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 [...]

Why Link Builders Need To Do More Than Just Build Links

May 1, 2012 at 1:21pm ET by Julie Joyce

In the past few months, link building as we've known it has been totally shaken up by three major events: Google anounced that they were changing how they view links (nicely recapped here:) Pandamonium! Certain large blog networks were devalued and webmasters started to receive warnings about unnatural links. Link building can still work well using ways that I wouldn't personally advise because I don't think that the techniques are sustainable. However, I fully recognize that not every site is destined to have a long-term link campaign that seeks to win the race by being slow and st [...]

Related Topics: Link Building | Link Building: General | Link Week

Home Depot To Correct Misleading Link Request

Apr 19, 2012 at 3:05pm ET by Danny Sullivan

It read like one of those bad link requests you get. Link to me, and you’ll rank better. It even suggested hiding the link. But the request was from Home Depot, to its network of nearly 2,000 service providers. Now that it's come to light, the home improvement store chain says it is correcting the mistake. Home Depot Asks For Links The link request was sent by Home Depot to providers it recommends for installation projects. It came to light in a Search Engine Watch forum discussion, picked up by Search Engine Roundtable and further by Bill Hartzer, who got a copy of the letter. It read in [...]

Google Sending Warnings About “Artificial” Or “Unnatural” Links

Apr 2, 2012 at 9:11am ET by Barry Schwartz

Have you recently gotten a warning from Google about having "artificial" or "unnatural" links pointing at your site? Google says this isn’t a fresh crackdown on link networks but rather a change from bad links being "silently distrusted" to being more vocal about this type of penalty. Warnings Issued Many people have reported getting messages from Google regarding link violations. If you scan the Google Webmaster Help forums, for instance, you will see many examples of these being posted. Here is how one reads: Dear site owner or webmaster of .... We've detected that some of your s [...]

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