Simon Lissa

I really wanted to write something valuable now that I have some time to give back but am a little stumped to what I have to offer, I dont really have any revolutionary link building strategies, or huge link lists to give, all I do is rinse and repeat the fundamentals that I learned from reading books and getting involved in forums (thanks guys).

I may have the largest list of hand built web 2.0 properties any of us have ever seen but I also have the highest income of anyone I know and serp result I never dreamed I could get.

Anyhow giving back… I am sure many of you would agree that one of the most common mistakes link builders make is getting caught up in confusion, the latest toys and simply not getting shit done. If you really want to make a living online you gotta get shit done.

I was forever confused about what I should be exploring and learning in the link building world, like many I got so caught up in trying new stuff I never got anyhting done at all, much of what I was doing was overlapping and just a total mess, jumping from one thing to the next. I think what got me caught up more than anything was simply that I never had a clear direction on where I was trying to get to, no clear target in sight, which often left me feeling overwhelmed, confused and worst of all I felt like I was going backwards. I would be working on 4-5 link building apps or services a day and then the next day I would be working on 4-5 different ones… sound familiar? for your sake I hope not.

Now days is a totally different story, I have a mental organisation of what I’m learning, where it applies and how far along I am in mastering that particular area. I have cancelled near 80% of my paid subscriptions yet I am getting exponentially better results than I was before because I am constantly doing something to move closer to my objectives.

I think that one of the things that really got me going in a new direction was simply creating an excel spread sheet that separated all the different types of links and outlined how to target them. this gave me a clear mental picture of everything link building. This enabled me to then build a monthly plan for each of my sites on what needed to be done to beat my competitors.

So anyway that’s what I have to share, as un-sexy and un-complicated as it is, it made a big difference to me and hopefully it will have some use for some of you. (There is a key for the acronyms at the bottom of the page).

Looking at your link building efforts in this way also helps you to ensure you are always getting good link variation which is imperative in avoiding a penalty.

I though I would share it here both for your benefit but also in a hope that some may contribute to it, I dont think I would have thought of every link type and platform, in fact I think that after I built this spreadsheet, I got the clarity that I needed and just started working, I never had time to go back and mess around with a spreadsheets any more so it is probably fairly incomplete.

Key:

Though i am aware that a lot of people, some in quite authoritative positions write off directory submissions as a way to promote a website, my experience with using them has been very different, I think what I like most about the strategy of submitting to directories is that because so many authoritative people have written them off as a waste of time, no one is doing it, there is so much opportunity and space to just let loose, there are other advantages to that also but I will talk about them later.

So I am a big fan of directory submissions, especially when it comes to client work. Mostly because of the mass IP, Domain referral and platform variation they provide and lastly they help enormously with google places listings if your including a physical address.

Additionally I think directory submissions even mass directory submissions fly strait under the google penalty radar simply because legitimate business and inexperienced webmaster put a lot of effort into getting lots of these when they first come to the scene because it is a natural flow on from traditional media mentality “get in all the local papers and directories” and lastly, in my experience people are not exploiting directory listings to the extent of other platforms, sure most people hit them once or twice to get a few hundred listings but no one is utilising large amount of resources over a long period of time hitting directories, meaning that it is less likley for google to go after someone doing it and the poeple who own directories are not spending all their time and money trying to keep spammers out making it relativly easy to get them. Many online directory sites dont even have captcha’s!

As long as you take into account a couple precautionary measures like hitting your local domain extension properties first (e.g. .com.au for Australia or .co.uk for the UK) variate your description text a lot, dont hit 10k in one fell swoop and variate the directory platforms your targeting you’ll be flying like a stealth bomber, dropping bomb’s like Hiroshima.

I have been playing around with Sliq Submitter a lot over the last couple months, it comes pre loaded with around 2k directories but you will only get reported success in about 1400.

Its got a couple negatives:
One it does not allow you to spin your descriptions, this makes variating your listings descriptions a HUGE time consuming task
Secondly as far as I can tell it is only compatible with one directory platform PHPLD or PHP Link Directory (the foot print is “Powered by: php Link Directory”)
And lastly it does not check if the links are actually approved and so it does not give you any reports that give you the actual location of the listings, it reports how many success but how many of those actually are I have no idea (wait they do have a . I did try it on a new domain and it does get quite a few indexed.

On the positive side its a very strait forward and simple tool to use, a total idiot could work it out and it is very intuitive in the way that it selects categories. Also works with captcha sniper but thats not a big deal when your only hitting 2k properties. it does have a new feature where it will go out and check the directories it has posted to for your link but its very slow and tediouse.

Anyway using hrefer (you could use scrape box also) I scraped some properties based on about 12 directory platforms (footprints below) and was able to generate a list of over 3k local directories (.com.au domains only, let me know if you want the list) with little to no effort but Sliq only accepted 7 of these

This forces me to find an alternate solution, possibly GSA submitter or one of the other 50 directory submissions software’s out there then again it may be easier to use Xrumer mods or training Zenno poster (or even scrapebox again if that’s your fancy). What is going to be difficult is mimicking the category selection algorithm that apps like Sliq do so well.

Ultimately I would like to hit many more directory platforms, and I know is not that difficult. I think this is a great way to get local links and diversity which are both super important now days, especially when working with the big G.

I will be sure to report back soon when I found the solution.

Has anyone successfully used something like Xrumer or Zenno poster to do directory submissions? if so I look forward to hearing about how you did it.

Directory Footprints:
“Powered by: php Link Directory”
“powered by PHPLD”
“Powered by WSN Links”
“powered by PHP Weby”
“Powered by cpLinks”
“Powered by cpDynaLinks”
“powered by BosDirectory”
“Powered by Link manager LinkMan”
“Powered by Gossamer Links”
“Powered by K-Links”
“Powered by In-Link”
“Powered by eSyndiCat Directory Software”
“Powered by: qlWebDS Pro”
“Powered by Directory software by LBS”
“powered by phpMyDirectory.com”
“Powered by HubDir PHP directory script”
“powered by BizDirectory”
“Powered by Free Directory Submissions”
“Powered by the original Free Article Directory”

OK so I thought I would share my finding now that I have had some time to look this PR update further.

There is definitely something a little fishy going on with this update, in previous updates all of y domains would remain fairly stable I would have made one or two domains go up and another one or two go down but only a spot or two, this time 90% of my domains have moved! and not only a spot or two some have shifted dramatically 5 point of page rank in some cases.

The Two Extremes:

Substantial Loss:

On the extreme end of the losses I have had several domains drop from a PR 6 to a PR 2. This domain still has home page links from .gov and .edu home pages, hundreds of other quality links and a bunch of comments, articles, forum profiles and so on. Other similar shifts were a couple pr 4′s and 5′s dropping to zero or one. nothing dropped to NA.

The Substantial Gain:

On the flip side I also have multiple examples of domains making erratic shifts in an upward direction, a have practically brand new domain that I purchased in February and put content up on only about a month ago and I am talking only 20 odd pages of unique content. This domain went from a PR0 to a PR5!!! I also have other domains showing increased from a PR of 1 and 2 to 4 and 5…

If anyone want visual proof of this stuff then let me know I can email you the domains, I am not inclined to list them here to keep my network a secret.

Summary:

Believe me when I say that this is not at all inline with what had occurred in the past, Google has definitely thrown a spanner in the works, luckily for me I am a jack of all trades and

How Redundant is this now?

a spanner is just what I needed.

What does all this mean? well at first I was a little upset about it all, no longer being able to rely on PR to determine a domains authority would make it hugely difficult for me to

broker quality links but then I got to thinking, I never really did that in the first place. I have always accessed a domain on other factors high PR was simply an indicator or a flag that drew me towards the domains that would most likely have the variables I was after by the bucket load.

In no particular order these are some of the times I would be looking for to locate a good quality authoritative domain:

• DMOZ, Google, Yahoo and other authority directory listings
• Number of Inbound Links
• Type of Inbound Links e.g: .gov and .edu links, blog comments, forum profiles, home page links, site wide links and so on
• Social Presence
• Domain Age
• Number Of Archives (this is a really important one)
• Number Of Registered Drops and Registrants In The Domain History
• Alexa Rank (low importance)
• Content

There may be some adjustments to PR over the coming days/weeks while things settle down, however I feel this is unlikely, my gut feeling is that this was calculated move by

Google and a smart one. By throwing doubt into the link builders minds about PR they have also reduced link builders ability to manually manipulate search results with quality

links, how are people going to know what sites are high quality without high levels of due diligence? how will anyone be able to purchase high authority expiring domains when 99% of people are basing their purchase off PR alone both of the site they are buying and the PR of the inbound links of the sites linking to it? It all becomes unreliable information!

For me there is now a need to automate the domain assessment process beyond and possibly even excluding domain PR. A tool that could access all o

f the above mentioned points and filter out domains that dont meet my criteria would be ten times more valuable now than it was before and I would not be surprised if some of these come to the market over the coming months. Let me know if you’ve got one .

Just a quick FYI that Google has just run the second 2011 PR update.

Something is going on with this update, massive shifts in PR have occurred on multiple of my domains that have been stable over the last 3-4 updates in 2010, additionally I don’t think that they have all been hit up yet.
Most of my domains received an increase including my online surveys domain, going up to a PR4 from PR0.

I believe the main thing that is holding the PR of my domains in place (or increasing them in many cases) would be the large number of high PR in content home page links that each of them have.
From a fairly quick observation, the old saying that “the PR of your site cannot exceed the PR of your highest in bound link” still remains true. After running an inbound link report on a couple of the domains that lost PR, I can see that they have dropped to the same level as the highest PR link pointing to them e.g. one of my PR6 domains that’s highest PR links is multiple PR5′s (including .gov links) has dropped to PR5. Same case applies on the domains I have seen increase.

I will post more on this later but for now go check your site out and see what the PR is. I would be interested to hear how your sites have moved and what you feel was the reason it shifted in either direction.

Just a quick one while I wait for my car to be cleaned, I thought I would express my thoughts on recent link building strategies as this is probably my strongest point.

As much as I hate referring to Google algorithm updates the recent changes made by Google coinciding with the Panda update have heavily effected search results, more than I have seen in the last couple years anyway.

Every man and his dog has written about how the most recent changes have effected content, the general gist being that people with duplicate content (across multiple domains) or weak content will have less probability to achieve anything significant and so they shouldn’t, there is nothing worse than hitting site after site with useless content.

But what has the effect of these changes had on link building? Does anyone care? In the 50+ SEO/Online Marketing related RSS feeds I subcribe to I have seen little to nothing about it!

So What Did Change?

The most significant change (that hit Australia only 2 weeks ago) has been sever penalties to sites with low link variation. Basically anyone who practised solely low quality link building e.g. forum profiles, blog commenting and so on and did not put in the effort to create solid properties at the same pace. Even when filtered through web 2.0 properties.

What Still Works?

Near everything still works just as it used to in my experience, with the exception of Forum profiles, low quality mass blog comments and strait up footer links/theme sponsorship type links have taken a dive on their previous ability to impact rankings. These should only have been a very small and insignificant part of your link building strategy anyway.

As for the link building factors that are now receiving more weight there is only two:

• Social Media
• Links Embedded In Slabs Of Content (not even necessarily relevant content).

Cool Twitter Badge. USE IT!

An important note on the above two points is that I am not referring to low quality mass social and in content links, I am talking about quality. Facebook and Twitter profiles with hundreds of followers, links in quality unique content on authoritative domains (so no, not article marketing).

All of my sites demonstrating these above factors in abundance without exception have made significant ranking improvements without any recent alternate link building or content for that matter.

Lastly the ranking shifts seem to be coming a lot slower but consistent improvements can still be had with the right variation. High PR home page links and utilising web 2.0 properties are still the ducks nuts when it comes to building solid domain authority.

My car is done so more on this later…

Looking Shmick