May 22, 2012 at 8:18pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Move over JC Penney. Another brand is getting attention over buying links, this time Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corporation. Today's news is less news and more a reminder of lessons that SEO companies, clients and publishers all need to keep in mind, to avoid trouble. Josh Davis drew attention to the DBCC situation in his post today, documenting how after receiving three link requests from the same person, he finally followed up, only to be pitched on placing a link from one of his articles to the DBCC site in return for $30 per month. What's Dun & Bradstreet -- the nearly 200 [...]

Link Building Tool Review: Link Prospector

May 22, 2012 at 11:20am ET by Debra Mastaler

Our link building tool review series continues today with Link Prospector by Citation Labs. A joint venture between Garrett French and Darren Shaw, Link Prospector is headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina and has been online since February 2012. Garrett and Darren continue to add features to the tool, foreign-language support and an API are scheduled to be added in the near future. Let's take an overall look at Link Prospector plus a couple of cool tips I found when using it and finish with a review of pros and cons. General Overview Link Prospector is a link building research tool [...]

Related Topics: Link Building: General | Link Week

Did Google Drop 100+ Small Directories?

May 16, 2012 at 9:44am ET by Barry Schwartz

Yesterday I covered a WebmasterWorld thread where SEOs were complaining that Google has been removing tons of free web directories from their index. I conducted some random tests and did notice some of these free web directories not coming up in Google. Later in the day, Terry Van Horne began running larger tests on 500+ web directories and noticed as much as 16% or more are no longer showing up in Google. Based on his initial numbers, there are over a 100 web directories that are not indexed by Google. I do not know if these directories were ever listed in Google or removed recently d [...]

5 Local Linkbuilding Ideas For The Post-Penguin/Panda Era

May 14, 2012 at 11:34am ET by Andrew Shotland

I have been fielding a lot of calls from sites big and small that believe they got hit by Penguin, Google's "over-optimization" algorithm. Or maybe it was Panda? Who knows? Traffic is down and everybody is freaking out. I have a particular soft spot in my heart for the small, local businesses that have been hit, in many cases because they bought into someone's spammy linkbuilding scheme. I have had a few discussions with other SEOs who are attempting to take down clients' spammy looking links, and while that might be effective, the ROI on finding and getting all of those links delete [...]

Related Topics: Featured | Link Building | Local Search

Majestic SEO Announces New Link Metrics: Trust Flow & Citation Flow

May 14, 2012 at 9:43am ET by Barry Schwartz

Majestic SEO announced a new set of link metrics they came up with that should give Google's PageRank metric and SEOmoz's MozRank a run for their money. Majestic SEO's new metrics are named Flow Metrics and are grouped into two categories; trust flow and citation flow. Citation Flow is a number of predicting how influential a URL might be based on how many sites link to it. Trust Flow is a number predicting how trustworthy a page is based on how trustworthy sites tend to link to trustworthy neighbors. What Do Flow Metrics Look Like? Let's compare Search Engine Land to Search E [...]

Related Topics: Link Building | SEM Tools: Links

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