Welcome to SEM SEO Expert. This site is owned by Toronto based SEM Expert, Nima Asrar Haghighi, and covers topics such as Search Engine Marketing , Search Engine Optimization , Social Media Optimization (SMO), Web Analytics and Affiliate Marketing. SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing and refers to marketing through search engines. SEM experts/specialists market products, services or websites either through SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or through PPC Advertising.
After months of speculations about Google punishing sites that sell links and discounting the value of paid text links for SEO purposes, Matt Cutts from Goolge revealed that they see paid links against their terms and conditions and quality guidelines. Here is a video from an interview Danny Sullivan did with Matt Cutts in SMX Advanced search engine optimization conference.
Video – Matt Cutts Comments on Buying Links
Shortly after, Google updated its PageRank data, apparantly with some adjustments to algorithm, and as a result many sites that were involved in buying and selling links have lost some PageRank.
This is another phase in Google’s war against those who try to get higher ranking by buying links to manipulate Google’s algorithm.
This is another reminder to all Search Engine Optimizers need to look at optimizing sites through organic and natural efforts. The short term gains might be achieved by trying to play search engines; however, if you are looking for long lasting high rankings, you would need to think outside the box and develop unique content that people love and link to.
If you have ever thought of doing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for your company’s website, you have probably heard of building reciprocal and one way links to your site.
Weather you conduct SEO in house or outsource it you cannot afford to overlook an advanced link building program. While working on your backlinks you need to consider link popularity, link quality, link relevancy and anchor text.
The link building campaigns became part of the optimization of website for search engines after Google revolutionized the way search engines were ranking websites by introducing PageRank.
As a result marketers with SEO expertise work on building valuable and viral content that add value to their audience and entice them to share the content with their community by providing links to them.
Some people tried to manipulate the search engine results by starting building and fabricating links.
As part of their quest to continuously improve their search technology, Google started incorporating other factors such as TrustRank, disregarding spam links, discounting reciprocal links and one way links that were not created organically.
Google even pioneered the use of no-follow tag and introduced ways to report paid links that are trying to manipulate PageRank algorithm and search results.
Many individuals and companies use blogs as a way of creating ongoing content and sharing information with their audience. Given the very nature of blogs and the fact that their purpose is to create ongoing multi-directional communications, they were embraced by search engines as a source of valuable and unbiased content.
In the early days of blogs, all you needed to do was to write an article on a blog and link to a site or a new page and search engines were following those links and that site was getting value for it.
Overtime, like any other linking strategy, link building through blogs has been affected by changes to search engines algorithms; however, blogs have not yet fully lost their mojo. It seems that links from blogs with a high authority and relevant and topical content are still useful.
