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Google, Big Daddy, Site Indexing, and Link Building

By HHI Golf Guy | May 18, 2006

For the past year or so months I have spoken with SEO’s & webmasters and posted on a number of forums regarding the future of linking strategy, especially as it relates to Google. My theory was that Google would need to find a way to combat link bombing and link spam. In fact, when I began this blog in November 2005 it was the topic of my first post.

First, I’ll cover some of the background and recent information on this topic, then I’m going to tell you how to lessen the negative impact of the upcoming changes at Google - but you will need to act fast.

The easiest way to combat link spam would be for Google to identify traditional links pages and place less weight on the value of those links. The lesser value would not be because of reciprocal links but because of the way that the page is organized (i.e. easy to pick out link formats, non-categorized links, too many links on the page, etc.). Sure enough, at once of the recent SES conferences Matt Cutts at Google gave a demonstration of how easy it was for Google to identify links pages, three-way links, paid links, and other link characteristics.

Fast forward to mid-May 2006 and Matt Cutts posted an interesting article on his Google blog. Take your time to read this article, then re-read the post again. There are a lot of interesting tidbits. Here are a few of the interesting quotes:

The sites that fit “no pages in Bigdaddy” criteria were sites where our algorithms had very low trust in the inlinks or the outlinks of that site. Examples that might cause that include excessive reciprocal links, linking to spammy neighborhoods on the web, or link buying/selling.

What does that tell you? You need to pay attention to the quality of the links to your site and from your site. Be careful here and don’t jump to conclusions. It does not make any sense for Google to penalize a site that has poor quality links pointing to it. If it did, you could kill your competitors’ web sites. More than likely it just means that poor quality links pointing to your site will have little value for your site.

Later in the post Matt was discussing Google dropping pages from its index and supplemental results. Here’s a snippet from that post:

It’s another real estate site. The owner says that they used to have 10K pages indexed and now they have 80. I checked out the site. Aha! This time, I’m seeing links to mortgages sites, credit card sites, and exercise equipment. I think this is covered by the same guidance as above; if you were getting crawled more before and you’re trading a bunch of reciprocal links, don’t be surprised if the new crawler has different crawl priorities and doesn’t crawl as much.

In other words - you need to pay attention to the relevance of the links both to and from your web site.

It’s also important to note that his entire blog post was referring to Google crawling your site and the pages that it indexes. It did not specifically state any algorithm changes related to links. However, if you read between the lines, if Google does not index your link pages (or the link pages of sites that link to you) those links are worthless.

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR LINK STRATEGY

So, what did we learn from all of the above? The links to and from your site need to be relevant and you should refrain from things like building excessive amounts of reciprocal links. Those reciprocal link pages are easy to spot.

The only problem with the strategy outlined below is that you need to convince others to participate in this method. If that doesn’t happen, you’re only helping their site and not helping your own site. Another problem is that most webmasters are lazy lemmings - they don’t want to do the extra work and don’t understand the evolution and progession of search engines. They prefer to stay with the status quo. Those are the same people who scream bloody murder when there’s an algo change and their site tanks.

The tactics I am proposing here are not ricks or black hat SEO - just common sense SEO.

Part I: Using Site Structure to Increase Page Relevance

You can start increasing the relevance of your own site and outbound reciprocal links pages by creating individual pages for every State. In the past, many webmasters would lump all of their real estate agents on one page (or a set of pages) regardless of the location of the agent. That’s not enough anymore. You need to strengthen the page theme by organizing pages by state (and sometimes by city, but we’ll get to that later).

You should also take the time to include some general information or a small paragraph about the individual state on each of your pages.

All of your individual state pages should tie in to one master page. This master page should be only one click away from your home page.

Part II: Using Content to Increase Page Relevance

When is a links page not a links page? When it’s a page chock full of useful, relevant content along with a few key links. And where do you get this content? By exchanging mini-articles instead of traditional links. You just need to be very careful about the way you structure these pages.

What is a mini article? It’s a one or two paragraph pice that contains an important link or two in the content. Here are some general rules:

What happens when you have requests for more than 4 articles on a state page? You need to create a new page, but not just any new page. Let’s say you have a Nevada page and three of the mini articles are from Las Vegas, one is from Reno, and the other is from Henderson. DO NOT create a Nevada1 and Nevada2 page.

Instead keep one page as Nevada for your Reno and Henderson links. Then create a new page about Las Vegas real estate. Any traditional links related to Las Vegas agents must also transfer to the new page.

You should create two links to this new Las Vegas page. The first link will be on your master directory page. You can indent the link under your Nevada link. You should also create a link to this page on your original Nevada page.

Any time you need to create a new directory page you must do the best you can to create the highest relevance for each page. On occasion, you may need multiple state pages for the same state. Just remember to include both pages on your master directory page. We do not want to have to keep drilling down to find all of these directory pages. They should be on the same hierarchy level.

Here are a few examples:

http://www.hiltonheadarealuxuryhomes.com/nevada-real-estate.htm
http://www.hiltonheadarealuxuryhomes.com/illinois-real-estate.htm

Now, you might be saying. “This is great for my link partners, but what about me?” This is where it gets difficult. You need to take a leap of faith and start this project and convince others to do so as well. There are some of us out there. Eventually this tactic will become more accepted, and you will have no trouble finding partners.

In fact, if you don’t watch out you will have too many mini article partners - and that may have an adverse effect on your own search engine rankings. How? Too many mini articles will dilute the main theme of your site (your city + real estate). But there’s an easy fix to that.

Create your new pages on a sub domain of your web site (i.e. www.directory.yourdomain.com). Then place one link on your site from your home page to this directory. At this time, search engines are treating sub domains as completely different sites from your root domain.

Part III: Duplicate Content Issues

Someone’s bound to ask about it, so I will address it here and now. It’s very, very hard to get a duplicate content penalty. In fact, it appears that most duplicate content penalties are in conjunction with a DMCA complaint.

Look at all of the article sites out there that webmaster are submitting to on a daily basis. Look at all of the RSS feeds and news stories out there on multiple sites. Thos sites are not penalized.

But if you’re worried about duplicate content all that you have to do is create 3 or 4 mini articles and spread them out to your partner sites. If you’re really, really worried about dupe content make sure that these mini articles are not posted or taken directly from your own web site. If they are, just make sure the pages are excluded with your robots.txt file.

Conclusion

What this link strategy accomplishes is that it creates content driven links from web site to web site. Each page has a focused theme, which increases the relevance of the outbound links on the page. The entire page reads as one article (headline tags and all) making it harder for the search engines to discern between a links page and a traditional article page.

Because of the increased link relevance you should need far less overall links to increase your search engine rankings. I wouldn’t go crazy with hundreds and hundreds of mini articles on your web site. But in combination with a few traditional links I believe that they will be a great benefit to all that participate.

If you have any comments, questions, or want to exchange some mini articles you can post them here, drop me an email, or call me at (843) 290-0031.

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Topics: General SEO, Real Estate SEO |

3 Responses to “Google, Big Daddy, Site Indexing, and Link Building”

  1. Las Vegas Homes Says:
    May 19th, 2006 at 2:46 am

    Shawn that was an fantastic blog post about linking solutions for real estate sites. I totally agree with you. Very nice my friend.

  2. Las Vegas Realty Says:
    May 20th, 2006 at 5:15 am

    I think you are spot on. I had already started doing some of the things you have suggested.

  3. Salomon amir Says:
    June 29th, 2006 at 10:27 pm

    Very interesting !

    Thanks for the info !

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