(Revised on Dec. 5, 2011)

In the previous parts of this article I narrowed down Google’s interests into three categories: 1) content, 2) relevancy and 3) popularity. We discussed content in Part I, and relevancy in Part II of these series.  Here we focus on popularity.

Popularity of a web page refers to the number and the quality of links pointing to it from other web pages on the Internet world. The more “inbound” links a site has and the more they come from reputable sites (in Google’s eyes), the better your site will rank. This is the most important factor in Google SEO.

Google’s success is mostly due to its decision to rate web pages based on the quantity and quality of the links they receive – much like the academia’s rating of a scientific article. The more an article is used as a source by other scientists, the more authoritative that article becomes.

Google uses the same rating method for all sites: the more a site gets referred to by other sites, the more authoritative it is. In other words, the more links a site has, the better rank it’ll get.

This aspect of Google’s algorithm is based on the principle that sites with good content should naturally be used as sources by other sites. But the older Google becomes, the more difficult it gets for sites to naturally generate the needed link popularity in order to rank at the top of Google search results – despite the quality of their content.

On the other hand, Google frowns upon sites that engage in “black hat” SEO to gain artificial link popularity. So, what are you to do if you want your site to compete for that #1 position in a competitive market?

The answer is not simple.

First, you cannot just sit and wait for others to link their sites to yours. That simply won’t happen. In a world where there are thousands of new sites built everyday, your prospective site visitors have no way of finding you to read your content (unless you already rank on Google). Second, you cannot just write comments on 100’s of blogs or forums to gain the popularity you need (because most of these comments and the links you gain from them have “nofollow” attribute – meaning Google gives them no value. And third, what might have worked six months ago (in successful link-building techniques), may no longer be a good practice.

But there are other ways.

At Master Google, our research and development team works everyday to discover new methods we can use to semi-artificially (and yet naturally) improve our clients link popularity and, therefore, their Google rankings. To help our readers, we share our newest techniques so you can engage in a tried-and-true link-building campaign that will help you improve your rankings on Google. And here is a list of what works for us:

Blogging: we build blogs for our clients and constantly keep them up-to-date with new posts, while linking from them to our clients’ sites.

Directories: we submit our clients’ sites to directories that have a PR3 or more. Here is a list of directories we recommend.

Articles: writing, optimizing and submitting articles to reputable sites helps us gain link popularity for all of our clients. Here is a list of article sites with good page rank.

Press Releases: writing, optimizing and submitting press releases to news sites has huge benefits for our clients. We can improve their rankings immediately when we submit releases for them. Here is a list of SEO friendly press release sites.

Freebies: we offer freebies to those site visitors that link to our clients’ sites.

Competitors: we go after those sites that are linking to our clients’ competitors and request links to our clients’ sites.

Partners: we ask our clients to request links from their partners and/or friends’ sites.

All of the above is much easier said than done. Engaging in all of these techniques requires months of hard labor, a complete understanding of SEO and, of course, cash. Nevertheless, we’ve been able to transform local, small businesses into large-international ones in a matter of a few months by practicing what we preach.

So, if you’re someone who doesn’t have the money to hire a professional SEO company (we mean us… lol), then you need to learn the ropes of SEO. With hard work it’ll take you a couple of years to master the techniques and, after investing some money and a lot of time, you’ll be able to rank your site above everyone else’s. Reading my ebook on Google SEO Secrets revealed will also help you.

Oftentimes, smart business people who have substantial financial backing will delegate important tasks to professionals, instead of spending years mastering what someone else already knows and taking away the focus from their business. If you are one of those smart business people, fill out our form and we’ll be happy to look at your site and see if it qualifies for our Top of Google program.

Popularity: 19%

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: 58%