Link Building

19 July 2013
In Link Building
By Usama

The Funniest Link Building Moments of 2013, so Far

I’m an avid fan of link building and I continually come up with link building “exploits” and methods, as a link builder it’s part of the fun of the job! Literally every time I see a new CMS hits the shelves I crawl through various pages, both design wise and it’s HTML/PHP.

So, without further ado, here’s the funniest Link Building moments of 2013 so far –

The “Error” Exploit –

This was apparently used to stop manual link checkers from finding your backlinks when Penguin 2.0 came out, I found it on a forum post that I’d found when searching a pretty big SEO Forum when penguin 2.0 was released.

An example of this was a site, the thread creator personal messaged me:

http://themanualseo.com

I told him the first time he showed me this, that it had an “Error establishing a Database Connection” he then said for me to scroll down, following my scroll down I spent the first 20 minutes laughing. The next 10 minutes was spent crying from the fact that there are people actually using this method out there.

Continue reading
16 July 2013
In Link Building
By Usama

Finding Deep Backlinks with DuckDuckGo

The NSA

Since the NSA and Edward Snowden scandal hit our screens, 100s of thousands of Internet Users have quit the big search engines which have been giving your information over “willy nilly” especially with the recent Microsoft fiasco with Bing and Outlook data. These users have flocked to a “zero tracking search engine” aka DuckDuckGo – Effectively, it’s a search engine which keeps no user logs, no private data and you can’t signup to anything on the site. I decided to check it out and have been playing around with some pretty cool stuff on it.

By far my favourite part of DuckDuckGo is that it actively promotes its competitors at the end of it’s listings, just incase you couldn’t find what you were looking for that is!

DuckDuckGo Competitor

Continue reading
15 May 2013
In Link Building, SEO
By Usama

Google’s Penguin 2.0 Update: What We Can Expect

It’s been just over a year since the first Penguin update and many websites are still shaking at the sound of the word. The Penguin update affected a huge number of websites, including some high-profile brands that were engaging in all sorts of spammy link building techniques. Matt Cutts has now confirmed on Twitter that Penguin 2.0 will hit the search engines within the next two weeks:

 

Continue reading
5 March 2013
In Link Building, SEO
By Usama

Interflora’s Google Penalty – What, Why and How

During the past week, you’re likely to have seen plenty of discussion in the SEO community regarding international flower delivery company, Interflora. No, SEOs aren’t laying out their plans for Valentine’s/Mother’s day, it’s because they have been heavily punished by Google, and near enough removed from the rankings.

The chatter and speculation started after Martin MacDonald posted this regarding Interflora’s sudden plummet from the search engines, or as he described it, “wiped from the face of the internet”.

Interflora were ranked very highly in flower/florist related search terms, such as ‘UK Flower Delivery’, and have plummeted in all of them. They’ve even fallen from the first page in a search for their own brand name, which epitomises how badly they’ve been affected. So, this begs the question, what happened?

Continue reading

25 February 2013
In Google Plus, Link Building
By Usama

Recognising the Ripple and Identifying Your Site’s Influencers

Outreach seems to be the buzzword of 2013 so far and we have seen countless articles about how to source outreach opportunities. With this in mind I have been trying to find slightly different approaches toward carrying out effective outreach and ways to identify individuals to build relationships with. I have talked a lot through the latter stages of 2012 about the importance of building niche-specific relationships with influencers in order to create a sustainable link-building campaign. What I am now going to show you is how to actually identify who your current influencers are and how you can benefit from building a relationship with them.

Influence Definition

Let’s start with what I mean by an ‘influencer‘ of your website: An influencer is someone who actively reads, shares and/or engages with your site’s content. This could be through sharing your blog articles on social media, linking back to your content or generally talking about your website/brand in one way or another. For the purposes of this article I will be concentrating more on content influencers as opposed to general brand evangelists, mainly because if I start getting into complete brand influencers then I could be writing for some time!

Continue reading
7 November 2012
In Google Plus, Link Building, SEO, Social Media
By Usama

Sustainable Link Building Through Relationships

Everyone is talking about creating ‘killer content’ in order to get shared online and talked about. What I’m here to tell you is that ‘killer content’ isn’t always the answer. What you should be focusing on is building long-term relationships that are likely to result in regular sharing of your material. Create content around topics that invoke conversation and trigger an emotional response from the people who view it. By doing this you will be able to sustain a flow of social shares for your content in the future and expand your total reach.

Google+ Meme

Link Building… You Mean Relationship Building?

One of the biggest problems with link building is the mindset that people get in when they embark upon it. If you get too wrapped up in trying to squeeze as much as you can from others then it can leave them feeling like the relationship is a bit one-sided. Add value to other peoples’ content and help them to achieve their objectives and you will most certainly reap the long-term benefits.

Continue reading