In the previous part of this article I narrowed down what Google is interested in into two categories: 1) content and 2) links. We discussed content in Part I and here we’ll focus on links.

Generally when we talk about links we mean any link that is either placed on your site pointing to another Web page (outbound) or placed on other sites pointing to your Web page (inbound). By “links” in this article, I’m only referring to the latter.

Google’s success has been mostly because of its decision to rate Web sites based on the quantity (as well as the 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 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.

Google’s principle is 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 atop Google search results – despite the quality of their content.

On the other hand, Google fawns 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^st page position in a competitive market?

The answer is not simple.

First, you cannot just sit and wait for other sites to link to you. 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 R&D team works every day to find new methods/techniques so we can semi-artificially (and yet naturally) improve our clients link popularity and therefore their Google ranks. To help our readers, we share our newest techniques so you can engage in tried-and-true link-building campaign to help rank your site atop Google. And here is a list of what works for us:

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

Directories: we submit our clients site to many directories (that have a PR3 or more). Here is a list of directories we recommend.

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

Press Releases: writing/optimizing/submitting press releases to news sites has huge benefit 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/friends’ sites.

All the above is much easier said than done. Engaging in all the techniques above requires months of hard labor and 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, then you need to learn the hoops of SEO. With hard work it’ll take you a couple of years to master the techniques and with investing some money and a lot of time, you’re able to rank your site above everyone else.

But smart business people who have financial backing delegate important tasks to professionals instead of spending years mastering what someone else already knows and instead focusing on YOUR business. If you are that person, fill out our form and I’ll be happy to look at your site and see if it qualifies for our Top of Google program.

Popularity: 54%

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%