TheAnand

The recent reshuffle of the Google results has severely affected one of my most active websites with traffic falling more than 80%. It was one of my biggest single earners in terms of money and loosing revenue from it is a big time bad news for me.

After almost 3+ years of solid rankings and earnings, the sudden drop on the website was a surprise. The website in question was very genuine, with original content, optimized and valuable content for many keywords. Initially it was curiosity, to know why PANDA update caught my website in its filters and kicked it out of top spots.

It is a known fact that backlinks are one of the major factors which Google consider while indexing our websites in their search results. The more you have the better. But it is also important to take care of the quality of backlinks that you get for your website as building backlinks the wrong way can screw you over with the Big G.

Google looks at many factors while ranking a website and some of these which I personally consider important are:

• Backlinks – The count and the quality
• Age of the domain and if its static or frequently updated.

This post is a response to this post I came across the other day tonight on Twitter about the Google Caffeine Search Engine Ranking factors which claimed to put tips to optimize your website to the new version of Google Search which is reportedly live on some datacenters. I question the source  of that article and how the author came to those points.

1. Loading time of your website/blog – This a fairly recent rumour if you ask me. Most webmasters work really hard on reducing load times on their websites. While it is NOT a SEO advantage to do so, it is a BIG user experience factor which is not only appreciated by Google, but by normal users like you and me also.

I wonder why it never struck me to complie a list of SEO friendly wordpress themes on my blog as I am constantly searching for them myself!

I usually have a select of 10-20 themes which I use on most of my niche websites mostly because I have heavily modified them myself or find them to be perfectly coded for Search Engines. This is my list of 10 Search engine friendly wordpress themes.

1. Green Park 2 -

2. PlainTxt -

3. A Dream to Host -

4. Dateless Sniper 1.0

Recently I was helping my friends at CSharks, the Indian Game Developers about their sites indexing issues in Bing. Initially I thought it was a flash site based indexing issues which Google had sometime back. Then we found out that BingBot has recently visited the homepage of the site, but failed to see through the redirect they had setup.

Though I knew redirects was tricky, it never occurred it could confuse the BingBot too! To me, it looks like BingBot gets stuck at the page which throws a redirect error and cannot figure out a way to index the new page.

Directory Submissions are what most SEO experts in the industry call – “Old School”. But personally, after all those chats of directory submissions going south with a Google ban on them, personally, I think it still works. I keep directory submission as a part of my weekly efforts on backlinks. It is pretty much the cheapest link-building methods out there.

But yes, the quality of the directories you submit to matters. I usually submit to those directories who are doing some sort of SEO for their sites and have decent authority backlinks to themselves. The list of directories will be soon attached to my RSS footer, so if you want a peice of my directory sheet, do subscribe to my RSS or get the updates by email.

A method I have been using lately is the Web 2.0 method of creating backlinks to your sites. I specifically use a the modified version of the LinkWheel method which is getting some rave results in my experiments with some keywords jumping up 3-4 positions within weeks of creating a wheel.

A method of creating backlinks from 6 different web 2.0 properties with new accounts and syndicating their RSS is what linkwheel is all about. Personally, concentrating on top sites like WordPress.com, hubpages and squidoo will give you the results you want, but mix it with a bit of article marketing and you have a powerful way of linkbuilding! If you missed the previous methods, check out the pilot post with the index to the methods of easy link building.

Personally, I think Press Releases for Backlinks have been manipulated to no end by smart webmasters and those looking to build a buzz around their product. If you can take some time off and craft a good press release, I am sure it can get listed in major news aggregators and even high end News sites like Google News and Yahoo! News.

Google News syndication is definitely the icing on the cake as it will bypass the normal listings on Google for your keyword. My personal list of press release websites I use for my submission needs can be found here and here. The time spent on this activity involves the time spent on writing the article and the time spent on submitting to the lists out there.

Welcome to Day 2 of Easy Link Building! I am planning to cover 5 popular and insanely easy ways of building backlinks to your site in this 5 day post series. So kids, we are going to lesson 2, Day 2!All the lessons will be updated centrally on pilot post of easy link building here.

Social Bookmarking is a ongoing process. There are a lot of social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Jumptags, Digg and others which help you get backlinks to your site as well as some good traffic if you submit them to the right categories and participate in the community. This method explained here is also a sureshot way of getting banned from certain social bookmarking site if you are selfish enough not to participate in the community but want all the link love.

This is my resource list for Day 1 of easy link building. Here are my personal list of top 10 article directories I submit to. Do make sure that you submit different articles to each of these directories to maximize your link juices!

	Site: EzineArticles This is a very impressive site with massive numbers of authors and articles. I use this very often on the lines of a wikipedia to know about a particular niche.
	GoArticles
	ArticlesBase
	ArticleDashboard
	ArticleCity
	Amazines
	ArticleAlley
	ArticleBiz
	ArticleCube