Every Link Builder Needs to Know(Contd.)

At last it happens! I have completed the total post that I want to share with the readers. It takes long since I started the topics but happy to reach at the terminal point.

44.  How To Check For Duplicate Content

Copyscape is free and you can quickly tell if someone is duplicating your content elsewhere. They also have a premium version that lets you check to make sure that post you’re about to publish is original content. Since scraped sites have been known to outrank those hosting the original content, knowing how to check for this is critical when the site you’re building links for starts to lose rankings and traffic.

45.  How To Figure Out If Links Are The Problem Or Something Else Is

Due to the recent panic about unnatural link warnings, links are being blamed more than ever when things go wrong. They can definitely be the cause of your problems but it’s very wise to learn how to see if they are and check out all the other potential culprits.

46. How To Use Advanced Search Operators

If you do manual discovery these can be a massive time-saver, helping you remove a lot of unwanted results. There’s a good cheat sheet here.

47.  What rel=author Is & How To Implement It

This sounded so simple when I first read about it but making it work really wasn’t nearly as easy as I expected. Verve Search has a great guide about how to implement it as does Rick DeJarnette here on SEL. If you write a lot, you need to get this set up.

It’s like a personal version of the big brand effect wherein you can build up a trusted name and (hopefully) enjoy more visibility on the Web. If one of your pieces shows up in the SERPs, you’ll get a More By X Author link so that all the other articles for which you are a verified author can be displayed.

48.  Why Site wides & Footer Links Might Not Be A Good Idea

Usually footer links are site wides but occasionally you see them on their own. A site wide link is one that’s on every page of a site. This used to be a way to get lots of links years ago, and it’s still occasionally a valid way to build links. A blogroll tends to be site wide and if it’s on a relevant blog and it makes sense, that is perfectly legitimate in my opinion.

However, when you scroll to the bottom of a page and there’s a massive paragraph filled with links, those aren’t good site wides. Site wides form a pattern which the engines can easily detect and devalue, so they aren’t anything that I’d usually pursue unless one made sense. Generally speaking, links that aren’t in the actual content of a page aren’t always the best ones.

49. How To Determine Whether You Have A Lot Of Site wides

I bring this up mainly because many people I’ve spoken to had no clue how to check to see if they had sitewide links. If you run a link check it should be very obvious, as you’ll see a list of pages all on the same domain.

Some people still like site wides but many link builders don’t actively seek them out anymore, as many people suspect that they’ve been discounted, and some suspect that they can actually hurt your site. I think that some are very legitimate but don’t think that algorithms are always sophisticated enough to be able to detect legitimacy.

50. What Deep Linking Is

Deep linking is the practice of building links to internal pages and not just your homepage. If you only have links to your homepage, that seems as if you have no other decent information on the site. That’s not a good signal to send.

51. What rel=canonical Is

You can read all the details but basically, this is used to specify the preferred version of a page when there is similar content elsewhere.

52.  How To View Source Code

In Chrome, you can right click and click on View Source and you can do the same in Firefox. Those are the two main browsers that I use so if you don’t have that functionality, just dig around until you can figure out how to see the code. You’d be surprised at how many people have no idea how to look at the code.

If you’re trying to figure out if a link is no followed, you need to know how to see the code so you can check that by hand and not rely on plugins. The same goes for viewing the code to see if robots are being blocked (listed above at #4) and identifying reasons why your link may not be working properly. From what I’ve seen, a very common link code error is with not closing tags properly.

53.  How & When To Submit A Re inclusion Request

If you’ve been penalized and you’ve cleaned things up, it’s time to submit a reconsideration request. If you have been penalized and you haven’t cleaned things up, don’t bother submitting one in hopes that Google won’t take a close look to double-check your honesty.

You can submit one here but remember, if you haven’t actually cleaned up any mess, it’s not a good idea to submit this. If you’ve been hurt by an algorithmic update but not actually penalized or warned, you may just have to make some changes and wait for the next update in order to get back into favor.

I am feeling better that I have done it. Sorry for taking so long to complete it.It's a great relief to settle down after a job has been done.