Category Archives: Link Building

PR Sculpting Now Obsolete: So What? Why You Shouldn’t Worry

So Google apparently hasn’t officially confirmed that yet, but now every SEO on the planet is aware of its decision to ignore PageRank sculpting.

If you used nofollow to change how PR flowed within your site, or even Javascript links, that era of easy optimization may be over.

I always knew it would be discounted one day, it was just a matter of time. This technique was so publicized and so abused that Google had to step in.

So the question is: should we start worrying about how we’re going to sculpt PageRank now? Would it be impossible to obtain the same kind of results without PR sculpting (or at least the methods we used to use)?

The answer is a straight NO. In fact, no SEO needs to worry at all.

Remember back in 2005 when every SEO was using link exchange techniques to build links and increase their PageRank? What happened when Google decided to discount these types of links? Did we all give up our optimization campaigns? Nope, we just learned the new rules of the game, we built better links which lead to better SERPs and better websites (at least outgoing links on a page were more useful to the user than reciprocate links).

Back to PR sculpting: you get the point, it’s not the end of the world. If Google really starts to depreciate it, that means that all webmasters are now on an equal footing.

To beat your competitors, you just need to be smarter. Instead of throwing nofollow tags on your “Contact” of “About Us” page links on your 5 page site (which really was useless and could raise flags easily), you’ll now have to organize links in a more clever way.

Based on your keyword research data, add links to your primary pages from your homepage and other important pages in terms of linking value (or link juice, anchor text value, PR, whatever).

At the end it will be the same, but unlike nofollow or Javascript techniques, that technique is not borderline and is perfectly acceptable by Google.

Every webmaster seemed to be using PR sculpting these days, but not all of them are going to be motivated enough to build better internal links, that’s your chance to beat them if you’re smart enough.

Amazon Caught Cloaking

I love playing with the User Agent Switcher plugin for Firefox. I just discovered that Amazon was cloaking its affiliate links thanks to that tool.

Cloaking is when a site displays one page to a search engine bot, while a regular user will see something different. Cloaking is used to manipulate search bots’ behaviour, and therefore obtain better search engine rankings.

I was browsing Uncrate the other day and after clicking on a link to Kanye West’s Graduation page on Amazon, I realized something fishy. Uncrate used the following affiliate link on their post:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000RG1FMO/ref=nosim/uncrate-20

But after I clicked, the link redirected to:

http://www.amazon.com/Graduation-Kanye-West/dp/B000RG1FMO

Wow, something is wrong here… I checked the status of the User Agent Switcher plugin and noticed that it was set to GoogleBot…

So then I decided to check the HTTP Headers of this redirection with Live HTTP Headers,another excellent Firefox plugin. And here’s what I found:

It’s a HTTP 301 Redirect!!! Click on the image (or here) to see the text version of these HTTP Headers. I’ve checked with other Amazon affiliate links, and it always redirected to the product page with a 301. Amazon is cloaking its affiliate links to get more links to their product pages and therefore rank higher in search engine results.

Clearly, this is unfair for other websites’ owners competiting with Amazon.

If Amazon wasn’t using 301 redirects on their affiliate links, they wouldn’t have that many links pointing to their product pages, and then it will be more difficult for them to get high rankings.

What Really Happened to DMOZ

As some of you may have noticed, submitting a site to DMOZ has been impossible for almost a month, apparently since October 23rd. The world’s biggest human-edited directory’s servers crashed, and all the pages that you’re able to see right now are static pages coming from their backup.

There’s also another reason behind DMOZ outage. Jean Manco, who is a DMOZ editor and also a member of Cre8asiteforums revealed something interesting in this thread:

There was a crash. The public side was recovered fairly easily. (It’s just a static copy though.) The real problem has been with the innards – the editing side. Don’t ask me what exactly went wrong. But it was catastrophic. Editors haven’t been able to edit at all since it happened.

The silver lining is that the new set-up that AOL has been working on in the wake of the crash should be an improvement. And we hope to see it in action fairly soon. I can’t give an estimated time for lift-off though. Nor can I promise that submissions will be switched back on as soon as editors can get back to work. There may be technical reasons for a time-lag on that.

Well, it’s good to hear that there is a serious reason behind this outage, but even if DMOZ goes back up tomorrow, we will still have to wait a year or two before seeing our sites listed! 🙂

The End of Microsoft bCentral Directory

If you try to submit your website to Microsoft bCentral Small Business Directory, you’ll get a message that may disappoint you:

As of November 15, 2006 Microsoft will no longer accept new sign-ups for select Microsoft Online Small Business Services. These services, previously marketed under the bCentral™ brand, include Appointment Manager, Banner Network Ads, Commerce Manager, Customer Manager, FastCounter Pro, List Builder, Sales Leads, SharePoint®, Submit it!, Traffic Builder, and Web Hosting Packages.

Unfortunately, they no longer accept submissions to their directory. As Andy Beal rightly noticed, the new home for Microsoft Small Business Services doesn’t appear to have a directory.

In the mean time, DMOZ has been unavailable for more than a month now… Could it be the end of human edited directories?

Text Link Ads Acquired by MediaWhiz, Offering New Services

Today, the famous text link advertising company Text Link Ads announced that it has been acquired by MediaWhiz. According to TLA owner, Patrick Gavin, this change will allow advertisers to have new ways to drive traffic and sales thanks to email marketing, CPA offers, CPM displays ads etc.

For happy publishers like me :), it means more potential advertisers and new ways to make money!

I’ve been providing text links through this blog and I’m quite happy with the revenue I got. If you have a website and want an easy and quick way to make money, you should check out their offers.