Links are one of the most important factors for high search engine
rankings. If your website doesn’t have enough incoming links then it will be very
difficult to get high rankings for a competitive search term.

It’s also important that you get the right kind of links. 20 “good
” incoming links will get you much better rankings than than 100 bad incoming
links.

OK, so what makes a good incoming link? There are a number of points that can make
a link better than other links:

1. Use your keyword in the anchor text

Make sure that the texts that are used to link to your website contain
words for which you want to get high rankings on search engines.

2. Relevancy

Links from related web pages almost always work better than links from unrelated
pages. Links from unrelated pages may not hurt your rankings (although they are unlikely to help) but Google
likes links from websites that cover topics that are related to yours better.

3. Relevant landing page on your site

While it’s okay to get links to your home page it is better to get links
to the page that is most relevant to the chosen anchor text. If the link text matches the content of the linked pages then it’s more
likely that your web page is really relevant to that term and it’s more
likely that you’ll get high rankings for that search term.

4. Authority Links

Links from pages with high “authority” will help to increase the TrustRank
of your website. Links from websites with high PageRank have a positive
effect on the rankings of your own site.

If a website
is well known and if the site has good search engine rankings then it’s
likely that it is also an authority website.

5. No nofollows

The nofollow attribute tells search engines that they should not follow
a link. Links with that attribute will not help your search engine rankings.

You will probably have to check the HTML code of your link partners
to find out if they use a nofollow attribute to link to your site (do this by viewing the source, finding you link, and looking to see if “nofollow” is present)

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The 30 day Challenge to create your own online business is just about to kick of again …. For the 3rd year - and starting on Wednesday 1st August, the challenge to make your first $10 online begins.

For the full 30 days of August (or 31 actually) Ed Dale and Dan Raine and Nicolas Messe are going to be showing you exactly how to start your own Internet business and generate your first income online, all without spending a cent of hard cash… although it will clearly involve some time commitment on your behalf.

I’ve not been involved in any of the previous 30 day challenges but this one promises to be bigger and better than ever… incorporating video tutorials and podcasts… and simple guides and instructions on some of the most sophisticated Web 2.0 technologies around.

I’ll be directly participating in the challenge myself… and encourage you to go and take a look and see what it’s all about.

see : The Thirty Day Challenge for more info

Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz fame has posted an article entitled : How to Handle a Google Penalty - And, an Example from the Field of Real Estate which includes a simple step by step process explaining how to check if your site is suffering from a Google penalty - and very importantly - how to deal with it.

The flow chart Rand has come up with steps you through several simple questions (with yes and no answers) to help you determine a strategy for dealing with a Google penalty. Here’s a summary of Rands post - including a textual representation of his diagram.

Step One - Is your site indexed in Google?

Try googling site:yourdomainname.com If your site is displayed, go to step 2 . If none of your pages come up - or if only your home page appears, then you may have some sort of penalty.

Login to Google Webmaster Central, validate your site and see if Google responds that your site is penalised. If so, clean up your site (by removing anything spammy - see Google Webmaster Guidelines and in particular the quality guidelines) and submit a reinclusion request within the Webmaster Central console.

Step Two - Do you rank for your domain name ?

Try Googling www.yourdomainname.com - If your site shows up, skip to step3 . If no, then you may have some sort of penalty.

Penalty? login to Google Webmaster Central, validate your site and see if Google responds that your site is penalised.

No penalty? Then it may be a trust issue. Review all your links, see if you have potentially bad outgoing links - and get rid of them. Drop paid link campaigns that you feel may be hurting your rankings. Drop link exchanges that you feel may be hurting your trust. Clean up other areas of the site that may seem a bit “gray”. Submit a reinclusion request via Webmaster Central.

Step Three - Do you rank in top 20 for some of your unique terms?

Try Googling some unique (or relatively unique) phrases from you site. If your pages are listed then you don’t have a Google penalty. If they don’t, then you may have some sort of penalty.

This may be as a result of Google discounting (or ignoring) the “link value” transferred to you by a bunch of your link partners. Now that those links don’t pass any value to you anymore, you probably won’t be ranking as well as you once were. If this is the case remove links back to your “suspect” link partners, and submit a reinclusion request.

Also review your site content and do some link building for great high quality, natural links.

Finally…

The above process is not a panacea, and will probably not solve all your problems, but it’s definitely a good starting point to diagnose and help address suspected Google penalties.

Rands article has also includes some great real world examples… so make sure that you drop by and take a look.

Matt Cutts of Google has recently updated his blog post on How to report paid links. The update has more detail on Google’s view of paid links. Here’s a quick summary of some of the new additions :.

• Sites with paid links may lose their ability to pass link value to other pages
• Google may use “semi-automatic approaches to ignore paid links,” such as manual reviews, spam reports
• Not all paid links are necessarily bad, only those that “flow PageRank and attempt to game Google’s rankings”
• Examples of bad paid links include those that have links to pages that are not related and pages disguising the fact that they are paid links
• Google wants spam reports on paid links to better test, confirm and improve their algorithms
• Directory links from directories that reject submissions, charge a fee and have quality listings in the directory should be OK