Weekly SEO news: 29 October 2009
Welcome to the latest issue of the Search Engine Facts newsletter.

This week, we're taking a look at an official Google statement about low quality links that point to your website.

In the news: Google introduces Social Search, a new spam method enables you to get 50,000 links from a PR9 website and more.

Table of contents:

We hope that you enjoy this newsletter and that it helps you to get more out of your website. Please pass this newsletter on to your friends.

Best regards,
Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO
1. Official Google statement: how to deal with bad inbound links

Many webmasters think that low quality links or links from spammy websites can have a negative effect on the ranking of their websites on Google.

The problem with links from spammy websites is that it is very difficult to do something against them. For example, a competitor could add your website to a link farm network or the competitor could spam with your URL.

Google statement

Google has released an official statement about spammy links

This month, Google published an official statement about low quality links in their webmaster blog. Here are the main statements:

  1. Linking is a significant factor in Google's ranking algorithm but it is just one of many factors. Other factors are the content of your web pages, the site structure and the appearance of a keyword in the different web page elements.

  2. If you have a high quality website and get links from spammy websites, try to contact the website owners and ask them to remove their links. Google will not help you with that.

  3. It the webmasters of the spammy website are not cooperative, don't worry and focus on the links that are under your control.

  4. Google recommends to optimize the many factors than influence indexing and ranking. The top 10 optimizer in our website optimization tool has been designed for exactly that task.

    It analyzes dozens of factors that influence the position of your website in the search results and it shows you what exactly you have to change so that Google will list your website on the first result page.

  5. Google says that low-quality links rarely stand the test of time and that they may not be considered by Google's ranking algorithm.

  6. If you want to make sure Google knows about the spammy links and is valuing them appropriately, you can report them to Google with their spam report or paid links report forms.

What does this mean for the rankings of your website?

Low quality links are usually links from low quality websites. These website usually have low Google rankings and they cannot pass much ranking power to other websites. For that reason, you shouldn't worry too much about links to your website that you cannot control. Better focus on the following:

  • Create high quality web pages with a good website navigation and optimized web page content. Make sure that all web page elements contain the right information so that Google will list your website for the right keywords.

  • Try to get high quality links to your website. The more high quality links your website has, the less impact have links from spammy websites.

To get an overview of the websites that link to your website, select IBP > Links > Add sites > Find existing backlinks to your site in our SEO tool IBP. IBP will show you the URL of the web page that links to you, the anchor text, the PageRank, TrafficRank and IP address of the linking pages and more.

IBP will also show you the websites that link to your competitors, blogs that could link to your website and much more.

Back to table of contents - Visit Axandra.com
2. Search engine news and articles of the week

GoogleGoogle introduces Google Social Search

"Today we're rolling out a new experiment on Google Labs called Google Social Search that helps you find more relevant public content from your broader social circle. [...] With Social Search, Google finds relevant public content from your friends and contacts and highlights it for you at the bottom of your search results."



New spam method: how to get 50,000 links from a PR9 website

"Get yourself a new Facebook page here, install the HTML profile box app Static FBML app, add a block of links to the html box using your anchor text. You can deep link to as many pages as you like here, for the sake of argument lets say you add 25 links (you could link to as many sites as you want here not just pages within the same site). Now once that page gets indexed you'll have 25 dofollow links. [...]

Create lots and lots of Facebook pages for Google to crawl, don't worry you don't have to create new business pages for each one because Google’s going to crawl every wall post."

Editor's note: do not use this method with your own website. It is likely that Google will block these links within the next few days and there might be a penalty for using this method. Better focus on SEO methods that get lasting results.



Google10 things Google has taught us

"Passion without focus can lead you astray. Bill Campbell, chairman of Intuit and a Silicon Valley mentor who spends a couple of days each week at Google, thinks the key to Google's success is 'focused passion.' He credits Schmidt for bringing a focus to the founders."



How high will real-time search fly?

"Google and Microsoft reached separate agreements last week to bring Twitter posts to their search engines. For all the buzz, however, one question remains unanswered: How easily can real-time search turn into real cash? [...]

No one doubts that helping users find fresh, up-to-the-minute content on the Web is valuable. But plenty of other valuable Web services — including content sites, free Web e-mail and social networks — have struggled to find effective business models."



 Microsoft, Google and the bear

"Two campers see a bear, and one immediately puts on his running shoes. [...] This succinctly describes the relationship when it comes to smartphones between Google (the camper with the running shoes), Microsoft (the other camper) and Apple (the bear)."



Search engine newslets

  • 11 years of Google in two minutes (video).
  • Google now offers custom search for your website.
  • Google's navigation bombshell.
  • Google's Sergey Brin on Web 2.0 summit (video). A text version can be found here.
  • Google AdWords announces new My Client Center interface.
  • Google envisions 10 million servers.

Back to table of contents - Visit Axandra.com
3. The new free keyword suggestion tool

Find keywords in English and German on KeywordIndex.com, the new online keyword suggestion tool:

keyword suggestion tool

KeywordIndex delivers keyword suggestions, search numbers and quick links to Google Trends, Google Insights and Bing xRank.

Back to table of contents - Visit Axandra.com

4. Success stories

Laura Betterly"We're number three for the term 'marketing firm'."

"Wow, we're ranking number three worldwide for the term marketing firm. Could have never done it without you! Thanks so much."
Laura Betterly, www.yadayadamarketing.com

IBP


220,000 readers will see YOUR website

Let us know how IBP has helped you to improve your website and we might publish your success story with a link to your website in this newsletter. The more detailed your story is, the better.

Back to table of contents - Visit Axandra.com

5. Previous articles

Back to table of contents - Visit Axandra.com

Do you have a minute?