In a previous life I used to work hard on building reciprocal link partnerships with related websites to get my sites ranking in Google. Some people think this process is now next to useless as Google can see you are exchanging links with other websites with the sole intent to increase rankings and therefore gives the incoming links less weight.

So how does Google know that you are exchanging link? Well, obviously it is because you have a page with a link from your website to the website that is linking to you. Now what I have come across quite a bit are people attempting to trick Google into thinking that the incoming links from the reciprocal link partners are one way links. They do this by trying to hide their website’s links page from Google.

The first two things you need to check on the website you are exchanging links with are the webpage HTML and the robots.txt. In the webpage HTML have a look to make that they have not added a tag. In the robots.txt file see if the links webpage has been disallowed. These bits of coding will prevent the webpage from being indexed in search engine listings, therefore Google will not know that the link to your site exists. To check if the links page is listed in Google, do a site: search specifically on that webpage:
eg. site:http://www.website.com/links.html
Also check to see that there are no rel=”nofollow” tags on the links to prevent passing PR.

The next tactic that is used is cloaking. The webmaster uses a server side script such as PHP to detect who/what is viewing the webpage. If it is a visitor viewing the links webpage in a browser then they will see the list of links and will not blink an eyelid. But if it is googlebot spidering the page for Google’s index then the PHP will detect this and will show it some completely different code that does not contain the links to other websites. You can check if this is happening by viewing the cached webpage in Google:
eg. cache:http://www.website.com/links.html

Cloaking is black hat SEO and reporting the website to Google is likely to get it banned. Blocking pages from Google’s listings using robots.txt or meta noindex tags does not violate Google’s guidelines.

In my opinion building reciprocal links still works and I have seen many sites rank well through just this process. But it is a painful chore, especially when other webmasters are focused only on Google PR and don’t understand how they would benefit from a link with their anchor text from a related website. Plus Google now penalises your site if you are linking to a bad neighborhood so you have to be more careful these days and check every website and the websites they link to! Nowadays there are a lot easier and quicker ways to build one-way incoming links.

Share This

I was reading away at SEO Chat the other day when I came across a technique that I’ve never seen before (yes, this does happen ) and thought it would be worth sharing on my blog.

It basically involves tricking Google into thinking you are gaining more clicks from a brand search in Google’s listings. How? Well basically you do a search in Google for your brand name (eg. bal4) then, using FireFox, copy the link shortcut from your own listing in the search results and use this shortcut as your “home” link in your website’s HTML. So now each time someone clicks on you home link on your website it will seem to Google that this user has clicked on the search listing for your brand term.

Recently “SEO Gurus” are beginning to believe that click throughs for brand terms in Google are influencing the search results, which when you think about it would make sense if clicks were true, but as you can see it can be easily manipulated. I personally feel click throughs will only influence personal search results when you are logged in to your Google account (something Google have tried with PPC results), for example if you have searched for “bal4” 10 times and clicked on other sites but not clicked on my site then it would slide down the results, but when you log out it is back to its original position.

So would I use the technique above? Not a chance in hell, it is blatantly obvious that you are trying to trick Google and I guess that if someone reported your site then it would result in a penalty. Though I would like to test it somehow to see if it does have any effect, maybe try it on a client’s site… hmmm… just kidding.

Share This

I’ve got the latest version of SMF (Simple Machines Forum) running on my AffiliStore website and have been using this for over a year now. I’ve had a strange problem in that Google seems to refuse to index the topic (post) pages. If you do a site: search on the AffiliStore forum you will find that it has indexed and cached all the member profile pages and a few other irrelevant bits of junk but no topic pages.

I decided to do a search on Google to see if anyone else has had the same problems and sure enough it seems that this is common amongst SMF users. Now the surprising thing is that when you go to the SMF main website and do a site: search on their community forum, Google seems to be listing their entire topic pages fine, so they seem to be blind to the problem even though people have posted about it in their forum.

Now I’ve looked into it quite a bit, checked the script to see if Googlebot is being blocked somewhere, removed a noindex meta tag which probably wasn’t doing too much harm as it only showed on certain pages you wouldn’t want indexed, tried the rewrite URLs option for a couple of months which again didn’t index topic pages and the rewrote URLs were very poor (along the lines of /forum/index.php/topic,72.0.html – that is just garbage) but the only conclusion I can come up with so far is that unless my server is somehow blocking SMF topic pages then Google doesn’t like the topic page URL format (/forum/index.php?topic=363.0 – is the . before the 0 causing a problem, surely not?).

So now I am trying a couple of other options, because I do love SMF compared to other forums as it is really user friendly and has loads of options. Firstly, I have now added the latest topic posts on the main pages of the AffiliStore website which should guarantee these pages being indexed as they have been brought to within one link of the top level of the website. I have also added a sitemap mod which creates regular forum sitemap and a sitemap.xml which I have uploaded to Google’s Webmaster Tools.

The next step is to just sit it out and wait to see if the above actions finally get the SMF topic pages indexed in Google. I’m not going to give up on SMF as v2 is just round the corner and I’m sure it will be even better than the current version, but it is frustrating as I do have a couple of thousand topic posts that should be bringing in lots of visitors for various longtail search terms.

Share This

It has been a while since I last submitted one of my own websites to Yahoo! Directory but recently I have decided to splash out the $299 on New Football Kits to help push it’s rank for some of the more competitive search phrases such as “Football Kits”, “Football Boots” and “Football Shirts”.

The last site I submitted to Yahoo! Directory was Glass Block Outlet back in 2005 and I instantly noticed the benefits in Yahoo! search engine rankings for targeted search terms and I also think it was one of the deciding factors that pushed the website to the number 1 position in Google.co.uk for the search term “Glass Blocks” (which also helped the site get a listing on the BBC website).

Now people may argue that things have changed since then but recently I have worked on a number of websites which have very poor on page SEO and minimal incoming links but still manage to rank in Yahoo! search results for terms they have no right to. This is solely because they have a Yahoo! Directory listing.

So I have been monitoring the positions of New Football Kits for these popular search terms and the current results are:

The Yahoo! Directory listing should hopefully go live over the next few days so I will report back with the rankings in a month from now which should be enough time for the site to benefit from the listing.

Share This

Here is a simple way to create a download counter script using PHP. It simply counts each click on the download link and stores the result in a writable text file.

First upload the file you wish users to download to your server. Then create a text file and name it “counter.txt“. Open the text file and add a 0, save and upload to your server and set the text file permissions to 777.

Now create a PHP file named “countdownloads.php” and add the following code:

<?php
$myFile = "counter.txt";
$fh = fopen($myFile, 'r');
$theData = fread($fh, filesize($myFile));
fclose($fh);

$theData = $theData + 1;

$myFile = "counter.txt";
$fh = fopen($myFile, 'w') or die("can't open file");
fwrite($fh, $theData);
fclose($fh);

header("Location: download.zip");
?>

Now add the following code to your HTML page that will display the link to your download:

<p><a href="countdownloads.php">Download File</a><br />
<?php
$myFile = "counter.txt";
$fh = fopen($myFile, 'r');
$theData = fread($fh, filesize($myFile));
echo $theData;
fclose($fh);
?> Downloads<br />
since Feb 2008</p>

Upload these files to the same directory on your server and that should do the trick. I’m using this script on AffiliStore to count the downloads of the software.

Share This