7 Advanced Link Building Strategies for a Competitive Edge

We all know it’s not worth our time to build sub-par links anymore. It’s time to get innovative with our link building tactics. We previously shared a few lesser-known link building techniques and post panda/penguin era link acquisition strategies here, but we are of the opinion that you can’t have too many.

So, here are a few more techniques that will help you push the envelope and approach link building with the mindset of a serious marketer:

1. Coin a Phrase and Set Up Alerts

The idea behind this strategy is to invent a new buzzword, try and get it to catch on, and then capture links as a result. Since not everybody who uses the phrase is going to send a link your way, you can set up Google Alerts to capture mentions of the phrase. If it’s clear front context that they’re talking about the buzzword you coined, this can be a great opportunity to build a link.

Now, if your site doesn’t quite have the exposure to get a buzzword out there, this might seem like a pointless exercise in futility. However, all it takes is $50 to get your article in front of 1,000 people on StumbleUpon.

If your campaign is targeted toward the right people, and the phrase is catchy enough, this could well be enough to start getting the phrase in use by many in the online community.

2. Produce a Resource and Set Up Alerts

Similarly, you can put together a video, white paper, or infographic, set up Google Alerts on the topic, and start contacting people. Any time a question about the topic comes up online, this is an opportunity to answer their question with a link to your resource. This is a great option because the answer is completely on-topic.

If you use this tactic, be sure to be as helpful as possible. The resource itself should be tremendously helpful, of course, but if it doesn’t answer every aspect of the question, make sure you address those directly in your comments, emails, etc. Don’t make it feel like a sales pitch, offer a genuinely useful answer.

3. Update Somebody Else’s Content

You know those pieces of content that seem to just keep on giving? This is the content that you want to keep investing in with updates, corrections, etc. to keep it relevant. It’s common practice to revisit your best content, keep promoting it, and keep improving it.

But fixing up your old content can be also be a chore, and that’s where you come in. Instead of submitting a guest post, why not contact a blogger with an interesting fact or update that will help keep one of their top posts fresh and interesting?

Try doing a search for some of the more broad terms related to your keywords, and visiting some of the blog posts you come across. Focus on the ones that already seem to have massive appeal. Read through, and catch yourself if you start thinking this reminds me of…

As soon as that happens, get in touch and let them in a surprising piece of information that’s relevant to the article. This can be a great opportunity to earn a link.

4. Customize a Widget

You might not be a coding master with the ability to put together a master widget that everybody’s going to want to download. However, odds are pretty good you have the coding or design skills necessary to customize a widget so that it fits a site’s branding and appearance.

Try seeking out blogs in your niche, or peripheral niches, that use widgets you recognize. Give the widget a tweak so that it fits the site better, place a link, and offer the new take on the widget to the blogger. This is especially powerful for popular blogging topics that aren’t centered around the tech industry.

That said, be ethical, and make sure the blogger is aware of the link back to your site. There’s no reason to hide this. As long as you understand how to work with people amicably it shouldn’t be a problem.

5. Buy Display Ads

Carson Ward from Distilled recently ran an experiment where the purchased ads as a method of building links. He discovered that, by far, the most effective ads were display ads. (AdWords ads, on the other hand, were the worst.)

With display ads, it’s possible to target sites where bloggers and site owners are most likely to lurk. This way, you can put your site in front of the audience that has the most impact on links and online influence. You only need to pay when the visitors actually click on the ads, and each visit from this type of visitor is much more likely to result in a link than a visit from the search engines.

Many SEOs are averse to spending money on ads because they generally only produce short term benefits, but if you can use ads to build links this objection doesn’t make sense anymore. The only question you should be asking is whether your time is better invested in paying for ads or outreach (or some combination of both).

6. Work with Experts

There’s no reason to produce content in a vacuum. In fact, most of the best content is the result of collaboration. Involve experts in the creation, fact-checking, and refinement of your content before it goes live. The more experts you work with, the more opportunities you have for additional links.

Don’t try to scale this too much. The more people you try to involve, the less commitment you can get from each of them, especially if you are automating your outreach. Instead, customize your outreach emails and be clear about why you are contacting them. Don’t ask for too much from them, and make it clear that they will be getting something out of the exchange as well.

7. Get In Business Directories

Most “link” directories are useless (though exceptions like DMOZ and AllTop are worth your time). However, getting added to relevant business directories is certainly a worthwhile effort, since these links are from reputable organizations and are a good sign of trust. These kinds of links can come from:

• The Better Business Bureau
• The Chamber of Commerce
• Your local library
• Other relevant city and state government resources
• Accrediting organizations
• Business memberships

Focus on links from reputable business lists that people actually use and care about. Avoid directories that exist simply to provide links for search engine authority, since these are the least likely to offer any real search engine authority.

Can you think of additional alternatives? If you can, pass them along, and if you liked this, be sure to pass it along as well.

Posted At Search Engine Journal

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Top 50 Expensive Keywords for Google Adsense

If you are an Adsense Publisher, you always want to increase your earning through clicks. Sometimes it happens that you have good CTR, I mean you are getting a good number clicks from Adsense but your estimated earning is low. For example, you gave got 40 clicks and your estimated earning was $0.77! It’s really an unexpected earning.

You aren’t responsible for this low earning. Actually Low CPC (Cost Per Click) is responsible for it. You might have noticed that Adsense shows Ads according to post contents. Specifically we can say that Ads are related with post’s keywords. CPC is related with these keywords.

Google won’t pay you an average rate for clicks. Sometimes you will earn $3 for a click where sometimes they won’t pay you $3 for 50 clicks. Here is the point. It depends on the Ads that people clicked. If people clicked on a high paying ad then you’ll get a good payment. As I said Ads are showing according to your content’s keywords, if you have high paying keywords in your post you will get high CPC.

So you want to know which are high paying keywords? Wait, in this post I’ll share 50 high paying keywords for Adsense. Before we move to the keywords here some advise for you.

It’s obvious that all of these keywords won’t be suitable for your niche. Just find the keywords that are related with your blog and try to use them on your blog post. Never abuse these keywords.

Google Adsense High Paying Keywords 2013

Keywords	CPC
MESOTHELIOMA LAW FIRM	$179.01
DONATE CAR TO CHARITY CALIFORNIA	$130.25
DONATE CAR FOR TAX CREDIT	$126.65
DONATE CARS IN MA	$125.58
DONATE YOUR CAR SACRAMENTO	$118.20
HOW TO DONATE A CAR IN CALIFORNIA	$111.21
SELL ANNUITY PAYMENT	$107.46
DONATE YOUR CAR FOR KIDS	$106.01
ASBESTOS LAWYERS	$105.84
STRUCTURED ANNUITY SETTLEMENT	$100.8
ANNUITY SETTLEMENTS	$100.72
CAR INSURANCE QUOTES COLORADO	$100.93
NUNAVUT CULTURE	$99.52
DAYTON FREIGHT LINES	$99.39
HARDDRIVE DATA RECOVERY SERVICES	$98.59
DONATE A CAR IN MARYLAND	$98.51
MOTOR REPLACEMENTS	$98.43
CHEAP DOMAIN REGISTRATION HOSTING	$98.39
DONATING A CAR IN MARYLAND	$98.20
DONATE CARS ILLINOIS	$98.13
CRIMINAL DEFENSE ATTORNEYS FLORIDA	$98.07
BEST CRIMINAL LAWYER IN ARIZONA	$97.93
CAR INSURANCE QUOTES UTAH	$97.92
LIFE INSURANCE CO LINCOLN	$97.07
HOLLAND MICHIGAN COLLEGE	$95.74
ONLINE MOTOR INSURANCE QUOTES	$95.73
ONLINE COLLEDGES	$95.65
PAPERPORT PROMOTIONAL CODE	$95.13
ONLINECLASSES	$95.06
WORLD TRADE CENTER FOOTAGE	$95.02
MASSAGE SCHOOL DALLAS TEXAS	$94.90
PSYCHIC FOR FREE	$94.61
DONATE OLD CARS TO CHARITY	$94.55
LOW CREDIT LINE CREDIT CARDS	$94.49
DALLAS MESOTHELIOMA ATTORNEYS	$94.33
CAR INSURANCE QUOTES MN	$94.29
DONATE YOUR CAR FOR MONEY	$94.01
CHEAP AUTO INSURANCE IN VA	$93.84
MET AUTO	$93.70
FORENSICS ONLINE COURSE	$93.51
HOME PHONE INTERNET BUNDLE	$93.32
DONATING USED CARS TO CHARITY	$93.17
PHD IN COUNSELING EDUCATION	$92.99
NEUSON	$92.89
CAR INSURANCE QUOTES PA	$92.88
ROYALTY FREE IMAGES STOCK	$92.76
CAR INSURANCE IN SOUTH DAKOTA	$92.72
EMAIL BULK SERVICE	$92.55
WEBEX COSTS	$92.38
CHEAP CAR INSURANCE FOR LADIES	$92.23

So there we given the most wanted list of high paying Google AdSense keyword .Remember using keywords that doesn’t suite your blogs posts and also doesn’t comes naturally could be a disaster for your blog. So do not use those just because they are giving high CPC till you have enough knowledge about it.

1. MESOTHELIOMA LAW FIRM : Mesothelioma law firm is a keyword which is staying on the top for a long time.If you have this keyword then Google pays about 179.01$ per ad clicks.But it’s quite difficult to get ranked for this keyword.Mesothelioma simply means a rare form of cancer which is developed from themesothelium cells.

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Writing That Seo Tips for Audience Directly - Internet Marketing Strategies

A list of the best SEO practices to increase site traffic and views (and ultimately land money in your pocket)

The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that is done once the article is finished may be more important than the work done while working on the article. At least as far as traffic for the article is concerned. There are many powerful SEO practices for increasing traffic that must be done once after the article is completed. The following is a list of the most important SEO tips for increasing traffic to online articles.

Social Bookmarking

This is another great way to get backlinks. Social Bookmarking is saving your article to sites like Digg, Stumble Upon and Delicious. When you save your article to a social bookmarking site you are also creating a backlink from that page to your site. This creates a "vote", though a slightly weak one. But if you think of how every other person can then save that link too, this can become potentially powerful. Social Bookmarks are an important SEO tool for increasing traffic to online articles.

Keyword Research and Utilization

Keywords are the short phrases that search engines will find and rank. Articles need to be written with an understanding of how these keywords will rank. That is keyword research. It is all about knowing how difficult it is likely to be to get your keyword or phrase to rank on the top page of Google. The first thing you should do when working on search engine optimization is find a great keyword phrase for that page.

Backlinks

Backlinks is a big topic. It is really THE topic when it comes SEO techniques to increasing traffic to online articles. First of all every single backlink creates a pathway that someone can follow to your doorstep. That is not SEO, but that does make a great way to generate traffic.

Since backlinks are so important to this topic the following is a list of everything that needs to be known about backlinks to fully understand increasing traffic with SEO.

1) No-Follow/Do-Follow: There are two different types of backlinks. No-follow and Do-Follow. No follow means that the "spiders" or "bots" that come from the search engines and follow these links to your site are not supposed to count these as backlinks. Basically they Do Not Follow the links. These backlinks are still worth but of lesser value.

2) PageRank: Page Rank is basically a vote of confidence that Google gives to a site over time. This page ranking is mainly based on how many "votes" it has from its own backlinks (among other things). Page Rank is scaled 0-10. Every increment of PR that a site increases means that it can pass along a more powerful "vote" to any site that has a backlink attached to it. So 1 PR5 backlink is worth dozens of PR0 and PR1 Backlinks

3) Relevance: Relevance isn't new, but with the release of Google "Caffiene," Google stated that they will be putting a premium on relevance for their search results. Relevance means that you get a better "vote" from your site about the BMW if you have your backlink from a site on "cars" and you get an even better "vote" if it comes from a site that is also about BMW's.

4) Anchor Text: When you make your backlink you do so with 1-4 words usually. These words are your "Anchor Text" they should be close variations of the keywords for the site you are linking to. It is desirable to have some variation in your keywords used for anchor text, but staying close helps with the relevancy and is good SEO.

5) Blog Commenting: Blog commenting is one of the most popular ways to try to get mass backlinks. Making sure the comments are "do-follow" is step 1. A good step two is finding blogs that are both commentluv and keywordluv enabled. Commentluv is a addon that allows a post from YOUR blog to be displayed after your comments. If the blog is dofollow this is a backlink. Keyword love allows you to change your name where you sign in to keywords of your choice by typing in "name@my keyword". All keywordluv blogs must be dofollow.

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Negative SEO : How to Uncover an Attack Using a Backlink Audit

Ever since Google launched the Penguin update back in April 2012, the SEO community has debated the impact of negative SEO, a practice whereby competitors can point hundreds or thousands of negative backlinks at a site with the intention of causing harm to organic search rankings or even completely removing a site from Google's index. Just jump over to Fiverr and you can find many gigs offering thousands of wiki links, or directory links, or many other types of low-quality links for $5.

By creating the Disavow Links tool, Google acknowledged this very real danger and gave webmasters a tool to protect their sites. Unfortunately, most people wait until it's too late to use the Disavow tool; they look at their backlink profile and disavow links after they've been penalized by Google. In reality, the Disavow Links tool should be used before your website suffers in the SERPs.

Backlink audits have to be added to every SEO professional's repertoire. These are as integral to SEO as keyword research, on-page optimization, and link building. In the same way that a site owner builds links to create organic rankings, now webmasters also have to monitor their backlink profile to identify low quality links as they appear and disavow them as quickly as they are identified.

Backlink audits are simple: download your backlinks from your Google Webmaster account, or from a backlink tool, and keep an eye on the links pointing to your site. What is the quality of those links? Do any of the links look fishy?

As soon as you identify fishy links, you can then try to remove the links by emailing the webmaster. If that doesn't work, head to Google's disavow tool and disavow those links. For people looking to protect their sites from algorithmic updates or penalties, backlink audits are now a webmaster's best friend.

If your website has suffered from lost rankings and search traffic, here's a method to determine whether negative SEO is to blame.

A Victim of Negative SEO?

A few weeks ago I received an email from a webmaster whose Google organic traffic dropped by almost 50 percent within days of Penguin 2.0. He couldn't understand why, given that he'd never engaged in SEO practices or link building. What could've caused such a massive decrease in traffic and rankings?

The site is a 15-year-old finance magazine with thousands of news stories and analysis, evergreen articles, and nothing but organic links. For over a decade it has ranked quite highly for very generic informational financial keywords – everything from information about the economies of different countries, to very detailed specifics about large corporations.

With a long tail of over 70,000 keywords, it's a site that truly adds value to the search engine results and has always used content to attract links and high search engine rankings.

The site received no notifications from Google. They simply saw a massive decrease in organic traffic starting May 22, which leads me to believe they were impacted by Penguin 2.0.

In short, he did exactly what Google preaches as safe SEO. Great content, great user experience, no manipulative link practices, and nothing but value.

So what happened to this site? Why did it lose 50 percent of its organic traffic from Google?

Backlink Audit

I started by running a LinkDetox report to analyze the backlinks. Immediately I knew something was wrong:

Upon further investigation, 55 percent of his links were suspicious, while 7 percent (almost 500) of the links were toxic:

So the first step was to research those 7 percent toxic links, how they were acquired, and what types of links they were.

In LinkDetox, you can segment by Link Type, so I was able to first view only the links that were considered toxic. According to Link Detox, toxic links are links from domains that aren't indexed in Google, as well as links from domains whose theme is listed as malware, malicious, or having a virus.

Immediately I noticed that he had many links from sites that ended in .pl. The anchor text of the links was the title of the page that they linked to.

It seemed that the sites targeted "credit cards", which is very loosely in this site's niche. It was easy to see that these were scraped links to be spun and dropped on spam URLs. I also saw many domains that had expired and were re-registered for the purpose of creating content sites for link farms.

Also, check out the spike in backlinks:

From this I knew that most of the toxic links were spam, and links that were not generated by the target site. I also saw many links to other authority sites, including entrepreneur.com and venturebeat.com. It seems that this site was classified as an "authority site" and was being used as part of a spammers way of adding authority links to their outbound link profile.

Did Penguin Cause the Massive Traffic Loss?

I further investigated the backlink profile, checking for other red flags.

His Money vs Brand ratio looked perfectly healthy:

His ratio of "Follow" links was a little high, but this was to be expected given the source of his negative backlinks:

Again, he had a slightly elevated number of text links as compared to competitors, which was another minor red flag:

One finding that was quite significant was his Deep Link Ratio, which was much too high when compared with others in his industry:

In terms of authority, his link distribution by SEMrush keyword rankings was average when compared to competitors:

Surprisingly, his backlinks had better TitleRank than competitors, meaning that the target site's backlinks ranked for their exact match title in Google – an indication of trust:

Penalized sites don't rank for their exact match title.

The final area of analysis was the PageRank distribution of the backlinks:

Even though he has a great number of high quality links, the percentage of links that aren't indexed in Google is substantially great. Close to 65 percent of the site's backlinks aren't indexed in Google.

In most cases, this indicates poor link building strategies, and is a typical profile for sites that employ spam link building tactics.

In this case, the high quantity of links from pages that are penalized, or not indexed in Google, was a case of automatic links built by spammers!

As a result of having a prominent site that was considered by spammers to be an authority in the finance field, this site suffered a massive decrease in traffic from Google.

Avoid Penguin & Unnatural Link Penalties

A backlink audit could've prevented this site from being penalized from Google and losing close to 50% of their traffic. If a backlink audit had been conducted, the site owner could've disavowed these spam links, performed outreach to get these links removed, and documented his efforts in case of future problems.

If the toxic links had been disavowed, all of the ratios would've been normalized and this site would've never been pegged as spam and penalized by Penguin.

Backlink Audits

Whatever tool you use - whether it's Ahrefs, LinkDetox, or OpenSiteExplorer – it's important that you run and evaluate your links on a monthly basis. Once you have the links, make sure you have metrics for each of the links in order to evaluate their health.

Here's what to do:

• Identify all the backlinks from sites that aren't indexed in Google. If they aren't indexed in Google, there's a good chance they are penalized. Take a manual look at a few to make sure nothing else is going on (e.g., perhaps they just moved to a new domain, or there's an error in reporting). Add all the N/A sites to your file.
• Look for backlinks from link or article directories. These are fairly easy to identify. LinkDetox will categorize those automatically and allow you to filter them out. Scan each of these to make sure you don't throw out the baby with the bathwater, as perhaps a few of these might be healthy.
• Identify links from sites that may be virus infected or have malware. These are identified as Toxic 2 in LinkDetox.
• Look for paid links. Google has long been at war with link buying and it's an obvious target. Find any links that have been paid and add them to the list. You can find these by sorting the results by PageRank descending. Evaluate all the high PR links as those are likely the ones that were purchased. Look at each and every one of the high quality links to assess how they were acquired. It's almost always pretty obvious if the link was organic or purchased.
• Take the list of backlinks and run it through the Juice Tool to scan for other red flags. One of my favorite metrics to evaluate is TitleRank. Generally, pages that aren't ranking for their exact match title have a good chance of having a functional penalty or not having enough authority. In the Juice report, you can see the exact title to determine if it's a valid title (for example, if the title is "Home", of course they won't rank for it, whether they have a penalty). If the TitleRank is 30+, you can review that link by doing a quick check, and if the site looks spammy, add it to your "Bad Links" file. Do a quick scan for other factors, such as PageRank and DomainAuthority, to see if anything else seems out of place.

By the end of this stage, you'll have a spreadsheet with the most harmful backlinks to a site.

Upload this Disavow File, to make sure the worst of your backlinks aren't harming your site. Make sure you then upload this disavow file when performing further tests on Link Detox as excluding these domains will affect your ratios.

Don't be a Victim of Negative SEO!

Negative SEO works; it's a very real threat to all webmasters. Why spend the time, money, and resources building high quality links and content assets when you can work your way to the top by penalizing your competitors?

There are many unethical people out there; don't let them cause you to lose your site's visibility. Add backlink audits and link profile protection as part of your monthly SEO tasks to keep your site's traffic safe. It's no longer optional.

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What is Google Penguin 2.0 Update ?

Webmasters have been watching for Penguin 2.0 to hit the Google search results since Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts first announced that there would be the next generation of Penguin in March. Cutts officially announced that Penguin 2.0 is rolling out late Wednesday afternoon on "This Week in Google".

"It's gonna have a pretty big impact on web spam," Cutts said on the show. "It's a brand new generation of algorithms. The previous iteration of Penguin would essentinally only look at the home page of a site. The newer generation of Penguin goes much deeper and has a really big impact in certain small areas."

In a new blog post, Cutts added more details on Penguin 2.0, saying that the rollout is now complete and affects 2.3 percent of English-U.S. queries, and that it affects non-English queries as well. Cutts wrote:

We started rolling out the next generation of the Penguin webspam algorithm this afternoon (May 22, 2013), and the rollout is now complete. About 2.3% of English-US queries are affected to the degree that a regular user might notice. The change has also finished rolling out for other languages world-wide. The scope of Penguin varies by language, e.g. languages with more webspam will see more impact.

This is the fourth Penguin-related launch Google has done, but because this is an updated algorithm (not just a data refresh), we’ve been referring to this change as Penguin 2.0 internally. For more information on what SEOs should expect in the coming months, see the video that we recently released.

Webmasters first got a hint that the next generation of Penguin was imminent when back on May 10 Cutts said on Twitter, “we do expect to roll out Penguin 2.0 (next generation of Penguin) sometime in the next few weeks though.”

Then in a Google Webmaster Help video, Cutts went into more detail on what Penguin 2.0 would bring, along with what new changes webmasters can expect over the coming months with regards to Google search results.

He detailed that the new Penguin was specifically going to target black hat spam, but would be a significantly larger impact on spam than the original Penguin and subsequent Penguin updates have had.

Google's initial Penguin update originally rolled out in April 2012, and was followed by two data refreshes of the algorithm last year – in May and October. 

Twitter is full of people commenting on the new Penguin 2.0, and there should be more information in the coming hours and days as webmasters compare SERPs that have been affected and what kinds of spam specifically got targeted by this new update.

Let us know if you've seen any significant changes, or if the update has helped or hurt your traffic/rankings in the comments.

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Google's Pure Spam Manual Action: Matt Cutts on How to Fix it

Google has released a series of seven videos designed to help webmasters resolve specific types of spam issues that have been identified on their site. With Google Webmaster Tools offering more specific details about why a website might be penalized, these videos are designed to help you know exactly what kind of manual spam action your site has been impacted by, and the specific steps you can take to correct the issues in Google's eyes.

What is Pure Spam?

Google considers pure spam to be anything to spam that anyone with a bit of tech savviness can tell that it spam. Often called "black hat", Cutts said this includes such things as “auto generated gibberish, cloaking, scraping, throwaway sites, or throwaway domains, where someone is more or less doing churn and burn where they are creating as many sites as possible to make as much money as possible before the get caught.”

Cutts said this is that type of spam that Google takes the most action against. He added that it's rare for people to actually file reconsideration requests for sites that are classified as pure spam, because many webmasters approach them as churn and burn.

For example, here's an image of auto-generated spam site Cutts included in a blog post a number of years ago:

Image Credit: Matt Cutts Blog

Fixing Pure Spam on a New Website

Sometimes there are legitimate cases where site owners have purchased the domain only to discover that there is a huge amount of spam in the domain's history, making it difficult for a new owner to then create something legitimate on that domain. People can look up a domain's history on archive.org and see what kind of spam issues had been happening, so it will become a priority to ensure that the new owner is starting with a clean slate with none of the spam content anywhere to be seen.

If this sort of thing happened to you, you must take special care to ensure that the new site you're putting on the previously spamming domain is high quality and nothing that could be remotely confused with being spammy. You essentially need to create actions within the site that gives Google signals that the site is now trustworthy and should be included in the index.

Fixing Pure Spam on an Existing Website

If your site has been flagged as being pure spam, this is probably one of the more difficult spam flags to overcome, because it is reserved for the spammiest of websites. That means, when you file your reconsideration request, you need to ensure that there is nothing anywhere on the site that could be remotely considered spam.

When you're trying to clean up, ensure everything that violate the Google webmaster guidelines has been removed, and that the quality guidelines are being followed to the letter. You should look at it from the perspective of building an entirely new site with new quality content.

Cutts said it's important for webmasters who are trying to clean up from a pure spam warning that they document everything they do, whether it is having purchased the domain from a previous owner, discovering and then removing spam you didn't realize existed on your site, or just simply not knowing better when you created what you thought was a fabulous auto-generated site.

When you finally file a reconsideration request, be sure that you include the steps you took to clean it up and when, so that Google can investigate and decide if the site has really turned over a new leaf.

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