Articles -- Link Building Advice

Keeping Your White Hat Clean:
How Often to Check Your Outbound Links

Irina Ponomareva |

March 15, 2006

Nowadays, having a website is becoming a tremendous responsibility. If you own a website, you need to do at least the following things, and do them on a regular basis:

• Make sure your domain name doesn't expire;
• Comply with the latest quality standards in terms of graphic design, copywriting, usability;
• Keep your coding at least moderately tidy;
• Add fresh content from time to time, and apply necessary changes to your existing content as it gets obsolete;
• Constantly watch legal issues ensuring your website doesn't break any laws;
• Study your web statistics carefully and improve your users' experiences to make sure it converts better and better;
• Track your ROI;
• Check if anybody is stealing your web copy or other copyrighted materials and take legal action against those who do.

That sounds like a lot of work, doesn't it? But now I've got some bad news for you: you've got yet another duty in regard to your website, which is to keep it clean in terms of SEO (unless you are a black hat SEO and don't care about such things).

Continue reading Keeping Your White Hat Clean: How Often to Check Your Outbound Links |

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Natural Linking Patterns: What They Are and What We Think They Are

Irina Ponomareva |

January 8, 2006

At the end of 2005, Google (in the person of Matt Cutts) announced Google's new link evaluation policies. Valuing natural (and earned) links more highly and devaluing unnatural (or unearned) links is the core of these new policies. First of all, it is supposed to affect reciprocal links, three-way links and paid links, and though, as usual, there is no way for us SEOs to know exactly how they will be affected, hot discussions of these new policies started at once. Some quick conclusions were drawn, such as:

• Reciprocal links from now on will be ignored by Google, because they are always unnatural;
• Three-way links will be ignored, as well, and probably the sites caught linking three way, will receive penalties;
• Link pages are evil, and all links located on them will be considered unnatural and disregarded.

Continue reading Natural Linking Patterns: What They Are and What We Think They Are |

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Avoiding Bad Neighbourhoods: How to Link Out Safely

Irina Ponomareva |

December 29, 2005

As far as achieving better SEO results is concerned, the reality these days is that knowing how to detect sites that use spammy SEO techniques is becoming more important than knowing where to place your keywords. With spammy sites growing in number at a tremendous rate and the search engines severely penalising websites for linking to such neighbourhoods, we simply can't neglect the issue any longer.

Continue reading Avoiding Bad Neighbourhoods: How to Link Out Safely |

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White Hat Linking

Irina Ponomareva |

September 21, 2005

SEO and link building always go side by side. From the earliest days of SEO, even before it had a name, people studying the search engines' behaviour noticed that the number of links pointing to the site improved the rankings of that site very significantly in all search engines. Some engines give the link popularity factor less weight, and others pay more attention to it, but they all use it to some extent in their ranking algorithms.

Continue reading White Hat Linking |