Mostly used tricks of Dirty Linking

As we all are familiar with the concept of search engine positions. The best way to achieve Search Engine Positions are acquiring links from external web pages. These links can come from websites who like your site or who link to your site(natural links), reciprocal link building, directory submissions and lots of other ways.

True quality links will carry benefits far beyond that of attaining a coveted position in the search engine results. The links will bring traffic from the Web page linking to your Web page. Therefore, you want to ensure you trade or barter links from quality partners.

Sometimes it's hard to determine who is a quality linking partner, even for the expert. So, how can you tell if your link is on a Web page where its value will not be very good?

The short list below highlights ways of diminishing or nullifying the value of a link to your site from another Web page.

Meta Tag Masking - this old trick simply used CGI codes to hide the Meta tags from browsers while allowing search engines to actually see the Meta tags.

Robots Meta Instructions - using noindex and nofollow attributes let's the novice link partner see the visible page with their link while telling the search engines to ignore the page and the links found on the page. Nofollow can be used while allowing the page to be indexed which gives the impression that the search engines will eventually count the link.

Rel=nofollow Attributes - this is not a real attribute based upon HTML standards, but rather it is an attribute approved by the search engines to help identify which links should not be followed. This attribute is often used with blogs to prevent comment and link spam. The link will appear on the Web page and in the search engine's cache, but never be counted.

Dynamic Listing - dynamic listing is a result of having links appear randomly across a series of pages. Each time the link is found on a new page, the search engines count consider the freshness of the link. It is extremely possible that the link won't be on the same page upon the next search engine visitation. So, the link from a partner displaying rotating, dynamic link listings rarely helps.

Floating List - this can be easily missed when checking link partners. Essentially, your link could be number one today, but as new link partners are added your link is moved down the list. This is harmful because the values of the links near the bottom of the list are considered to be of lesser value than the links at the top. With the floating list, it is possible to have your link moved to a new page whose PR value is significantly less or not existent and the new page may not be visited and indexed for months.

Old Cache - the caching date provided by Google indicates the last time the page was cached. Pages with lower PR values tend to be visited and cached less often than pages that have medium to high PR values. If the cache is more than six months old, it can be surmised that Google has little or no desire to revisit the page.

Denver Pages - while Denver, CO is a nice place to visit, Denver Pages are not a place you want to find your link in a trade. Denver Pages typically have a large amount of links grouped into categories on the same page. Some people call this the mile high list. These types of pages do not have any true value in the search engines and are not topically matched to your site.

Muddy Water Pages - these are dangerous and easy to spot. Your link will be piled in with non-topically matched links with no sense of order. It's like someone took all the links and thrown them in the air to see where they land. These are worse than the Denver Pages.

Cloaking - cloaking is the process of providing a page to people while providing a different page to search engines. You could be seeing your link on the Web page, but the search engines could possibly never see the link because they are provided with a different copy. Checking Google's cache is the only way to catch this ploy.

Dancing Robots - this can be easily performed with server-side scripting like PHP and is rarely easy to catch. In this situation people that attempt to view the robots.txt file receive a copy of the robots.txt file that does not include exclusion instructions for the search engines. However, when the search engines request the robots.txt file they receive the exclusion instructions. With this situation the links pages will never be linked and you'll never know why without expert assistance.

Meta Tags and Robots.txt Confusion - which instructions have the most weight? Don't know the answer? Shame. Search engines do. If they conflict the page Meta tags are typically considered the rule to follow.

Link the Head - while these links do not count in the search engines and do not show up on the Web page, they do get counted by scripts or programs designed to verify the links exist. These programs only look for the URL within the source codes for the Web page.

Empty Anchors - this is a nasty trick, but can be an honest mistake. The links exist and are counted by the search engines, but unfortunately are neither visible nor clickable on the Web page. So, there are no traffic values from the link.

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How to Avoid Alienating the Major Search Engines

Each of the major search engines Google, Yahoo and MSN have quality webmaster guidelines in place to prevent the unfair manipulation of search engine rankings by unscrupulous website owners. These webmaster guidelines change frequently to ‘weed’ out any new deceptive practices and those websites found engaging in these illicit practices are consequently dropped from the search engine rankings of the major search engine they have offended.

Being banned or dropped from the search engine rankings can have dire effects on your website traffic, online sales generation and site popularity. Especially if your website is classified as a ‘bad neighborhood’ site, you can then kiss your reciprocal linking campaign goodbye, as existing and prospective link partners will not want to be associated with your site for fear of their own rankings dropping.

If you wish to avoid alienating the major search engines then do not engage in the following SE tactics:

1. ‘Cloaking’ or sneaky redirects - displaying different content to the search engines than shown to your normal website visitors including hidden text and hidden links. Often this is achieved by delivering content based on the IP address of the user requesting the page, when a user is identified as a search engine spider a side-server script delivers a different version of the web page to deceive the search engine into giving the website a higher ranking.

2. ‘Doorway’ pages created specifically for the search engines that are aimed at spamming the index of a search engine by inserting results for specific keyword phrases to send the search engine spider to a different page. With doorway pages a user doesn’t arrive at the page they were looking for. Similarly avoid ‘cookie cutter’ approaches that direct users to affiliate advertising with little or no original content.

3. Don’t create pages that install viruses, Trojans or badware. ‘Badware’ is spyware, malware or deceptive adware that tracks a user’s movements on the internet and reports this information back to unscrupulous marketing groups who then bombard the user with targeted advertising. This type of spyware is often unknowingly downloaded when playing online games or is attached to software or information downloads from a site. They are often difficult to identify and remove from a user’s PC and can affect the PC’s functionality.

4. Avoid using software that sends automatic programming queries to the search engines to submit pages or check rankings. This type of software consumes valuable computing resources of the search engines and you will be penalized for using it.

5. Don’t load web pages with irrelevant words.

6. Don’t link to ‘bad neighborhood’ sites who have:

* Free for all links pages
* Link farms - automated linking schemes with lots of unrelated links
* Known web spammers or the site has been dropped or banned by the search engines.

7. Avoid ‘broken links’ or ‘404 errors’, your site will be penalized for them.

8. Don’t display pages with minimal content that is of little value to your site visitors.

9. Do not duplicate content unnecessarily.

10. Do not use pop-ups, pop-unders or exit consoles.

11. Do not use pages that rely significantly on links to content created for another website.

12. Do not use ‘cross linking’ to artificially inflate a site’s popularity. For example, the owner of multiple sites cross linking all of his sites together, if all sites are hosted on the same servers the search engines will pick this up and the sites will be penalized.

13. Do not misuse a competitors name or brand names in site content.

14. Sites with numerous, unnecessary virtual host names will be penalized.

15. Do not use techniques that artificially increase the number of links to your web pages ie. Link farms.

16. Display web pages with deceptive, fraudulent content or pages that provide users with irrelevant page content.

17. Using content, domain titles, meta tags and descriptions that violate any laws, regulations, infringe on copyrights & trademarks, trade secrets or intellectual property rights of an individual or entity. Specifically in terms of publicity, privacy, product design, torts, breach of contract, injury, damage, consumer fraud, false, misleading, slanderous or threatening content.

Google Slips in China

A new report shows Baidu.com Inc. increased its share of the search market in China's top cities, while rival Google Inc. lost ground despite continued heavy investments in its Chinese operations.

Baidu has a 69.5 percent share of the search market in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, up 7.6 percentage points since last year, according to a report (in Chinese) by Peter Lu, managing partner and chief analyst at China IntelliConsulting Corp. (CIC).

Meanwhile, Google saw its share of the market shrink, falling 1.1 percentage points to 23 percent.

Google's decline was offset somewhat by improved performance among students during the most recent six months. But the company continued to lose its older, more affluent users to Baidu, the report said.

These figures are likely to step up the pressure on Google China President Kai-Fu Lee to deliver results for the company. Google China has grown quickly, hiring hundreds of staff and moving into a new building close to the campus of Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University. But these investments have yet to deliver the hoped-for domination of China's search market and raised concerns the company expanded too fast in the country.

Those concerns came to a head in April, when Google admitted that a software tool released by its Chinese operations used a database developed by rival Sohu.com Inc. for a competing product -- a stunning admission for a company that is widely respected for the strength of its engineering operations and the caliber of its software developers.

The CIC report had some good news for Google. The company's efforts to strengthen its Chinese search capabilities are recognized by users, with 58.5 percent of respondents in a survey saying they'd noticed changes to the search engine. Of those respondents, 65.3 percent said Google's Chinese search engine had improved.

Other search engines also saw their share of the search market decline. Yahoo China, which is run by Alibaba.com Inc., saw its share drop 2.9 percentage points to 2.3 percent of the market, while Sohu.com's Sogou search engine fell 1.4 points to 1.8 percent.

Way of Link Campaigns

If we are going to be engaged with link campaigns,there are various reasons for that. Mostly search engines always prefer links to determine a site rank in SERPs(search engine results page).And if we talk about Google algorithms, link campaigns always play a vital role in search engine promotion and marketing strategies.

Before getting into it deeply,lets have a look on types of link campaigns we often handle:

Reciprocal Link: This is where two sites exchange links to each other's site.

One Way Link : where one site links to other site without getting link back from that site.

Tri-Way Link : where one site links to other site and get back a link from other's secondary site.

Reciprocal linking is a easy process than one way linking and also time consuming process too. During this process, a web master look for the related websites and ask them for link exchange.

If and when you receive some responses, you should add their sites as soon as you can, and send them an email telling them that their link has been added, and include the url where they can see their site.

In-Bound (One-way) Links are the best type of links if you can get them. It's not all that difficult to do so, but as in anything worth while, there will be an amount of effort involved.

The easiest way to get In bound links to your site is to do directory submissions. There are many great free directories to submit to, and it's worth the time and effort to get listed in as many as you possibly can.

There are also fee-based directories which you submit to, and as your budget allows, you should try to get listed in all directories that are relevant to your site's topic.

The next way to get one-way links to your site is to do a press release. With sites such as prwire, you can submit a press release to them for free, and that will not only get your site exposure, but it will also get you some in-bound links.

If you have the ability to compose articles or columns, there are many sites that can get your site exposure by you allowing them to re-print your content. While some may argue that this procedure may penalize you in the search engines for duplicate content, as long as you have posted your article to your site first, you shouldn't get hit by a duplicate content penalty.

Web Site Cloaking and Search Engines

Cloak: Something which hides, covers or keeps something else secret. (Cambridge Dictionary)

Cloaking: Also known as stealth, a technique used by some Web sites to deliver one page to a search engine for indexing while serving an entirely different page to everyone else. The search engine thinks it is selecting a prime match to its request based on the meta tags that the site administrator has input. However, the search result is misleading because the meta tags do not correspond to what actually exists on the page. Some search engines ... even ban cloaked Web sites. (Webopedia)

A good amount of web space has been dedicated to the merits of cloaking, but no one seems able to agree on the actual definition of the technique. One definition given is: "A technique used to deliver different web pages under different circumstances." This definition is too broad as page redirects for different browsers, for example, would be included under this definition but these pages are not hidden from search engine robots.

The one main characteristic of cloaking, according to Webopedia and Google, employs a different page delivered to search engines than the one displayed to visitors to the Web site; its only purpose being to hide content from search engines.

Many of those who employ cloaking techniques argue that they are presenting something different to a search engine rather than hiding something from it. The end result remains the same: the page presented to the search engine is different than the one anticipated by the visitor.

Link Building Quality Parameters

Link Building requires deep analysis of search engine algorithms and there response to the quality & relevancy of the links so if you are planning to outsource your link building campaigns, it is extremely important that you must insist your service provider to conform to the following quality guidelines for your Link Building Campaign.

1. Only Incoming (non-reciprocal) links.
2. Links with specified "Keywords" in the Anchor Text.
3. Sufficient randomization in the anchor text and associated link description text so as to not have a set pattern of linking.
4. Links from sites that have PR specified links page.
5. Link to your site should not be through a "redirect" script.
6. No JavaScript links.
7. No framed sites.
8. No flash site links.
9. No robots.txt excluded link pages.
10. No Robots Tag excluded link pages.
11. No paid or time-bound links
12. Links from Pre-indexed Pages only.
13. Spread your site link across different domains.
14. No SPAM should be used to solicit links.
15. No links from Link Farms.
16. No links from FFA (Free-For-All) link networks.
17. Don't get links from Blogs and that have the Link Attribute, "rel=nofollow".
18. No links from PORN, racially prejudiced sites and other sites containing offensive content.
19. Full data sheet of links created at the end of each month.
20. Only relevant established links should be counted in the final report.
21. The links creation should be spread across a duration of time, so that there is no sudden surge in the incoming links count.
22. No more than 60 links per page where your link appears
23. Links from industry-relevant pages.
24. Links pace as per client convenience
25. No email spam used to solicit links

Link Popularity Building helps your website gain high Page Rank which enables your site to rank higher in major Search Engines with highly competitive keywords.

Link Building: The paradox of Poverty amidst Plenty

An effective landing page is only as good as the visitors that it attracts. Hence, the next logical step after development of an effective landing page is to promote it. This involves attracting qualified visitors to it, by employing various online marketing efforts, viz. PPC or SEO , email marketing. Another frequently employed online marketing tool with the twin benefit of economy and effectiveness is Link Building.

Link building is a practice of getting the other semantically similar websites to feature your link on their websites. Link building constitutes finding viable business partners willing to endorse your site. An authoritative link to your site counts as one vote toward your link popularity.

Other site owners would link to a page, when they consider the content important. Likewise, search engines will consider your content important because human beings, not software programs, link to your site’s content. These factors result in the page attracting classified visitors.

There are various attributes that influence the link building initiative. The irony of link building is that while it may be appear to be an easy exercise (sourcing links from FFA and link a minute sites is easy), the real benefits of link building accrue only when the link is obtained from a quality website that is thematically relevant to the website that the link is requested for. Hence the paradox.

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