Backlink Tool: Penguin-Friendly Link Building Tips

Statistics show that the Google Penguin update hit more than 64 percent of websites. If all of your traffic comes from Google, then you are setting yourself up for failure. Search engine optimization and link building strategies have changed completely after the arrival of Google Panda and Google Penguin. Sites with low quality backlinks or identical anchor text have been penalized. If you want boost your rankings and succeed in online marketing after Google Penguin, then your link building campaign should look natural in the eyes of Google.

First of all, you should focus on offering useful content on your website. Nothing can beat high quality content. If you provide fresh information, other sites will link to you. Just understanding that Google is built on users may help you get your site back up to where you want it to be. You simply can't get away with links from over-promotional sites, irrelevant sites, or web pages that have poor quality content. Great content earns links over time and generates long term results.

Focus on quality links over quantity. Even if you are using a backlink tool, choose one that generates quality backlinks. Stop building anchor text for more than 10 percent of your links. Another element that Google has penalized is over-optimization. For example, if you are targeting the keyword "cheap holidays in Greece" and you are asking all of your readers and customers to link to your sites using that exact keyword, search engines will think it's highly suspicious. Try to diversify your anchor text.

If you are writing guest posts for link building, focus on quality. One high quality link from a reputable blog is better than 100 links from low quality sites. Search engines will penalize your website if it has a large amount of links from untrusty sites. You should also diversify traffic sources to hedge against fluctuations. Guest posting is all about creating long term relationships for years to come. Make sure your site or blog is compelling enough to pull natural backlinks.

Get links from websites that are relevant to your niche. Make your content link worthy. Get more social and stay active on social networking sites. This way you will obtain natural links that are relevant to your site. Work hard creating amazing content and building relationships with your audience. Don't forcefully repeat keywords. Use unconventional link building techniques and check the authority of websites linking to your content.

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The Google Disavow Links Tool: Summary of Objective and Use

The Disavow Links Tool was released by Google in October. Its purpose is to enable you to identify low quality links and request that Google does not take such links into account when calculating your PageRank. You can therefore reduce the effect of link spam or irrelevant links on your web pages.

What Links Can Harm Your Page Ranking?

Google lists web pages, not entire domains or websites. However, while each page is fundamentally indexed and listed on its own merits, your entire domain could suffer if you are using low quality links on numerous pages. What is a low quality link? Here are some examples:

Paid links: you have paid for backlinks to be generated by a third party. Irrelevant links: links from pages that have no relevance to your target page content. Reciprocal links: Excessive link exchanges - some may be acceptable, but only Google knows what is 'excessive.' This is often associated with the irrelevant links mentioned above. Low Quality Articles: Links from poorly written articles. If you pay a small amount for a large number of articles they are likely badly written. This will harm your ranking. Comment Spam: Software-generated comments on other people's blogs. Web Spam: Links from web spammer sites Automated Links: Software generated links or automated programs that create links. Contextual Links: You often see these in blue on passages of online text. The links appear to be irrelevant to the topic of the page. These are software generated and can result in your PageRank being reduced and your listing being harmed if they are linked to your website.

Keep in mind that we are discussing links to your web pages. Links from your web pages to spammy sites will also harm your ranking, but you can remove these manually yourself. You cannot remove links published on other websites (more on this below).

When to Use the Disavow Links Tool

Matt Cutts of Google recommends that the Disavow Links Tool be used sparingly and only as a last resort. Matt emphasis that "most people do not need to use this tool." He describes it as a tool for power users, not the home user or regular business.

He recommends that you use Google Webmaster Tools to get a list of your backlinks and check the most recent first. If you believe that you site or individual pages are being harmed by links over which you have no control, you should ask the webmaster of the other site to remove them. If this fails, then you can use the Disavow tool to flag them so that Google ignores them.

Examples of How Bad Links Can be Generated

You made a charity donation in return for a link that happened to be sandwiched between links to a Pharma company and a sex site. You made comment on a blog relating to casino gambling, leaving a link back to your pet food page. You paid for links that were generated from a wide range of websites totally irrelevant to your niche. You belong to a reciprocal linking service that offers you links in return for you publishing the links of others: in each case they are published on 'links pages.' You have links on a site that relates to your niche, but on which many others have disavowed their links. Google may regard this as a suspicious site.

Google, through Matt Cutts, has clearly stated that this tool should be used sparingly and only when necessary. It will not remove the link from another person's website, but will exclude it from the ranking calculation in much the same way as the 'nofollow' attribute does (Matt's words). It will take about a week to come into effect, but much longer to reverse!

Summary

This is not intended as a Google Disavow Links Tool tutorial, but simply to set your mind at rest that it is no big deal to most people. Those that have employed dubious linking strategies in the past, or even that still do so, will have more reason to be interested in it.

What was acceptable many moons ago is not acceptable now, and link-building software services, paid links, auto-blogging and auto-comment services are no longer acceptable to Google. Neither are badly written articles with poor content and grammar, and articles created by scraping the web. You may want to disavow links from such publications.

Google has intensified its campaign against such automatic generation of content and is seeking natural hand-written articles and website information. The Google Disavow Links Tool is just one more way of Google enabling you to meet its requirements. In the words of Matt Cutts himself: "Most need not use it - only a very small number of people, and if used indiscriminately you could should yourself in the foot."

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Backlink Tool: How to Build Links With Infographics

Infographics are some of the most powerful SEO tools in the social media world. These graphics are visual representations of information or data. Using infographics has become a new way of sharing information on the Internet. Instead of writing a blog post or an article that includes lots of percentages and stats, you can create an information graphic that ties it all together in a visually appealing image. This way you can express complex messages to readers in a way that enhances their comprehension.

Increasingly more webmasters are using infographics for link building and SEO. Adding images to your posts makes them more interesting and appealing to readers. Search engines love multi-media stuff. Statistics show that infographics are up to 40 times more likely to be viewed and shared on social media sites compared to text. They are easy to add to websites and they boil down the most important elements of complicated stories.

A well designed infographic that offers fresh information and appeals to the interests of your audience will always be successful at building quality backlinks. One of the biggest benefits of using information graphics as part of your link building campaign is that the links you will get tend to be from relevant websites. Some of the most popular types of infographics are data visualizations, viral visualizations, iconic visualizations, and business insights.

Many infographics fail because their design is low quality or their topic is poor. An engaging topic combined with a visually appealing design can make the difference between high quality backlinks and a wasted investment. If you create compelling graphics, a highly authoritative website will use the embeddable HTML code to share your work withy its readers. You should also consider adding your images to popular infographic depositories, so that others can see them.

Studies indicate that over 60 percent of people are visual learners. Internet users are generally looking at information graphics on lunch breaks or whenever they have some free time. Most of them don't have time to read long articles. If you want to get the most out of this link building technique, create infographics that are attractive, informative, relevant, and easy to share.

Marketing is essential to maximize the exposure of your images. If you are getting information from external sources, let the owner of the dataset know about your intention. He might be interested in any tool created using his data. If you are using independent contractors to create infographics for your site, ask them to feature your design on their websites or in their portfolios. Make sure your infographic has a Facebook like button, a Twitter button, and social network share buttons for Pinterest and Reddit.

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Backlink Tool: What Is Anchor Text and Why Is It Important for Link Building?

Simply getting links from other sites and blogs is not enough for your website to rank well in search results. The quality of your anchor text plays a key role in link building. This element represents the visible text in a hyperlink. In most browsers, it is typically blue and underlined. Most SEO experts know the value of a quality backlink, but many of them fail to understand that the anchor text of a particular link is almost always the most important factor in search engine optimization.

This element tells search engines what the page is about. When used properly, it can boost your search engine rankings and support your link building efforts. Many webmasters don't know how to use this factor. Instead of choosing a relevant keyword to turn into a hyperlink, they use words and phrases such as "click here" or "read more."

Search engine spiders gather information from all around the web via links. Links are used as key factors for identifying the main topic of the pages they are visiting. The anchor text plays an essential role in search engine algorithms because it usually indicates what the landing page is about. The main goal of the search engines is to generate relevant search results: this is where this element comes in. For example, if you have an online store that sells gifts and souvenirs, building links with the anchor text "holiday gifts," "gift items, " or "gift certificates" will boost your rankings.

Whether you are using a backlink tool or you prefer to build links by yourself, there are a few things that you should consider in order to succeed. First of all, you should vary your anchor text. When you are linking to your website from article directories or social media sites, make sure that you don't always use the same phrase as anchor text. If many links are pointing to a web page with relevant keywords in its anchor text, that page will rank in search engines and attract traffic.

You can use this element in navigation maps, internal links, external links, and links on your main page. If you want a page to rank for a specific keyword, then you should include that keyword in your anchor text. When you ask other people to link to your posts, you should use variations of your target keyword. Switch keywords in key phrases and include synonyms.

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