Search engines are getting harder with their algorithm promising the best search engine results to their users and Google is an unquestionable leader when it comes to changing algos and countless ranking factors with latest Mayday and Farmer/Panda hits. This has led webmasters share their attention to Yahoo and Bing SEO as well. It was a good time to share some of my thoughts on the link building methods that are going to work in 2011.

I’d like to give the credit of topic to SEObook forum where an aggressive discussion is going on among SEO experts. Just to make a note, the methods are followed by the success and results we have experienced recently.

Methods that are going to work great

1. Guest blog post on reputed blogs – This method is working just perfect to bring the attention of your audience and search engines equally. You can either request reputed blog owners to write post for you (for a free) with a link or 2 pointing to your website or ask them to do for a fee. There are many SEO agencies who can handle this for a nominal fee.
2. Custom article marketing – I’ll rather advocate writing one great piece of information and publishing it to one of the winners of latest Google updates (buzzle, idea marketers, wikihow etc.) and share it on social media (Facebook, twitter, friends etc.) Remember, I’ll not publish this article elsewhere so it stays unique and gives full value and link juice.
3. Maintained web 2.0 link wheel – The effectiveness of link wheels is debatable but I’d like to stress the word “maintained” here. Expect nothing from these web 2.0 link wheels if you’re just creating some filler content pages and leaving them stuffing with your links.

Link wheels can give real value over an elegant time frame if they are maintained regularly with good content (fruitful for readers) and shared among your friends and network. Placing one or two links randomly should help instead of creating such pages solely for links. Bet, you would get the results.

Methods that working average

1. Multiple article directory submission – This method has lost its value somehow, but still working average for some affiliate sites promotion. Though you can get the most out of this method if sort a filtered list of the best possible article directories.
2. General contextual blog posting – This method is working fair as long as the blog post are coming from unique IPs and some decent blogs instead of content farms.

Make sure the blogs are fairly promoted and gets unique content (at least textually)

1. Press releases – This method used to be one of the highest quality methods but lost its value lately. Though, some of the paid distribution portals still maintaining their authority like PR news wire, PR.com etc.
2. High end directory listings and niche directories – Directories like goguides.org, botw.org, Yahoo directory, super pages etc. together with theme niche directories are doing well. Most of them are paid but give good returns on investment.

Methods that are not working

1. Mass directory submission – Until and unless there are specific niches like weight loss, credit cards etc. directory submission has become a zero result method. With no to minimum approvals, increasing number of spam directories at duplicate IPs, and most of them being penalized by Google recently. Directory submission method left with no value.
2. Profiles – The most hyped method, the Angela and Paul links method is gone because of no to bad results.
3. Social bookmarking method - Except few sites like digg, spinn, reddit, mixx etc., social bookmarking is of no value.

Experience-driven Tips for 2011 SEO

1-      It’s not just about lot of content anymore, but “WOW and worth reading” content now. Prefer keeping a decent amount of fresh and conceptually unique content coming to your website, instead of adding lot of copyscape passed textually unique content. Tempt your audience, get yourself liked and Google will be in loop itself.

2-      Cover as many keywords as possible, instead of chasing only 2-3 and building links for them. Add possible random keywords like know more, visit site, sitename.com and more to stay natural in your campaigns. Not to worry, your links will still to go your website url and will be good for a link building campaign.

3-      Avoid blogrolls and nude text links. These are prone to be picked up by Google as paid links. Prefer in-content links.

4-      Work out a good on-site optimization check up before you proceed with off-site link building. Double check the H tags, SEO oriented as well as reader oriented web copies, alt tags and seo friendly coding to ensure your link building campaign.

5-      Get social media into your marketing campaign. Facebook, twitter, and video marketing is complementing link building campaigns maximizing the results by 80%. (I’m going to discuss why facebook Likes are getting important for future SEO in my coming posts)

Coming straight to the point, the only intention of Farmer update is to devalue all content farms and poor quality content pages. Unfortunately, high authority sites like Ezinearticles and hub pages were considered among content farms even if there are real great pieces of information there.

Other targets of Farmer update were adsense websites making money with spun content (I could see some of the quality content sites with adsense are safe in search results).

Possible conclusions of Farmer update

1.    Article directories are devalued from search results – When I tested this with a search query “copywriting company” in google.com from India, there was a link of Ezine article towards bottom (it means Farmer didn’t reach india yet but when I search by adding &gl=us ezinearticle link was gone. But hey, the ideamarketers.com article link got my attention. Conclusion -  Not all directories are devalued, you just need to sort out the winners and losers of Farmer update(wikihow, buzzle, ehow etc. are among the winners)

2.    Few website owners noticed drop in rankings - Webmasters who employed methods like mass article submissions, low quality web 2.0 link wheel and blogs might have faced significant drops in their rankings.  Reason is – all the pages/articles from Farmer-hit sites like hubpages, ezinearticles etc. have lost their value from search results; so they were no longer strong enough to backup the rankings your website had, leading to possible and expected drop.

3.    Who are the targets? The content farms or the content on these farms – To clear the confusion I would say like this. Sites like hubpages had many wonderful articles that lost their search engine positions now. Google seems to compromise its promise to deliver quality results as such articles are removed from SERPs; it means Google may remove all the results just based upon the name/type of the website without regarding the content?

4.    Who are possible winners? Sites that publish the unique content by their own without letting others to submit their articles with “easily insertable” able links. This may enhance the value of some high quality blogs that publish the content regularly even though Google keeps a hard eye at contextual blogposts. It may be an SEO boon to web masters to resort to high quality and well maintained blogs when most good article directories are gone.

5.    Possible ways to get links in current scenario - Looking at Google’s recent frequent, it seems to favor the real people giving real links naturally “after “ actually reading the content or analyzing the quality and relevance of the page

6.    Other factor that may influence the rankings more than before is the traffic coming on the page. All the factors are recklessly pointing to social media networks like facebook, twitter, myspace, linkedin etc. that can make a page popular and invite the possible backlinks naturally.

These are just quick conclusions after a vague analysis from recent rankings we tracked for various clients. I can be back with more facts and logics later as Farmer goes wider with geo Google.

Feel free to share your thoughts, comments and conclusions.

Stay cheered and geared up!

Hear them and you’d know why one can love them. We need a reason to move on, a self-motivation to beat the fate and fight harder every second you wanna live -
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