Hi Gang,
Just a quickie to tell you all about a freebie we have coming out later this week for members. I have had various discussions over the past week or so and one of the common themes is “how do I go about rescuing a domain / web site when it has appeared to disappear from sight index wise and / or been slapped by one or other of the Search Engines?”
Now if we are all honest then most of us have been in this unfortunate situation from time to time and the best piece of advice that I can always offer in a situation like this is to look at ways that you can “freshen up” the back links landscape of the site or domain in question.
This is quite often one of the less well known aspects of the SEO but it really is one of the most basic and the reason behind it is actually quite obvious when you think about it.
What Search Engines are looking for when they “come calling” is to see a web site that as far as its Link Profile is concerned is a profile that as closely as possible approximates that that would have been created if the entire process had been created by human intervention and not via a network of software applications.
What is that we humans do best?
Screw up, that’s we do more often than most and in a lot of cases that is what we do best and as such that is quite often what the SE’s want to see. As such as far as inbound links then the SE’s want to see a good healthy mix of the following:
- Direct Anchor Links
- Indirect links
- Redirects
- Dofollow links
- Nofollow Links
- Typos
- Good IP spread of inbound links
A back links landscape comprised of a healthy mix and spread of the above type of links will stand you in good stead and make whatever landscape you are constructing look credible and believable.
So how do we go about the above and make this whole landscape look varied and believable. Firstly don’t shy away from sites that only provide “nofollow” links as these can still be extremely useful for two reasons. Bear in mind that our back links serve two purposes. Firstly we want to try and pass on and / or aquire as much “juice” or credibility as we can from the originating site as possible and secondly we want to try and make sure that the links and / or pages we are promoting are discovered as quickly and as efficiently as possible.
Now bear in mind what the “nofollow” attribute does to a link. Basically it tells GoogleBot not to pass on any acquired power / PR / ”juice” or whatever to the target site for the link but that is all. Contrary to a lot of folks it does not tell the Crawler or Bot not to follow that link just to disregard any link power that the originating site may or may not be passing on. As such “nofollow” links quite often are to be found on sites or locations that might be good for traffic and to that end they are perfect.
Bear in mind that our second major attribute of an inbound link is to make our target pages discovered as soon as possible and therefore “nofollow” links serve this purpose excellently. So the ideal scenario is to use “nofollow” links to link to or support pages where “dofollow” links exist to make them discovered as soon as is possible.
So we drive traffic and Bots via our “nofollow” links to our other back links and therefore get them discovered and crawled and therefore the Linking Process begins and the “dofollow” links start to accumulate and direct power to our target and / or other web 2.0 pages that are part of our structure.
Now whilst we were fine tuning our approach to “re invigorating” supposed dead sites we happened to stumble upon ( no pun intended as Stumbleupon was not a site that we used in this scenario) another of the so called New Generation of sites that helped us kick start one of our so called dead sites.
Now quite often sites or pages can slip down the indexes if Google or Yahoo etc think the page or site in question is dead and no longer current or valid. At this point you have to do two things. First off you need to rejuvenate the inbound links – freshen the profiles of these links up as much as is possible and then secondly you have to tell the Bots that the site in question is not actually dead or moribund but still “alive and kicking”.
There are several ways that you can accomplish the latter but one of the most effective ways of doing this we have found is to make sure that as much traffic finds its way to the site in question and by the very nature of this traffic, it tells Google / Yahoo/Bing (almost forces them) to reconsider its assessment of the viability of the site.
We have found Twitter to be rather useful in this and it was whilst we were experimenting with Twitter earlier today that we found out how useful it could be.
Now that Google has started to crawl and index Tweets then Twitter really starts to figure quite proactively as far as site promotion is concerned. Not only is it an ace way to drive highly targeted and focussed traffic to your site but if you have the support of a at least one (preferably more) good Twitter accounts with “clout” then there can be considerable benefits all round.
By “clout”, I mean a Twitter user profile with a reasonable number of followers that suggest to the outsider that it is an account of some standing” (the more followers the better) and as such merits consideration.
Now the commonly held view is that with Twitter you have to get your user accounts over the 2,000 follower marker as soon as is possible. Once you have more than 2,000 followers your credibility rises accordingly.
