Kikabink News

Good article by P.J. Fusco on getting backlinks from web directories. Ms Fusco explains that obtaining backlinks from the RIGHT directories is still a legitimate link building practice for the purposes of search engine optimization (SEO).

For one thing, directory submissions typically give you control over the anchor text used to link to your site. For another thing, directories are not only fairly easy to find, but also allow and WANT you to submit your site to them.

Just be sure to focus only on directories that are RELEVANT to your business - whether they are general, topical, niche or local/regional directories. Indeed, Ms Fusco suggests you take your time when evaluating a directory and to look for these signs:

• .edu and .gov backlinks;
• An aged domain;
• Lots of pages indexed by the search engines;
• Good PageRank flow-through to the listing pages; and
• Fewer than 100 links per listing page.

Similarly, she gives some solid tips for what to AVOID in a directory. You want to steer away from directories that:

• Are NOT relevant to your website;
• Are really just thinly veiled link farms;
• Contain links to “bad neighborhoods”;
• Have excessive broken links; and
• Feature numerous pop-up or pop-under ads.

Check out Ms Fusco’s article for more tips, including a list of other things to avoid when evaluating a directory.

Source: P.J. Fusco, “Tactical Link Building: Reliable Directories”, The ClickZ Network, August 27, 2008

Interesting article by Patrick Altoft - he reckons Google may have reduced the weighting it gives to anchor text in its search engine algorithm.

Anchor text is the text that appears in website links. In other words, instead of simply displaying the URL of a given website, you might provide some descriptive text - this is known as anchor text. As an example, “http://www.kikabink.com/news/” is the straight URL of the home page of Kikabink News. But if I wanted this link to appear as “Internet marketing newsletter” I would write “Internet marketing newsletter” as the descriptive or anchor text.

According to Mr Altoft, anchor text is the “biggest flaw” in the Google algorithm. He believes that anchor text has no relation to trust for most queries.

“Just because a site has 5 million links with the anchor text ‘loans’ doesn’t mean its a good search result for the query ‘loans’. Currently there are two types of sites ranking for commercial queries - ones that rank due to the TrustRank of their incoming links (links from newspaper websites and quality blogs) and ones that rank because they have thousands of paid links with keywords in the anchor text.”

At this stage, the under-weighting of anchor text is just a theory… but certainly an interesting, and possibly valid, one.

Source: Patrick Altoft , “Google Changes Algorithm - Anchor Text Less Important”, BlogStorm, August 22, 2008