Exclusive Interview With Neil Shearing
Of ScamFreeZone.com

Part 3 of 5

NS - Oh Louis I'm writing a book on links because it is an enormous subject.

But there are important golden rules you have to remember about building links and this is what I spend the first section of my book talking about, because Google doesn't like it if you put up a site and that site attracts a lot of links quickly, they think something fishy is going on there and you may well get a ranking penalty because of that.

So when you do build links if it's a new site you need to build links slowly over time. If you have an older site you can get away with getting a lot more links a lot more quickly, so that's quite important.

You need to consider your anchor text, that's the actual clickable part of a link on the other page that links to your site. It's good if that anchor text is descriptive, so if the anchor text actually says "coconut oil weight loss diet" or whatever it was we were talking about (laughter) then that's going to tell Google what the page it's going to is about, which is your page. That's good because it's descriptive and it describes your page.

So having lots of links with the anchor text describing your individual blog post is important. It's also important that all your links don't say the same thing in the anchor text, so if they all say "coconut oil weight loss diet" then that looks unnatural and Google's going to penalize you for that.

So it's good to mix it up with a few links that say, "click here" or a few links that just say "this" because that's how webmasters naturally link to other people. If you go to any random blog not written by a SEO expert, they'll link to other things just by words that say "this" or words that say "click here" and Google will expect to see links like that. So that's another important thing, you need to mix the anchor text up and not have it all be the same thing.

So gaining links slowly over time if it's a new blog, having relevant anchor text but not being dominated by all the anchor text being the same. Let me see, there are a few other rules. I need to go back through the book as I'm writing it (laughter). Go back and see what these rules were.

As for where you get links it's also... oh yeah, another one would be the IP diversity. You don't want links all pointing to your site from the same place.

It used to be that some search engine optimization people would go out and they would have a money site and then they would build a couple of other sites on the same web host, and the purpose of these satellite sites was just to link to their money site so that the money site went up in the search engine rankings.

But all those sites, if they were on the same web host would have the same IP address and then that looks 'spammy' as well, so you want to get links from a diverse set of places all over the Internet and different servers, different domain names.

So if you go to Alexa.com and type in your domain name or any domain name, it will tell you the number of links into that site but it will also tell you the number of unique domain names that link to that site. And that's important because as Google sees 2, 3, 10, 20 links from one domain it will start discounting the rest. And I don't know what the exact number is because only Google knows how their algorithm works for sure, but Google isn't going to count 20,000 links if you run a forum site or put in an ad at the bottom of a forum footer - one of these paid links. And if that forum has 20,000 pages it's not going to count as if it were the same as 20,000 links with 20,000 unique domain names.

So, it's important that you think about link-building from what looks natural. Google wants people to put quality content online that effectively get natural links of love - those are editorially given links. So, some webmaster or other writes on their blog that your blog had a really good post and is excellent and links through to you, that would be the perfect link. The thing is that webmaster or blogger may well link to your site just with the word "click here" or "here" which doesn't really help.

So what most good search engines and optimization experts will now do is tell you to put quality content online because that will attract a few good natural links, but supplement that with other links that you build yourself in a way that looks as natural as possible, because Google wants to see natural-looking links.

And if you have too many links too quickly it's unnatural; if you have too many links with the same anchor text it's unnatural; if you only link to your homepage, it's unnatural - spread your links throughout your site. What was the other thing? If you have too many links from the same IP address it looks unnatural.

So all these things... if you do it in an unnatural way it can raise red flags, and it may not be any one thing that causes a ranking penalty, it may be if you have three red flags raised or if you have four or seven red flags raised, it probably isn't one or two.

But these are the things that you need to be aware of before you even start building links because then you'll avoid the potential problems of attracting a penalty at Google and seeing your rankings disappear.

While there are loads and loads of places you can get links from, a good starting place is blog directories. Probably the best one is the Best of the Web blog directory. I think that's free if you decide to let them take their own sweet time about listing your blog or you can pay for an expedited listing.

And there are millions of other blog directories that you can submit to. There are RSS directories that you can submit to. If you install WordPress then you go to YourDomain.com you see your blog; if you go to YourDomain.com/feed you'll see your RSS feed. You can take that RSS feed and submit it to RSS directories. You can do Web 2.0 promotions such as creating a page at Squidoo.com, a page at HubPages.com, a page at WetPaint.com - all these various different places - Blogger.com, WordPress.com - and have them link back to your site.

Personally, I'm not so hot on doing the Web 2.0 stuff because I feel if I'm going to create good content it may as well be at my blog as opposed to putting on Squidoo, so maybe that's something you can consider outsourcing. Have someone else build a Squidoo Lens or a HubPages Hub rather than doing that yourself.

If you create original unique blog posts then something else you can do is just turn that content into an audio file. So if you read it out say, "This is YourDomainName.com. This is the latest blog post." Read it out, save it as an MP3 file and then if you create a special RSS XML page, now this is getting a bit technical but I go into details in the book. I could read out the page if you want Louis (laughter)?

But if you actually create a special XML file you can put that on your blog and link the XML file to your MP3 audio files and then that file you can submit to podcast directories. So basically all you've done is reused your same content. You've got quality original content on your blog, you've turned it into an audio file, saved it as an MP3 file, uploaded it, linked to it from your podcast XML page and it's that podcast XML page that you actually submit to podcast directories then you get links back from that.

You can create maybe a screen saver around whatever your actual blog is about - like weight loss. And then you can submit the screen saver as software to software directories - that's another way to get links. You can submit the site to general link directories.

So - this is an interesting topic in itself - whether it's worth submitting to link directories that charge a fee. Some people say it's not, some people say it is. I think if I were Google and I saw that someone had spent maybe a thousand dollars to submit to the top link directories I would consider that a genuine business. So I would see the links from those directories as more authoritative than other links.

And those directories are Yahoo at $299 a year, Business.com it's $199 or $299 per year. Best of the Web I think that's $99, but they often have discount coupons that you can save 25%. DMOZ is actually free - but it takes forever to get into if you happen to pick a category where the editor's asleep at the wheel. And Starting Point, I think Starting Point charge a fee as well, I'm not sure if it's annual or not. So those are the main directories to get listed in.

You can also do blog commenting. And that's another thing to think about - is whether blogs use the 'nofollow' attribute or not, which goes back to a time when blogs first came out and people who left blog comments got a link back to whatever site they wanted to link to along with their comment resulting in all the blogs getting spammed and Google releasing the 'nofollow' standard, so that bloggers could add 'nofollow' to any external links and then if a link contained the 'nofollow' attribute the search engine said well okay, we won't count that link for search engine ranking purposes so it won't pass page rank and we won't count it as a back link.

So then Blogger.com switched to using 'nofollow' and WordPress by default if you install it at your site uses 'nofollow'. So it became harder obviously by design for people to get links, genuine links, from blogs.

So what I created was some software called the Real Link Finder that is free from RealLinkFinder.com. If you download and install it and put in a keyword it will search for blogs that actually don't use the 'nofollow' attribute. Because there are some bloggers out there that said "Okay, I'm disabling that 'nofollow' attribute because I want visitors, I want people to leave comments, and in return I'll let them have a real link back to their website".

So that requires a bit more effort, a bit of moderation on the part of the blogger but they're willing to trade that in return for more traffic from people that are happy to leave comments and links .

So the Real Link Finder tries to find blogs where you can leave a comment and get a real link back to your website. And I try to encourage people to actually leave quality comments, you know read the blog post - do some research around the topic and leave a quality comment with a link back to your website because you want those blogs to remain 'do follow', to still provide a link back to your site. You don't want those blogs to get spammed and then they'll turn off the comments or make it 'nofollow' and then you have one less resource to get a link from.

So respect the fact that there are bloggers out there that have turned off 'nofollow', it's a risk for them... and leave quality comments to enhance their blog and also gain a link back to your site, so that's another place you can get links.

You could also exchange links directly with webmasters. Now, this is another interesting point because in the past Google frowned on reciprocal linking because it was abused. Everyone and their dog started exchanging links and Google said, 'well okay we can see you link to them, they link to you, we're just not going to bother counting as important'.

But, if you decide to create a list of links and exchange links with other webmasters in your niche, one thing I would suggest is to try and add value to that list of links. Don't just make it a list of links because if you say, "This is my list of links" Google will go yes, so what?

What I suggest doing is just adding a sentence or two, a short paragraph, saying why you're linking to that site: "This site tells you all about coconut oil... This site tells you where coconuts came from... "And just have a little review about what that site is about and then that adds value to your link page. And if the other sites link back to you as a reciprocal link then as long as they're all roughly in the same niche and it adds value to your visitor then I don't think Google would have a problem with it.

Because anything that enhances the visitor is what Google's looking for, looking to approve. It's the sneaky tricks and redirects and black hat stuff that Google wants to ban people about. So, I think that's just a few ideas for link building.

LA - Okay and I've just put down a few possibilities myself, so if I just quickly talk or quickly mention them... if you could just offer your comments on these as well. First one would be link building using articles?

NS - Still good, but not if you do it the old way.

If you do it the old way which was just to spam an article out there and have it listed on as many sites as possible, the exact same article, which is basically a block of text with your link at the bottom as the author with a link back to your site, then that's really no better than going back to 2000/2001 and having free-for-all link pages.

I don't know if you remember them Louis but they were great! (laughter) You had your link, your link gets listed and within 2 minutes it's disappeared off the bottom of the page as 10,000 other people add their links. Well, there's not a lot of difference really between that and article directories apart from you actually have to have some text above your link.

So that really doesn't count for much any more because there was an update to the page rank algorithm when they slapped the link sellers, the brokers who actually sell links. And they also slapped the article directories quite hard, so actually submitting articles the old way doesn't work.

What you want to do now if you're going to submit articles is (a) try to make sure there's a different version of the article appearing on each different site that it's used on; (b) try to get your links within the article copy not in a resource box or a biography box at the bottom; (c) have them appear over time on the Internet and not all as just one big lump, and then those links are much more likely to be counted as genuine links as opposed to just free for all links.

And there are different article services I use - SubmitYourArticle.com run by Steve Shaw here in the UK. He's changed his system from just submitting articles out onto the Internet to allowing you to distribute them over time; I think it's 30 days. And he allows you to rewrite sentences so that different versions of the articles appear on different websites that use them. I don't think he allows you to have the actual links in the body copy of your article yet .

But I also use the service by Mark and Daniel called ArticleMarketingAutomation.com. They do have a system where you can submit articles over time, I think it's 90 days. They appear on other people's blogs and they don't have the bio box, the resource box at the bottom, the actual links are in the actual copy of the article so it looks much more like just a natural blog post than it does an article appearing on someone's site with a biography box. And again, you can have that appear over time.

So what were the three things I said... (1) it needs to appear over time, which it does; (2) it needs different versions of the article on different people's sites, which it does; and (3) you need to have the links in the article, which it does.

So I use both of those services one of which ticks two boxes out three and the other one ticks three boxes out of three.

LA - Now I've done article submitting in the past and I find out of all the directories the one that actually sends the most traffic is EzineArticles.com. Would you say it's worth the time to submit any article manually to their directory?

NS - Yeah, that's not a way I've done it, I've used systems and services to send out articles to multiple different places. But yeah, if you just want to create a quick article and have it appear on their site.

It depends if you want to use them exclusively. I would imagine then you could put in the effort to become one of their... is it featured authors or most valuable authors, the people that have submitted the most articles? And then that might get you additional visitors because you would be seen as an authority within Ezine Articles.

It then turns into the Web 2.0 thing - should you create lots of pages, and lots of Lenses at Squidoo; should you create quality Hubs at HubPages; should you become an EzineArticles - featured author?

I have mixed feelings about all that, because you would probably spend a lot of time to accomplish that goal and that is time you could have been spending elsewhere, actually building your blog or promoting your blog so, I don't know, I haven't actually gone that route of manually submitting articles just to Ezine Articles in exchange for just the traffic that comes from that site.

LA - Okay. And also, of course, if you do write let's say, one exclusive article or a number of exclusive articles then you can choose to just submit each one of those articles to somewhere else. I know some sites and some quite high traffic blogs are looking for guest writers. So if the content is high quality enough and relevant enough to their blog they may publish it for you and then that's a valuable link from their high traffic site that is going to get you traffic. Would you agree with that?

NS - Absolutely, but they will need to know in the first place a bit about you. That comes from, like we said, creating quality content at your blog and then building links into your blog. So when you go to this expert authority blogger and say would you like me to write an article, a guest article at your blog? They're going to say "Well, where are you from and what's your website and what's your history?" So you need to focus on building that first.

If you say "Well this is my blog on weight loss coconut oil and it's been around for 2 weeks and it hasn't actually got any page rank yet but I'm working on it..." they'll say "Well come back in 12 months when you've built up your credibility a little bit", or at least I would.

Maybe if you write some scintillating article that they can't refuse then that demonstrates through the power of the article itself that you're an expert then that may get you access to their blog as a guest author straight away. But definitely, I agree with the basic point that getting exposure in that way would be very valuable and something to go after. I would just think that you would need to spend some time building up your credibility and authority before you can approach those people.

LA - One last potential link building way I've made a note of here, and then I'll think we'll start moving on to other questions, is what would be your comments on a service like PRWeb.com, providing you used it for press releases?

NS - Yes I've used PRWeb.com in the past. I think that's good for being yet another place that you can get links from. I mention that one in my eBook as well and show examples.

I like the fact that PR Web, although they're not the cheapest they do a good job of tracking things for you. So they'll show you the number of times people have clicked the print icon by your press release, so gone to print it out; and the number of times people have downloaded your PDF version of your press release; and the estimated number of people that have seen your press release and things like that, so they have some really good tracking statistics at PR Web.

Writing press releases is totally different to just writing blog posts or writing articles to submit to article directories. You need to write it in the way that a news editor would expect to receive it. So, if you want to write press releases I suggest... I think there's a really good tutorial section at PR Web where you can read about how press releases are written because it's a different style of copywriting, and it's important to try and get that right if you want your press releases to actually be picked by the media and maybe be printed in some prestigious places. So, yeah, that's a good extra idea that off the top of my head I hadn't included.

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