Google looks mostly at the links pointing to a site (inbound links) as the main factor to determine a site’s rank on its organic results. I give this factor an 80% over all the other factors Google looks into. And for most SEO’s, whether experts or newbies, link-building is the most difficult of all the tasks.

To rank your site, Google closely looks at the number of inbound links pointing to your site, the quality of the sites that have the inbound links, the anchored text links associated with each link and finally any traces of human interference to “artificially” increase a site’s link popularity (which will negatively affect your rankings).

I can go into a lot of details on each of the above, but for the sake of this post, I want to focus my attention to the press release development/distribution as one of the easiest ways to acquire quality inbound links for your site. My team has previously put together a list of press release distribution sites you can use for this purpose. Now, I want to give some advice on how to best use press release distribution sites to stay ahead of the game.

Please note that we use the following tips internally and have seen great success within the past few months.

• Hire a professional writer to write your press release. If your press release is not written in the format accepted by the news outlets, they will simply reject it.
• Ask your writer to write multiple versions of your press release. By multiple versions I mean a complete rewrite to the point that only the meaning is similar, but the content is completely different on each release. Much like the same news we read on Google News from different sources.
• One of these versions will be posted on your site as the source and the rest will be distributed.
• The other versions will be posted on a different press release distribution site. This will help you to avoid duplicate content on your releases thus increasing the chance that they will be picked by Google and ranked better with the engine.
• On the bottom of each release, you should include a copy-right sentence to avoid readers to copy/use your press releases.
• Link to the original post on your site (as the source) as well as your site’s homepage or the internal pages from these press releases.
• Your anchored text links should be different, yet contain your main keywords in them.
• Avoid multiple keyword text links. It’s best to link only one word to your site.

Like always, we appreciate your comments.

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Google rankings of many Web sites suffer greatly because of a phenomenon called “duplicate content.” Our recent client, cryoserver.com was penalized (red-flagged) for this particular reason prior to signing up with us. The site was ranked on page 13 of Google SERP’s for one of their main keywords.

Duplicate content refers to “substantive blocks of content” that match or are similar to “content within or across domains”, according to Google webmaster central. Google simply reduces the ranking of both pages/Web sites if it notices similar content being posted.

Here are some examples of duplicate content and tips on how to resolve them:

Mirrored Sites
Having mirrored sites refers to the same Web site being hosted on two or more different domains. This was basically what cryoserver.com had done. They had their site hosted on cryoserver.com as well as forensiccs.com.

Use a domain-level redirect from one domain to the other to resolve the mirrored sites issue. Also, use 301 redirects for any linked-to Web pages within the redirected domain.

We asked cryoserver.com to redirect the mirrored domain to the main one. After only one week, Google removed the red-flag and now their site ranks on the 3rd page (still some SEO work is needed to get them to the first page).

The same for-sale items on e-commerce Web sites
This is very common when it comes to e-commerce sites. Many URL’s are dynamically created and linked to from the home-page or other pages. Or simply, one product is placed within different categories. To resolve this issue, you should avoid dynamically building your pages and use different description even for the same products if they’re placed on different categories (having different url’s).

Copied text to be placed on competitors Web sites
If someone copies your text and place it on their site, your site could be penalized (flagged) by Google spiders for having duplicate content. This doesn’t happen too often, but when it does, it reduces your site’s rank on Google dramatically. To resolve this issue, you should contact the site that copied your text and ask them (by using all means) to remove the stolen text from their site. If they don’t comply, you should just rewrite your own content (painful, but it’s easier and less expensive than hacking the other site and removing your text).

Print-only versions of Web pages
Avoid print-versions if at all possible. If you cannot, use a “no-follow” tag wherever you link to a print-version copy of your Web pages.

Web pages that generate a mobile-friendly version
Similar to above, use “no-follow” tags so Google spiders don’t follow the link.

If you have any other questions, don’t hesitate to ask. We will respond to all questions in a timely manner.

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