The Love Story of SEO – Building Backlinks with Google by your Side..Bar

Backlinks and especially Blog Commenting have been getting a load of bad press recently and I think it’s slightly unfair for all the honest Link builders using blog commenting as a form of RELATED link building.

So, now I’ve got my little speech out the way, let’s move onto the actual Blog commenting itself, and by that I don’t meaning scraping 1,000,000 blogs and posting to all of them in a day with a black hat software.

As I said in my title – This is a love story, it’s between you (The Link building damsel in distress) and the white knight, on his great stallion riding through firey gorges, battle Orcs and eventually defeating the dragon to win the girl! (aka.. Google) – Yes, for the first time ever! You’ll actually be working with Google to improve your website, as in Google itself – Not Webmaster tools or Analytics but the actual Search engine, ya know – The thing your trying to rank in.

What your going to want to do is take this script:
“powered by wordpress” “dog training” inurl:”/dog-training” + intext:”dog training” “comments” + “says:” | “leave a comment”
Now change any of the keywords aka “dog training” to what your target market is! – Now for those of you who are used to using Operators this should be fine. For those not, that’s the inurl:/dog-training or intext:”dog training” – and the + means you want to add more operators to the search query.

Now enter you new jazzed up code into Google and you’ll find a list of related results -

As you can see – From these first 3 links on the Homepage we’ve already found 3 blogs, with commenting enabled all related to “Dog Training” – Well done you!

Now your going to want to go onto 1 of said blogs and find yourself a related blog that looks nice and juicly related to your content. Go to the comments box and find enter in your Name (this’ll be the URL aka Anchor Text, so try to make it realisitc I prefer brand related terms, e.g. your business name, your name or clients name, an event you host, your location or even just your websites name.

Now once you’ve filed out that form, they’ll either moderate it or it’ll just create it will list it straight away. Most blogs will require moderation and around 75% will be NoFollow – but that’s great! In my opinion the more NoFollow links, the better. If you have 95% DoFollow across sites with 1,000s of external links, Google is going to Penalize you.

There are 2 HUGE advantages to this link building technique -
Google provides you search queries that are relevant, if the site has 1,000 external links and is low qaulity, duplicated content it’ll be pushed down and penalized (like any normal search query). This technique provides the most relevant and best Optimized Backlinks that your search query is looking for.The results it provides are specifically targeted to your location (e.g. Google UK, Google CA etc) and targetted to your keyword. This means you get the best of both worlds – Localized results at the most relevant point.
Well, I’ve done this with a number of clients and even on our personal company site – Here’s what the results look like from Majestic SEO (Citation Flow and Trust Flow aka Page Authority and Domain Authority for OSE)

As you can see, a Great citation flow with anchor text related to both myself & the company name. It hasn’t been deleted in over a month and has given us a related post to the content we’re trying to link build to.

- Don’t go crazy, you can spend an entire day building a 100 links, but that won’t help – When I’m building backlinks with this method I tend to look through about 5 pages of SERPs per keyword, note down the best pages to build comments on and over the next month I’ll build 10 – 20 really high quality backlinks with good replies and varied anchor text.

- Ignore some results. If you find sites with more then 20 DoFollow backlinks in the comments, I suggest completely ignoring the blog – I find blogs which have a good article/content, that’s Unique (you can check the Unique-ness against other sites with Copyscape) and build the link, doesn’t matter if it’s DoFollow or NoFollow as you want a variation of both.

Google Plus – what impact will Google Plus 1 have on SEO ?

It’s been quite some time since Google launched Google Plus – a new and interactive way for users to get together and share interesting things with one another.

On the first view, you would see Google Plus as just another socializing site, similar to FaceBook, Tumblr, Twitter. BUT, there is more to it than it may seem at a first glance.

Obviously, only for the fact that it belongs to Google itself, it should ring some bells. So far there are only assumptions, but many voices are inclined to say that even if at the current moment, Google Plus 1 doesn’t really affect the ranking of a site, in the future it will definitely matter and A LOT.

Let’s have a look at Google’s official statement about this new site. Their purpose with Google Plus 1 is to make searches more and more personalized, so us, the users would not waste so much time looking for things that we like, and also to get ads more specific to our interests

How does it work? Things are pretty basic. You will have to make a G Plus account, join your friends there and start sharing different links. At some point you may find something that you like, and instead of hitting the “like” button like FB has, you will hit the g+ button. This will result in a plus one vote to that specific link.

Here is where things get interesting. Because you plus 1-ed that link, in the eyes of Google this means that you liked the information presented there. AND this will result in changing the SERP, as long as you stay logged in on your Google Plus Account.

In other words, Google Plus will alter the search results based on your preferences. So the sites you gave a plus one vote will appear much higher in the search results than usual. AND that is not all.

Google plus will affect the result page based on your friends preferences too. So, if you’re friends with Mary, and she plus 1-ed a site about how to be a successful blogger, then you also will see that site appear higher in the Search Results.

In a way, Google Plus will inflate artificially the SERPs so that you will have access quicker at the sites you and apparently your friends liked.

Technically this happens only when you’re logged in with your G Plus account. When you sign off, the SERPs go back to normal. For now.

So it would be safe to assume that giving up SEO altogether and relying only on social sites would be a big mistake.

The +1 button will bring with itself the possibility for personal annotations which will increase your site’s visibility in the search results.

Also, you can keep track of the traffic you get from your  +1 account using Google Webmasters Tools.

We must admit that the social media aspect has become more and more important, so make sure you keep yourself active out there.

Personally, I think Google Plus will become bigger and bigger whether we like it or not. And not only that, but it may just happen that Google will know your habits better than yourself!