR of a site is always 0 at creation, but at the next PR update (which is supposed to happen every 3 months, but we're a bit behind right now), the PR of something like a comment page will usually update to some portion of the PR of the main site. So if you put your site in a link from a PR8 government site, it'll look like PR 0 for a while, but when it updates to PR 3 or 4,it will become a much more powerful backlink. Of course, for extremely large sites, like your Warrior Forum for example, the PR of the main page is spread so thin that the comment page will still only have a PR 0 --but then, for sites that large and that popular, there are other factors at play that I can't go into that still make the backlink strong even at PR 0.

    When Google's Matt Cutts was asked about this, he refused a direct answer because he said the question cut too close to Google's algorithm:
    Stephan Spencer: OK. So, I guess, a follow on to that would be: a .edu and .gov link, and so forth, has, typically, a more pristine link neighborhood, so it is not just about the PageRank, right? The link neighborhood comes into play.


    Matt Cutts: That is a little bit of a "secret sauce" question, so I am not going to go into how much we do trust that sort of stuff.


    Stephan Spencer: OK. I am going to slap my wrist now. Ouch, ouch!


    Matt Cutts: [laughing]


    You can see the entire interview here.


    There are people who will absolutely insist that inner pages inside of a High PR domain have no value, but if those pages can move me more than 12 million places in Google's index and keep me firmly planted on Page One, I would say that they do have value.
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    • Profile picture of the author Jared Alberghini
      Originally Posted by Angela V. Edwards View Post

      Directories have been removed from Google's recommendations for getting backlinks. That's because some directories have become no more than "link farms". Be careful about that.

      As far as low to 0 PR pages inside of a High PR domain; trust me, those will help you. My article is on Page One of Google out of 12.4 million competing sites. Most, if not all, of my backlinks were on pages like that; new pages on a High PR domain. The idea that "this will not help you" is a fallacy.

      There are people who will absolutely insist that inner pages inside of a High PR domain have no value, but if those pages can move me more than 12 million places in Google's index and keep me firmly planted on Page One, I would say that they do have value.
      Listen to what Angela has to say here people. Words of wisdom.

      Don't get all goofy over PR.

      There are tons of low ranking pages that will give you tons of traffic, and there are also many high ranking pages that will give you virtually no traffic.

      Would you rather have a ton of traffic? or a high PR? Of course, both are good, but if I had to choose only one, I would most certainly choose TRAFFIC.

      Also, don't get caught putting all your eggs in the one 'directory link' basket... diversify your efforts and you won't regret it.

      - Jared
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  • Profile picture of the author jasonl70
    I've found directory submissions to be a bit different.. submit a site to several hundred directories, and yet only a few backlinks ever seem to show up (I use yahoo site explorer for this).

    Also, it seems like 99% of the directories I find are 'gray barred' by google as soon as you drill down into the sub categories. That means it doesn't even have a pr of zero, which is googles way of warning you..

    Directory submissions have become a million times harder because of this, and I'm seriously doubting whether I'll do it anymore (besides dmoz).

    I agree with Angela - I'll take pr0 pages from a decent site any day
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    -Jason

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    • Profile picture of the author IowaGal
      Originally Posted by jasonl70 View Post

      Also, it seems like 99% of the directories I find are 'gray barred' by google as soon as you drill down into the sub categories. That means it doesn't even have a pr of zero, which is googles way of warning you.
      Actually the gray bar means one of two things:

      A) They've been banned (to check this visit Google and search site:nameofdirectorysite - if something shows up they're not banned);

      B) The page just hasn't been assigned a PR yet.
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  • Profile picture of the author Andy Fletcher
    I agree with Angela 100% on this. As long as you're investing the time in getting dofollow backlinks rather than posting on blogs with the nofollow attribute this is a far better use of your time than directories (although some directories are still worth having and its unlikely that a link in a directory could actually hurt your rank).
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  • Profile picture of the author AndyBlackSEO
    People... people.... How organic will it look like to Google if you throw all your eggs in one basket? It's fair enough if you personally find one method better, or easier than the other, but it would be wise to mix it up a little. A handful of each per day.. at most.

    I have recently had an increase of rankings for a site that is mainly down to blog commenting, and the majority of them are no follow. Good relevent comments are submitted though, but still, it has drove my rankings up.

    Best to experiment with a couple of different sites... preferably new and try different methods on each one.

    Andy
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  • Profile picture of the author australianrealestate
    I'll add my ten cents ( or nickels ) worth about the value of different types of backlinks.

    If I were Google and was building an algorithm that hoped would somewhat fairly judge a link value I would design it to look for links from lots of different ip's and from lots of different types of websites.

    Such an algo would tend to mirror a truly popular sites link profile i.e a quality site would get picked up in blogs, directories, press releases,forums etc etc.

    Given that theory, it would be less productive to get links from only one area such as just directories. Still, if it's workin for you man, none of us can knock it. But sometimes what's actually working isn't always what's obvious eg it could be your url etc.

    Like another poster said, be wary of the technique as it may lose its impact over time
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  • Profile picture of the author ryanmacca
    I definately agree with you.
    Page Rank from directories are often high and they also bring traffic from click throughs
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    • Profile picture of the author altesino
      You have an interesting take on backlinks. It seems that its always a debate which backlinks are the most effective. I tend to try to get a mix of backlinks that are relatively fast to obtain: Forums, dofollow blogs, and social bookmarks.

      However I do mix in articles and such.
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  • Profile picture of the author jspmedia
    I usually do PR4 or Higher Directory submission from DP when I have free time for free and it worked well for newly created site. I know most of them are not good quality directory but it still backlink...
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  • Profile picture of the author ebizza
    Yes, its true that directory links have become weaker now, just like links from article directories.
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  • Profile picture of the author tommen
    If you are looking to find dofollow forums and blogs, there is a Google search
    available at:

    DoFollow Blogs & Forums Search
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  • Profile picture of the author Gunter Eibl
    I haven't seen any value in submitting to directories at all for my sites. That's the first and usually only thing every new web site owner hears he shall do. There can't be much value in things everybody does.

    Gunter
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    • Profile picture of the author kakang
      submitt to DMOZ its very difficult .. i think its not good idea. i have some blog and 1 blog im try submitt to dmoz and google..but until now this blog not listing on google directory. my other blog never submitt to SE or Dmoz and now listing on google directory. im worry this blog is banned
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      • Profile picture of the author krishananda
        Originally Posted by kakang View Post

        submitt to DMOZ its very difficult .. i think its not good idea. i have some blog and 1 blog im try submitt to dmoz and google..but until now this blog not listing on google directory. my other blog never submitt to SE or Dmoz and now listing on google directory. im worry this blog is banned

        Indeed, submitting to DMOZ is difficult, but not impossible, if you follow the guidelines at DMOZ then there is a chance to be listed.

        I submitted one of my blogs to DMOZ months ago and its listed now, but get this, not with the titles and descriptions that I submitted.

        Since DMOZ is administrated manually by real people, they did research on interesting blogs or sites then put it in the list.
        In my google analytics I noticed I had 4 visits from DMOZ author's site, I think they monitored my blog back then.

        So be nice, follow the guidelines, work on your blogs/sites, and hope the DMOZ authors kind enough to notice your blog.

        Unless you have a great site or you know the secret author of DMOZ you'd be so lucky to get your site listed in short time.
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