About two weeks ago I wrote a post about blocking Google Image Search from getting your images.

Just in case anyone out there is curious - image theft/bandwidth leeching has dropped pretty much 100% since blocking it. This chart represents the number of new bandwidth leechers each day (as reported by Thiefinder):

And guess what, the site is still growing. If that doesn’t convince you how pointless Google Image Search is I don’t know what will. It’s a bit like submitting your blog to 5,000 RSS directories - it hurts more than it helps. All it does is result in theft, theft, and more theft.

What Would Google Look Like If It Was Optimized For Google?

So true, so true…

Do You Disclose Affiliate Links?

To be honest I am SHOCKED at the number of people who say they redirect their links and such. Personally I think anyone who tries to hide the fact they are getting paid is scum, absolute scum. I think it is also bit foolish to not disclose the links (unless it is obvious, like an ad), but I don’t mind that as much as purposely hiding them. Money changes everything - including people’s opinions about products.

The Virtues Of Posting Less Often

Mohsin has pretty much convinced me posting less often is better - and I want to try my best to do it. Problem is now I am doing weekly blog reviews in addition to the regular content here, so I’ll probably still be posting daily.

A Secret to Profitable Blogging - Trending Up Over the Long Haul

Darren talks about treating blogging as a long term thing and to not expect huge, immediate results. It takes a long time to go from nothing to something.

PC Magazine Top 100 Favorite Blogs

Nusuni Dot Com didn’t make it on there, oh well. Maybe next year?

Being Stupid And Litigious Is No Way To Go Through Life

A classic case of copyright misconception and how NOT to handle legal issues. Extortion, anyone?

Judge to Porn-Peddling Spammers: You’ve Got Jail

Some spammers have finally been sentenced to jail for five years for sending spam mail. Two down, 5000 more to go.

Google image search (and similar search engines) are fairly worthless for website administrators for 2 reasons. 1) It is very rare that a visitor who comes to your site via image search will become a repeat visitor or customer, and 2) It wastes bandwidth and greatly increases the threat of bandwidth theft (MySpace and forum users love to hotlink images they find via image search).

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

I’ve recently started doing that after repeated cases of bandwidth theft via image hotlinking. I’m sick of it, so I’m making it harder for people to find them.

If you have not done so already, you can read part one of this post here.

This is a guest post by Ryan Caldwell. Ryan is a link portfolio artist at SeaWaves Technology, LLC.

Just like a house is made of many parts, which together give the house its character, your link portfolio is really the set of all your links. So how do you make your link portfolio better?

Well, it depends. But here are nine basic principles that I’ve collected by interviewing several top SEO experts:

1. Bait the hell out of new sites

A new site should launch with at least one linkbait per week for the first 3 months. Once you get the hang of crafting a linkbait, you should have no problem gaining massive linkage from Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Delicious and Propeller. Say your site is in the health industry. A linkbait not only provides you the opportunity to score some great .edu and .gov link, but it also removes most patterns that occur when you try to execute your own link building plan.

2. Leave comments at the most popular posts on the most popular blogs in your niche

First, identify the top 5 sites in your niche. Let’s say your blog is about blogging and making money. For argument’s sake, we’ll take Problogger, Shoemoney, John Chow, Performancing and Entrepreneur’s Journey as the top 5.

Second, identify their top 5 blogs posts. There are many ways to do this, but for the sake of quickness (and relying on multibillion dollar companies), you could use Yahoo Site Explorer which tends to list what it perceives as the most important articles on a site first.

Third, make intelligent comments. Hopefully they have the URL field open. Don’t worry if links are nofollow in their comments. Doesn’t matter.

3. Increase Randomness / Remove Patterns

Patterns emerge from non-natural link manipulation. What if 90% of your home was made out of fabric? Not good. Any home builder knows that the majority of your house should be built out of a solid, long lasting material. They’d know something was amiss if 90% of your home was built from fabric. The same goes for search engines. Search engines consider your site against ideal link portfolio archetypes. If something is way off, you’ll get penalized.

So how do you remove patterns? Well, for one, you use high doses of linkbait. But you can also define an “ideal” natural link portfolio and model your link-building methods around it. See below for some examples.

4. Get Exponentially More Links From Weaker Sites Than Stronger Sites

Under a natural temporal progression, a good site will have more links from weaker sites than from strong sites. You can track this natural progression by simply not committing the common error of only trying to get high PageRank links. A good quality site with PageRank 3 might just be a diamond in the rough.

5. Pay attention to temporal momentum

A new site should not show up one day with 50,000 backlinks out of the blue. A slow start, with progressively exponential growth for the first year is natural and a sign of health. Pace out your acquisition of links and don’t do it all at once. A daily or weekly schedule can do wonders for executing this model.

6. Solicit (or Buy) Tightly Focused Blogroll Links

Against the judgement of many, let me suggest that it is very natural to get run of site blogroll links from other sites in your niche. Just make sure they are quality sites with quality content. an easy and natural way to get these sort of links is a reciprocal link exchange. Please…forget all the bad information out there. Semantically relevant reciprocal links are not a zero-sum game. They are almost always good for both parties. Just make sure that you balance recips with one-ways, etc.

7. Limited article directory and press release submission doesn’t hurt and might help

You don’t want article directory submissions or press releases to be the dominant part of your link portfolio, but they don’t hurt, and can add to portfolio diversification. And if done under natural circumstances, with newsworthy material, press releases can actually turn into their own form of linkbait if news organizations or related companies pick up on the news. Make sure to mention other companies in your press release and you’re almost guaranteed to get a thank you, as well as a link.

8. Submit your site to about five quality directories

Quality is the key here. Google doesn’t take most directories seriously, but there are a few that I recommend such as Yahoo, StartingPoint, DMOZ, BlogCatalog, EatonWeb, Best of the Web.

9. Increase site visibility by getting easy quality links in moderation

Don’t overdue it, but you can easily get links from wordpress.com, blogger.com, youtube.com, wikipedia.com, squidoo.com and the list could go on forever. It doesn’t really matter if the links are redirects or nofollows. You want to focus on domain visibility.

What to avoid

The two most important rules to follow when creating a strong link portfolio are 1) diversify your methods and 2) use moderation when taking the “easy” steps. If you have too many links from a single domain, or if you get too many run-of-site links too quickly, your link portfolio is going to look like the frame of a house without a foundation. Search engines are now capable of seeing this.

• Don’t spam wikipedia.com (though you might add a few quality, relevant links)
• Don’t spam wordpress.com (though you might setup a few quality supplemental blogs)
• Don’t spam blogspot.com
• Don’t submit your site to 100 directories (most of them will be seen as junky link farms)
• Don’t slap your domain up on one site’s blogroll and then stop
• Don’t just go after PR 5+ links (though a few are fine)
• Don’t just build comment links
• Don’t just rely on blog network links
• Don’t just rely on purchased links (though in moderation, they are fine)
• Don’t just rely on social media and short term links

The key is to pace all of your link building activities out over time and to diversify the “building materials” or type of links that you use so that everything seems as natural as possible.

Stay tuned for even more Back To The Basics posts.

This is a guest post by Ryan Caldwell, a writer at Performancing and College Startup.

Summary: The basic idea of this post is this. Take any object. Let’s say a house door. We can say different things about that door. Either it fits the house well or it doesn’t. Now go up a level and consider the house. What makes a good house? Well, if the majority of its parts are good parts, and they are put together in the right configuration, etc. In this post I suggest that a good link portfolio is one that is well constructed according to a natural pattern of “location” “semantics” “strength” and “duration”

We all perceive the universe as having four dimensions: Three dimensions in space (depth, width, height). One dimension in time. Whatever happens in this universe seems to occur across these four dimensions, without exception.

But this isn’t a lesson in physics. Rather, it’s an attempt to understand SEO (which occurs across time and virtual space) on the model of 4 dimensions, thinking of a website’s link portfolio as a real world object with real world properties.

A link portfolio for any given page is the total set of properties associated with the inbound links to that page. A link portfolio is like the structure of a house. It consists of many parts, and each part has its own distinct properties, but the house as a whole also exhibits unique properties not possessed by any single part.

For my purposes, you can think of links themselves as objects with properties. Just as the door (an object) to my house has a certain age (a temporal property) so do the links to my website. The door might be significantly younger than my house, just like a link to my website might be significantly younger than the website.

The door to my house has many properties other than age. It has a certain depth, width and height. It is made of certain materials. An experienced construction worker could tell you whether the door is a good door or a bad door. He would perform this evaluation based on various criteria like “does it fit in the door opening” or “does it have a good insulating value” etc.

A link to your website is just like a part of your house. It has certain properties. A link can be strong or weak. A link can be relevant or non-relevant. A link can be run-of-site or single-page. It can exist within content, in the sidebar, in the footer, in comments, or even hidden on top of a single pixel. A link can point to an existing page, or a 404 page. A link can point to the home page, a category page, or an article page. A link can have anchor text, nofollow tags …or not.

So you get the point. We should think of links as objects, just as we think of the parts of a house as objects. But, in this case it’s not just the parts of the house that have properties. The house itself has its own characteristic too, properties that are derived from the cumulative nature of its parts. A beautiful, quality, sturdy house might have a few bad parts. But it’s overall character will still shine through as fundamentally “good.” Your overall goal in building a link portfolio should be the same.

That was the introduction. Now I want to get into some specifics.

You should think of each link to your site as an object with 4 main types of properties.

The Four Dimensions of a Link

1. Location
2. Semantics
3. Strength
4. Duration

Location

One of the points you should get from this article is that some links are more important than others, yet diversity is key. You can’t build an entire house out of 2×4s - and you shouldn’t build your entire link portfolio with in-content links.

Still, some links are clearly better than others. There is a general consensus that the best type of link is one that is situated within the upper portion of textual content in an article. Next, is within the lower portion of textual content. This is followed by “below the content” resource links.

Outside of the content, the best sort of link would be right below the header. This is followed by resource or blogroll links in the left sidebar (closely followed by the same type of link in the right sidebar).

The worst position for a link, in my view, is the footer, or absolute bottom of a page.

Of course, not all inner-content links or sidebar links are created equal. This brings me to the second dimension of a link.

Semantics

A link always occurs within a semantic context. Because a link is a “relation” between two pages, each of the pages in the relationship contributes to the semantic context. What is the page that possesses the link about? What is the page that gets linked to about? If there’s a semantic match, then that stands in favor of the quality of the link. A run-of-site link in the sidebar from a similarly themed website is much better for your link profile than a run-of-site link from an irrelevant site.

Think of semantics in the same way that an interior designer thinks about matching colors and themes. Do the interior colors and objects blend well? Do they go together? The same can be asked about the two pages between which a link exists.

There’s more to semantics though, then page level analysis. There’s also site level analysis and microlocal analysis. Site level analysis seems to be getting much more important. It is no longer sufficient that a site about gadgets throw up an article about dogs with a link to a dog site. An analysis of site-level semantics diminishes the value of such a link. This is becoming especially true with the pushback that the search engines are making against PayPerPost spam.

Microlocal analysis is simply a consideration of the specific anchor text and whether semantically similar anchor text exists on the linked-to page. If so, your link becomes invaluable. However, if the size of your link portfolio is small, make sure to avoid the newbie habit of using homogeneous anchor text. “Coffee cup” repeated ten times is much worse than a natural semantic balance of “coffee cup” “my favorite coffee cup” “insulating coffee cups” and “coffee cups.”

Strength

Every link that comes to your site has its own perceived strength. Does it come from a strong, authoritative domain such as usatoday.com, about.com or harvard.edu? How about a moderately successful, recognized blog like copyblogger.com or shoemoney.com?

Strength is a complex metric that roughly indicates both the perceived authority of the domain on which the link exists, as well as the individual strength of the specific page that does the linking.

While it’s always great to get strong, quality links from heavy hitting domains, don’t forget the importance of the niche-relevant “little guys” to balance out your portfolio.

Duration

Here’s the biggest, often unspoken tip: time matters when it comes to the value of a link. Stable, long term links are the best kind. Links from social media sites are often of little long term value in themselves. They might provide a quick boost of traffic, but unless they convert into long-term links on other sites, their value can be almost completely lost in a few months.

I ran an experiment recently where I collected a lot of long term links very quickly. The page receiving the links was penalized. But only for about 2 months. It then jumped from page 21 in the SERPS, all the way to page 2 and is on the verge of climbing onto the first page. The moral of that story? Search engines buffer against short-term gain from links, but remove the buffer after a probationary period of time. If your links are long term, they should increase and then retain most of their value.

Continue reading…

Stay tuned for more Back To The Basics posts.