These are some of the most painful questions asked by many website business owners and although we can completely sympathise with their concerns, it is not uncommon to find that sometimes they are not happy with the answers!

The truth is that the solutions to these problems often look easy on paper but implementing them is another matter entirely. Progress is most often hindered when the onsite implementation of action points can only be done by a third party web-development company.

So what are the biggest loopholes and reasons why website links and juice are lost, diluted or completely blocked from being indexed?

• Links based in JavaScript, Flash or Plug-Ins – Links embedded inside these elements are almost always inaccessible to spiders.
• Overly complex URLs ( e.g. five or more parameters in the query string)
• Session ID’s or user ID’s in the URL
• Temporary 302 Re-directs – This type of re-direct does not pass any link juice whatsoever.
• Links in submission forms – Some forms have certain elements like drop down menus and other complicated elements, like surveys, which make it very difficult for spiders to index.
• Links in internal search boxes – Spiders don’t perform searches to get content and this can result in thousands of pages on the web being completely inaccessible due to being hidden behind internal search box walls.
• Links in frames and I-Frames – these elements present complex structural problems for search engines.
• Links on dedicated pages with thousands of links – On average, the limit for search engines is 150 links per page, so this obviously causes some concerns. Preserve your link juice by using the rel=”nofollow” tag for the less important links and leave the high priority links to pass on link juice to the other pages of your site.
• Links to pages that are blocked by the commands in the Robots.txt file – Robots.txt files allow the webmaster to control and restrict spider access to certain pages that you don’t want to be indexed. Use this effectively to preserve your domain authority.
• Duplication and canonicalisation – Having more than one dedicated URL (e.g.; http://www.example.com/index.html, http://www.example.com/default.aspx etc…) for your site dilutes the amount of link authority and therefore dilutes the overall link juice that could be passed to your ideal domain URL – e.g.; http://www.example.com/
• Static and XML sitemaps – Not implementing these correctly could lead to valuable pages on your site not being indexed and therefore not contributing to the overall domain authority.

The first step in resolving these issues would be to identify the problems and then fix them. Ideally the best practice would be to keep these factors in mind when building your site up from scratch. When it comes to building a brand new site it is best to start out by creating a strong focus on architecture and linking structure. One of the best and most advised site structures, which can preserve both a strong information hierarchy and link structure, is  called a “stacked pyramids structure” as you can see from the image below.

Unfortunately most of us aren’t so lucky and only find these types of problems after the site has been built and running for a while. Lucky for us there is a little tool that is free to use and available to everyone: Google Webmaster Tools.

Google Webmaster Tools allows access to a wonderful variety of tools to troubleshoot the above mentioned problems. Once you have your site verified, navigate your way to the Crawl Errors Report.

The Crawl Errors Report is one of the most helpful tools and one of the primary reasons why Google Webmaster Tools is so helpful. Using this report will allow you to see which of your pages are giving errors and why, as well as solutions to your problems via the Webmasters Help Centre.

Use Google’s Webmaster Tools to spot loopholes that are preventing your site pages and keywords from ranking in the search engines and by doing so, you will successfully manage to preserve as much of your website’s authority and link juice.

In celebration of Mandela Day and to put our 67 minutes of volunteer work to outstandingly good use, the R.O.I. Media team decided to do what we do best – drive 67 links to an online charity that’s more than deserving of some notice. 

In tribute to the 67 years he devoted to our country’s political struggle, and in honour of our beloved icon’s 93’rd birthday, every single South African was urged to do their part by devoting 67 minutes of time to a voluntary cause. That’s pretty much a lunch hour – if you’ve got a plan and a bunch of keen mavericks to pull it off, like we do… 

We chose The Smile Foundation as our target and spent time creating a campaign to drive more traffic to their site by rocking our online SEO skills. Focussing our link building efforts toward http://www.smilefoundationsa.org/, we created one link for every minute – but the reach goes much farther. By helping this charity to rank higher on Google searches, they’ll get more donations to keep the ball of awesome rolling. That’s a job worth grinning about and with The Smile Foundation being an official charity backed by Nelson Mandela, we couldn’t think of more deserving recipients.

The foundation exists to assist children with facial abnormalities in receiving free surgery in South Africa. By bringing in expert surgical care, a wealth of education and a world of support for children and their families, they are able to bring about meaningful change. Established at the request of Nelson Mandela, who is their Chief Patron, about 11 years ago, the non profit organisation receives patients via hospital referrals, word of mouth, the media, online and their toll-free number. In much the same way, they rely on the same channels of communication to receive donations, which is naturally their most vital driving force.

R.O.I. Media hopes that by devoting our time to this charity, using our profession as a way to contribute, we can help The Smile Foundation to continue making a spectacular difference.

Happy Mandela day!! 

What do I mean by artificial? Well, it’s not according to a site’s natural link growth evolution. Good sites do attract links naturally.

In Google’s ideal world, if you find something interesting or relevant you link to it. But if a site attracts the wrong types of irrelevant links, surely Google has to protect the integrity of their algorithm from artificial manipulation?
Search engine optimizers have supported the assumption that we can control who we link to but not who links to us. Leading SEO companies only pursue one-way links, which makes you think that unless you are not linking out and only receiving one-way links, you are safe.

The reason why this makes some sleep well at night, is because if this was not true, a competitor could link to your site and potentially damage your rankings.

For those of you who think you are now safe – you are not. The reality is that links can harm your site and it’s easily detected by professionals and, of course, Google.

1. On a recent call to Eric Ward, he said link as if Google didn’t exist. This got me thinking about the whole purpose of link building. You should never just get a link from a site that has no value and just for the sake of getting a link, or you are intentionally trying to manipulate pagerank (Google’s Webmaster Guidelines).

So now assuming that we are not linking out to a bad neighbourhood and we are receiving a link, what would Google be looking out for in terms of applying a penalty for inbound links?

1. Paid Links: As per Google’s terms of service, they do not allow sites to sell text links. Sites that engage in these practices are easily detectable and Google has applied penalties to both the site linking (selling) out and the site receiving it (buying). JC Penny recently got slapped with a 90 Day penalty for paid links. If you are selling outbound links for advertising, use no follow links or face the consequences.
2. Unnatural inbound anchor text ratio: If your domain is www.brandname.com, it’s a fair assumption that the majority of your links will contain “brand name”. If it’s the opposite and its “keyword keyword”, you are going to show up on Google’s radar. Rather vary your anchor text and make sure it looks natural.
3. Unnatural link Growth patterns: If your site receives a steady flow of links per month (i.e. 20/month) and that figure jumps up dramatically (1500/month), your site can be put under review.
4. Complaint from a fellow webmaster: Google has appealed to webmasters to use its form to notify them of any link irregularities.
5. Relevancy: If the site you are receiving a link from is not relevant and has nothing to do with what you are discussing, chances are it’s been acquired for purposes of pagerank manipulation. Watch out!
6. New Trends: It doesn’t take long for Google to see artificial manipulation of a new trend for the purposes of link manipulation. Sites that abuse this usually start to rank very quickly and get blasted out of Google as quickly as they entered.

Detection:

There are two types of ways Google detects bad linking practices and applies a penalty, they are:

Automatic – based on the points above, Google can easily detect inbound link manipulation and apply a penalty

Manual:  A fellow webmaster can notify Google through Webmaster Tools of unethical link building and Google then does a manual review of your site.

How do I know if I have received a penalty ?

The simplest way of detecting a penalty, is sudden loss of traffic. If your traffic is radically down, chances are something is very wrong. Run checks on your rankings to see if they have dropped or if your site is not in the index.

Google is getting proactive and now notifies you through webmaster tools of a potential issue. If you are innocent, this can save you. If you are guilty, you need to start cleaning the mess.

An emerging trend has been seen with sites discovering spam back links and removing them to lower their spam score.  Did you just hear right?

Yes, the new face of link building is “Link Cleaners” who will remove these bad links.

What to do if you are guilty:

Make a strong case, remove the damage (yes, you know what this is) and submit a re-consideration request.

What to do if you are innocent?

Repeat the process above, explain your case and be patient or do some link cleaning.

A website is the primary income generator of many businesses and you can’t afford to get a penalty, as this could most likely destroy your business. I personally receive emails making ridiculous claims such as 3000 links for $200. If you want to be in Google’s good books, DO NOT attempt this.

The reality is that Google is already ahead of this curve and probably 99.9% of those links have zero value, so you are actually getting no boost. To get valuable links with sustainable rankings, use a trusted SEO company.

Why do we build Links? The two main reasons are:

1. Search Engine Rankings

Inbound links are very important to your website. Every inbound link associated with your website counts as a ‘vote’ in the eyes of the Search Engines. Why a vote? An inbound link is effectively a vote of confidence. Search Engines assume that if another website is willing to link to yours you must have something worthwhile on there. In other words, the more quality, one-way inbound links you have pointing to your website, the more popular your site will be with the Engines.

1. Traffic

Links also guide browsers in finding the information they are searching for. Links can in fact be seen as the doorways to every single page on the World Wide Web. This means that you can generate higher amounts of user traffic to your site by having links all over the Web pointing to your site. More traffic means more potential customers and that means, (potentially) a higher conversion rate! If these links come from sites related to yours, the users that arrive at your site would have been searching for the product or service that you provide and thus will be much more likely to actually move to action. This is why your product or service has to be the best or has to be presented in the best possible way. You don’t want the potential client to be unable to find the information they are looking for and move on!

Social Media is probably one of the most popular Link Building strategies out there, and for good reason.

These days it is possible to find breaking news on Social Bookmarking sites like Digg even before the top news agencies had had a chance to publish anything (in fact many of these news sites get their breaking news from the Social Media sites).

Link Building with the help of Social Media sites is a great strategy if you know how to use it properly. Merely leaving your links on all the bookmarking sites you can find most definitely does not guarantee you anything in the way of traffic or “Link Juice”. Here is how you SHOULD be doing it:

• First and foremost, building a good reputation in the Social Media realm is a must! Top Social Media users are known throughout the platform they are using, and therefore they have an army of followers that vote for their additions.

• Don’t bookmark for the sake of a link. Your work will count for nothing. Here, like everywhere else on the web, content is king. Contributing useful and interesting information to the Network will ensure that users click on your link and you will build your reputation.

• Choosing a “catchy” title and using market-related keywords in that title could mean the difference to your bookmark moving up in the ranks or being buried under all the thousands of daily bookmarked sites.

• Choosing the correct category for your bookmark is also very important. Religious Social Media users will bury your link if they feel that you are only interested in leaving your link for self gain. In other words, don’t bookmark your “Cute Kittens” site in the World News Category.

Web2.0 can be classified as sites on the web where the user can contribute to the information found on that site. A good example would be Social Media sites, like Reddit.

There are others, like the well-known and much-used Wiki’s. Wikipedia is a vast source of user generated knowledge and information. AboutUs.org is another Wiki that is mainly used to advertise your service or product on a different platform than your official site. Do a good job and make sure that you don’t duplicate content from your existing site, and the good folks at AboutUs.org can actually remove the No Follow attribute from your created page. Link Juice!!!!!!

Web 3.0 – the Semantic web is on the rise.

Web3.0 uses the semantics of language to be able to deduce what it is that you, as a consumer, like. This means it analyses your likes and dislikes in order to send relevant content your way. Awesome, right? Twine.com is a fantastic Web 3.0 platform. This is a Web 3.0 Social Media site consumers can use to create and bookmark their own “Twines” of information.

Social Media is here to stay. It is already evolving with the use of the Semantic Web. We should keep evolving and use the technology that is out there. Who knows, in the near future the entire Internet will probably be personalised to your suit your specific requirements!

Widely whispered to be one of the most important aspects of Search
Engine Optimisation, link building is very much like starting an exercise
routine. Not the easiest of tasks by a long shot, it takes time and effort to
get a successful link building campaign off the ground and even more time to
see the results of your efforts. Suffice to say you’ll have to run around
the track a few times before the muscle starts to show.

Getting links to your site is crucial if you want to dominate the Search engine
results pages on Google and its contemporaries.

Jealously guarding our coveted market-related keywords we all strive to rank
within that mystical top 10 search engine results on Google – that Global
Super Power of the search engine marketing world.

One of the best ways to earn a spot in that elusive
top 10 is to get other sites to vote for yours. Think of each link you build
as a little ballot paper, a stamp of approval that marks you as an authority
in the specific market you choose to target.

Just to make matters a little more complicated it has to be said that not just
any link will do. The links pointing to your site should be relevant, i.e. the
site that links to you should have similar content or content related to the
information on your site. Furthermore, you should also take into account factors
like the age of the site that’s linking to you, the other sites it’s
linked to, as well as the sites that link to them. All of these pesky little
factors can make or break your link building efforts

The fact of the matter is that link building is HARD and, at times, severely
frustrating, but if you keep at it and bear in mind the fundamental link building
guidelines you are sure to see the results.