Search Marketing and Internet Marketing Blog Online: link building

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The Most Powerful Website Directories

A while back I wrote about the top 35 Website Directories for Link Building. As a follow up to that post, I found a great article from Paul Teitelman on the Top 25 Most Powerful Website Directories many of which weren't included in my original list. There are a number of great suggestions in the comments as well.

I thought I would post a few of my new web directory favorites below:

1.) Family Friendly Sites
2.) Incrawler
3.) Ally Web Directory
4.) Kahuki
5.) Greenstalk
6.) Rakcha
7.) Goguides
8.) Biz Lightenment
9.) Enquira
10.) The Librarians’ Internet Index
11.) ALS Links
12.) Info Listings
13.) Skaffe
14.) Premier Business Directory
15.) Dmoz Zilla
16.) Data Spear
17.) World Site Index
18.) Most Popular Sites

Now, if you are looking for the means to find 'do-follow' links, you'll enjoy reading more about the top do-follow link finding tools. As we all know another important factor in link building is analyzing the competition. Check out this link analyzer tool or try a free trial from one of the most popular SEO tools in the marketplace right now - Market Samurai!

Have any favorite directories of you own? Add them in the comments and I'll append to the list!

Update:
A good friend suggested these two additional link building resources:

Top 35 Web Directories List

Over at the Search Engine People Blog I found a great list of the top 25 website directories. I thought this list was a perfect supplement to my previous post on the top 8 dofollow link tools. As a result, I added another 10 directories for a grand total of 35!

Now, there are a lot of great directories that aren’t on this list because they are either too expensive, such as Best of the Web and the Yahoo! Directory, or they just take way too long to get approved, ie. DMOZ, Illumirate.

1.) Family Friendly Sites

2.) Incrawler

3.) Kahuki

4.) Greenstalk

5.) Rakcha

6.) Joeant

7.) Splash Directory

8.) Goguides

9.) Enquira

10.) ALS Links

11.) Clush

12.) Octopedia

13.) Info Listings

14.) Skaffe

15.) Global Weblinks

16.) Links 2 Go

17.) Dmoz Zilla

18.) Gimpsy

19.) Global Link Networks

20.) Business Directory

21.) Zorg Directory

22.) TWD

23.) Data Spear

24.) World Site Index

25.) Most Popular Sites

26.) The Librarian's Index

27.) Premier Business Directory

28.) The Ally Directory

29.) Zyas Directory

30.) 2YI Directory

31.) Romow Directory

32.) Lobo Links Directory

33.) Authority Directory

34.) Aviva Directory

35.) Dir Journal Directory

SEO Link Building Training

Building Links Through Do-Follow Blogs

Scam: Domain Listing Services Corp

I received a startling letter in the mail the other day. I register most of my domains via www.GoDaddy.com simply because I get a lot of discounts due to the number of domains I register. Regardless, I can only assume this company whores the 'whois' information from new domain purchases and then sends out a letter advertising their horrific services! If you received a letter that looks like this, BEWARE:

Directly from the letter:

WEBSITE ADDRESS LISTING INCLUDES:
Domain name submission with 8 key words/ phrases to 25 MAJOR search engines, quarterly search engine submissions

Directly from their website:
We submit your website 4 times a year to over 25 search engines and business directories like these below...

Google	Yahoo	MSN	AltaVista	Excite
About	Overture	Netscape	Lycos	HotBot
Quickseek	Scrub The Web	Search Hippo	Alexa Web Search	Metadata Search Spider
Search It	Super Snooper	Ultraseek	Info Probe	whatUseek Network

Before we go any further....THIS IS NOT A GOOD DEAL! NOT FOR $75!! NOT EVER!!
What are the issues with this? First off, when you submit your website to a search engine you don't get to pick 'key words / phrases'. You simply submit your URL (www.example.com).

Second, search engines have evolved tremendously since the 'early days' and the need to submit your website to search engines is no longer needed. Rather, gather a few links from some authority websites soon after you launch your new website and allow Google and Yahoo to find your website naturally by doing what they do best - following links to find new content.

Thirdly, and based on my second point, continually submitting your website to search engines (for instance the 'quarterly submissions' advertised above) IS SPAM and will only result in getting your website banned completely from the major search engines.

I was so bothered by the fact that this company, Domain Listing Services Corp, is making God knows how much money off of uneducated people I decided to do some digging.

Here is a great post from Danifer Web Services.

Here is another from HyperSensory.com which notes that DLSCorp.net also operates as ilscorp - Internet Listing Service Corp. - yes, another scam!

Yet another from Les Jones Blog (take the time to read through the comments! It is well worth it!)

Rip-Off Report: Domain Listing Service Corp - says it all!

Please feel free to contact the following organizations with your complaints:

FTC
http://www.ftc.org

Better Business Bureau
http://www.bbb.org

ZoneEdit - Their DNS host
http://www.zoneedit.com or mail support@zoneedit.com

WaveRiderHosting - their hosting company
http://www.waveriderhosting.com

Building Links Through Do-Follow Blogs - Spam?

I was reading through one of my favorite blogs, Search Engine Journal, and stumbled upon an excellent article regarding the use of blog commentes for link building and the on-going argument of whether or not it is 'considered' spamming.

The author Ann Smarty raises an important question! “If I build links via blog commenting - do I look like a spammer?”

To see how comment spam can be identified algorithmically, let’s try analyzing Spam Karma reports (it was only fooled once or twice with my own blog). The plugin uses combination of the following ‘red flags’:

It looks at the period of time the comment was posted after the page loaded;
It analyzes if the comment contains an URL(s) in content;
(If there is an URL in content) it compares non-URL comment length and the length of the URL itself;
It looks if the URLs are linked or not;
It filters some ’spammy’ IPs;
It looks how old the post is and how long ago the latest comment there appeared;
It tracks if the poster’s browser looks natural (e.g. if it supports JavaScript);

A search engine can do pretty much the same plus it might be looking into:

comment relevancy;
overall comment content length;
similar/same comments around several blogs;
your linked comments acquisition rate (e.g. 100 per day might look unnatural);
some blacklist words like "porn" both in the author link and the
comment body.

So if you avoid those flags and comment at relevant (established) blogs (that both follow and nofollow) you are both adding value to the discussion and doing some natural link building (btw, if you have a similar to the blogger’s post article, deep-link your author link).

This is certainly a hot topic! Feel free to leave your thoughts or suggestions in the comments below..

SEO Link Building Training Programs

I wanted to follow up my top list of search marketing associations post with some additional training associations that will surely help your Internet marketing knowledge base. Our friends at Link Building Best Practices has put together a comprehensive list of link building training programs.

The debate surrounding what links are best and the placement of those links will no doubt continue, BUT one thing we all know that link building is one of the keys to the success of websites on the Internet.

That being said,there is always more to learn about link building and you can’t learn it all from “experience.” In fact, trial and error could be the death of your business – too many mistakes while trying to develop link building strategies could tank your website and search engine rankings. Sure, you could tell yourself that you’ve learned some valuable lessons along the way, but that’s not going to take the sting out of a failed business venture.

There are a variety of link building programs available tailored to the needs of corporations, copywriters, advertising and SEO specialists that can provide you with the skills you need to build links that will work.

We Build Pages offers one or two day programs to give companies solid overviews of the link building process, SEO, competition strategies and search ranking factors. This is ideal for companies who want to begin “in house” programs.

Eric Ward offers personal evaluation of your company’s website and, in the two hour session, a link development strategy session, including evaluation of competitor’s sites and full reports. This is individual instruction by phone unless you opt for the six hour on-site training session, which includes six months of IM access for follow-ups.

Justilien Gaspard focuses heavily on link building and offers one-on-one training that features lots of in-depth discussion specific to your own business and site. Link bait and email campaigns are among the topics.

Search Engine College is less personalized and less expensive. This is a “nuts and bolts” of SEO and SEM with a wide range of courses you can take online that are self-paced and self-directed. There are also lots of valuable resources in PDF form that you can download. Covers more than just link building.

Sempo Institute is geared toward those who are looking at starting a career in SEO or SEM more than business owners who want to tweak their own websites. You can learn a lot here, but it will be of a general nature rather than specific to your company or industry. They also offer corporate training options for corporations who feel that their in-house marketing teams need refresher or advanced courses.

THE Best SEO Link Analyzer Tool

Update: So it's been almost two years since I wrote this post and with the Bing Yahoo merger approved there is rumor of Yahoo's Site Explorer being done away with. There have definitely been a number of link analysis tools that I've used since 2008 and I have finally found one that I can say is the best I have used in all the years I've been SEOing. Check out Market Samurai (they have a free trial) and while, I don't usually recommend paid programs (there are far too many great free tools) I think this tool is worth every penny! From keyword research, to keyword ranking to competitive analysis to link building this tool covers it all.

Every SEO knows that links are the secret sauce that promotes a decent website into a SERP dominator. Now, I don't often say "this is the best" simply because there are countless link developing/analysis tools out there but .... honestly, this is quite possibly THE best link analyzer tool I have ever seen.

The Link Diagnosis tool uses Yahoo Site Explorer data and is currently in BETA testing. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a paid version in the near future.

Considering it is still in BETA there are still a few bugs being worked out. For instance, to take advantage of all the tools features, a firefox plugin needs to be downloaded. Occasionally, when I run a report it asks me to download the Firefox extension to get the full report even though I have already downloaded and installed it.

According to the programmer, there is a limit of 5000 calls to yahoo per day per user(IP)- that should roughly be around 50 reports per user per day with the current setup. In all likelihood, that is the source of the bug.

Despite that one small problem, this is a seriously must-have tool in any SEOs toolbox!