One of our clients brought up an issue with me a few days ago. While trying to visit relevant blogs to his site and placing a comment there with a link back to his site, he noticed that almost 100% of these sites have a “nofollow” tag.

- Is it worth to place a comment/link where the link will have a nofollow tag?
- Are there blogs that do not have a no-follow tag for the comment sections? How can we find them?
- If leaving comments on blogs has no link-value, then why should we do it?

What is a nofollow tag?

A nofollow tag has the following format (HTML code):

<a href=”http://www.website.com” rel=”nofollow”>text link</a>

The nofollow tag indicates to Google (and other) spiders to not follow the link to its intended place. Thus, making such links value-less from an SEO point of view. The only intended audience for these links are human visitors who cannot tell the difference between a followed link and a nofollowed link (because the code is hidden in the back-end).

Now, getting back to the original questions. The short answer is that if you leave comments to get some link-juice for your site, don’t do it. You won’t get any SEO benefit from them. Because many black-hat SEO companies have abused the comment section of the blogs, almost all blogs have nofollow tags for the comment sections.

On the other hand, they don’t have nofollow tags for the main blog pages or other links on the site.

Instead of leaving a comment with your link in it, contact the blog admin and tell him that you’re interested in placing a link to your site on his blog/site.

Here are some tips to get the most benefit from your efforts:

- Check the blog’s PR (Page Rank). Sites with less than PR3 are usually not worth your efforts.
- In your first contact, indicate that you’re willing to pay a fee if necessary. Most blog owners crave for such business generating from their blog and most are honest people that will honor your agreement.
- Ask for a link on the home page. Home page links have far more value than links from the internal pages.
- Try to make an arrangement for a year at a time – the longer your link stays on a site, the more value it will have with Google.
- Pay monthly if you can.
- Give the blog admin the exact URL and anchored text-link to be used for the link.
- Also give him a description to go with/around your text link – a text-link without any text around it could be viewed negatively by Google.
- Varry your anchored-text as well as the URL for the best results.
- Monitor your link on a regular basis.

Still, visit blogs and leave comments with links to your site, not for the benefits of SEO, but for encouraging other blog visitors to visit your site. That generates traffic/customers and if you have excellent content, could lead to natural links for your site.

Popularity: 100%

Many of you may have seen your site’s ranking on Google Search Results (SR’S) fluctuate and you have wondered why. Recently, one of our subscribers asked me the same question and I thought it would be beneficial to post an answer for everyone.

I have personally seen Google search results fluctuations since I started my SEO career. For one thing, if it wasn’t for Google changing the search results pages, none of our clients would have had top of Google rankings, right?

But what we mean here is gaining and losing first page or top positions in cycles. Normally, this doesn’t happen for very competitive keywords, as top players always have SEO experts on their sides. But for less competitive keywords, this is a common phenomenon.

Here are some reasons that you see your site’s rankings fluctuate on Google:

1- Posting fresh content: Google values fresh content on sites. Adding a new story to your blog, posting a new article on your site or simply rewriting your site’s homepage could trigger Google bots to move you up the scales a few notch. Same could go for your competitors. However, the improvements in rankings don’t last that often unless you keep on updating your site’s content.

2- Optimization Removal: if our SEO team has optimized your site and you have over-written the optimization work by uploading your old files to the server, you have caused your site’s rankings to be dropped. In this case, you can ask our team to re-upload the files.

3- Different Google bots: each Google bot (spider) uses a slightly different algorithm; so, theoretically, when different spiders visit your site, they would rank your site according to their algorithm.

4- Duplicate content: this is also more likely a theory as I have not seen the proof of it, but I was just reading Google Webmaster Help and someone had claimed if your site’s content is copied by someone else, it could fluctuate your rankings. However, what I’ve seen with duplicate content is that rankings will drop to 10+ pages of Google SR’s.

We appreciate your comments/questions.

Popularity: 36%

This is a question often asked by many Webmasters who do not see their site on the first page for their keywords. Google bans/flags sites that use spam (black-hat) SEO techniques. Most of these techniques are used when the site is optimized using unacceptable SEO techniques, which are referred to as “black-hat” – thus the Web site owner/Webmaster has full control over the use of such techniques. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t notify Web site owners if their site is flagged, neither places an error in Webmaster Tools. And finding the answer takes a bit of expertise on your part.

To know if your site is banned (red-flagged) by Google, follow the following steps:

1- Copy a portion of your site’s content (at least two sentences) and paste them into Google search within quotes (“your site’s text”). That way you’re asking Google to return only the sites that have that exact content. If you only see your site in the search results, that means everything is fine. If you see other sites listed next to yours, but yours is at the top, that means the other sites have copied your text and that’s not a good thing, but your site is still not flagged. However, if your site is not ranked at the top or is not listed at all, that means either your site is flagged, or you have copied someone else’s text – neither of which are good news.

2- Search Google for some of the keywords within the title tag of your site (the title tag appears within your site’s back-end code as as the text after <title> – also, it shows up at the top of the browser when you load your site. If your site comes up #1, or towards the top of Google search results, then it is not banned.

3- Search for your main keyword (which is also part of your title tag if you’ve optimized it correctly). If your site is within the first 10 pages, then most probably it is not banned. If it is listed after the 10th page, it is most probably flagged. I say “most probably” because this very much depends on many factors such as selecting your main keyword correctly, etc.

And if my site is red-flagged, is there any chance to get it un-flaged?

In most cases, yes; you can get your site un-flagged – and lately Google does this rather quickly. To un-flag your site, follow the following steps:

1- Identify why your site was flagged in the first place. Some of the common reasons are using duplicate content, keyword stuffing, door-way pages, etc. (for a better list, you can read our Google SEO eBook). This is by far the most important step. If you’re unable to identify why Google has flagged your Web site, there is no way for you to help remove it.

2- Remove the “black-hat” SEO technique that got your site flagged. If you used duplicate content, re-write it. If you used keywor-stuffing, remove them, and so forth.

3- Next time Google spiders visit your site, they will notice that you have removed the spam techniques and will slowly give your positions back on the search results. If you want the process to take place faster, get some inbound links for your site.

In general, avoid using questionable SEO techniques on your site – especially do not ever link to sites you do not know their online reputation. Read extensively on the subject before you go for optimization of your site or consult someone who knows the game. There are many gray areas that you could go into and sometimes the lines between white-gray-black are blurred.

Good luck with getting your site ranked at the top of Google.

Popularity: 17%

Dear Clients/Friends,

In general terms SEO services are divided into two categories: Web site optimization and link-building. The former refers to modifying each Web page so Google spiders (algorithm) can read it without any obstacles and keywords are placed appropriately on each page so these spiders rank the particular page higher than the competition.

Link-building on the other hand has very little to do with your Web site. It refers to encouraging “other” Web sites to place a link of “recommendation” on their site pointing to yours.  In other words and in contrast to Web site optimization, nearly all link-building efforts are done off-site.

In our company, Web site optimization is only about 10% of the work. The other 90% is link-building. That’s what makes us very successful when it comes to Google SEO. As a matter of fact, we offer Web site optimization for free to any Web site on the planet.

A few days ago, one of our free SEO clients who is now interested in our link-building campaign sent me the above question. I thought this may be the same question as many of you, so I’m placing my answer here – with some modifications to keep our client’s identity hidden:

***

Dear Client,

Link building is a sophisticated service and we cannot give you exact estimates on how much each link costs. It’s actually wrong to think of link-building that way, because having many cheap links is not necessarily the best deal. Cheap links usually come from low-end Web sites and are less valuable to Google spiders.

Our different link-building services cost from $79 to thousands of dollars per campaign. So, the best way to approach link-building is to know the kind of budget you want to work with. Of course, the more you can spend, the better link-building campaign you can have.

How many links do we generate with these campaigns? The number of links has to be multiplied by the quality of the sites that are giving us the link. So, the number of links could confuse people who do not understand the subject well. In other words, there are Web sites out there that having only one link from them is equivalent to having 1,000 links from low-end sites. So, asking about the quantity or the price/quantity of links is the wrong way to approach this subject.

We tell our Top of Google clients (the ones we guarantee their rankings at the top of Google search results) that they need to have a specific budget – which is different for each client – based on the competitiveness of their market. Almost any Web site could enjoy top of Google rankings for competitive keywords if we have the right budget to work with.

***

In case you need a proposal on how much you need to spend to get your Web site ranked at the top of Google (or how many high-quality links your site needs to get there), simply fill out our services request form. I will personally respond to you within a few days.

Also, I’ve discussed our link-building techniques in our Google SEO eBook. This is a great guide for anyone who’s either interested in doing his/her SEO campaign or those who want to understand what we do in order to make our clients successful.

Leave a comment and I’ll be happy to answer any other questions you may have.

Best,

Ali Husayni

Popularity: 12%

You’re not alone. I’ve heard this at least ten times in the past month. About 50% of our clients don’t believe we can actually deliver on our promise of getting their sites ranked at the top of Google search results. Some leave keeping their beliefs and some decide to let us prove them wrong.

If you honestly don’t believe this is possible, then read on; I may have you believe otherwise.

First, there is a difference between guaranteeing to rank your site at the top and guaranteeing to refund your money if your site is not ranked at the top. Read more…

Popularity: 7%

After we have optimized your website please make sure you will not upload directly from your local computer to the server. This means if you want to edit the index.html file, for example, you have to first download this file from the server to your local computer and update it locally and then upload it to the server.

This is because the files you have on the server are optimized and contain our optimization codes and therefore are newer than the files you have on your local computer.

Now if you upload directly from your local computer to the server it means you have overwritten the new optimized index.html file by the old not-optimized one that you have had on your local computer. Read more…

Popularity: 6%

Q: How does it work?

A: After we receive a request for our Free SEO services, we first study your entire Web site. We determine the specialty and niche market the Web site targets, and we use different tools to determine which keyword combinations receive the most search engine queries for the specific market. Next, our team optimizes the Web site’s Home page by implementing keywords in meta tags and other locations to boost your site’s visibility for those popular keyword terms. We generally use one to five keywords during optimization, depending on the specialty and the market.

After the Home page is set up, we set you up your Web ranking report as well as your traffic report. You will receive an updated version of your Web ranking report every week and the traffic report every month for free.

Click here to read more about our Free SEO package.

Q: How could it work for me?

A: Our Free SEO service is an effective strategy to improve your Web site’s rankings for the keywords we use. You will notice an improved status in Google for the keywords we target within a few weeks, which should help boost Web site traffic. However, these improvements will most likely only occur for the keywords we use in our optimizations (see “How does it work” to read about keywords).

For more thorough visibility in search engines, your site will need organic inbound links in addition to our keyword optimizations. We offer organic link-building services through our Top of Google and 1st Page of Google packages. Also, with these packages, we bump the number of keywords we use when optimizing your site from two to five keywords to around 50 keywords.

Click on the links below to read about our other SEO services:
Top of Google
1st Page of Google

Q: How quickly does it work?

A: This is the question everyone asks. After optimization, it usually takes a few weeks for a Web site to see improvement in any search engine. There are no fast results unless you are dealing with illegal black hat tactics. But, our SEO services have been proven to work, providing our clients with improved search engine rankings, increased Web site traffic, and more online business. And our services are guaranteed.

Q: What do you need to start your optimization?

A: All of the information we need is noted on the Service Request Form. Usually, our clients don’t know what an FTP site is or encounter problems with finding accurate FTP login information. If you have any problems providing the necessary information, just leave a message in your Free SEO Service Request Form, and we will contact you and walk you through the process.

Popularity: 24%