Where to get a websites’ backlink data?
You can get a websites’ backlink data from many places with different levels of accuracy. The first place to start is Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools, then you can look at other platforms like Open Site Explorer, MajesticSEO and/or ahrefs.com.

When examining the backlinks on your website, there are many unnatural indicators to look out for.
Examples of unnatural linking behavior to look out for when doing a link audit:

• Paid links.
• Link farms / Content directories.
• Links that point to 404 errors.
• Majority of the links are pointing to websites homepage.
• Very little branded keywords.
• Many over-optimized anchor texts.
• Many of the same C-block IP addresses (links coming from similar IP addresses, check yours here).
• Anchor texts that are not related to the page it links to.
• Many sitewide links (lots of links from small amount of domains).

Some additional patterns to look at….

• Anchor frequency
• non-branded textlinks
• Article sites/spinning
• Sponsored posts
• Sponsored blogrolls
• Sponsored footer links
• Suspicious content page
• Suspicious domain
• Content mismatch

The idea is to identify patterns that stand out and look unnatural. For example, you might want to take a look at the title tags of the pages that link to your website, often this is an excellent indicator to determine if the pages linking to your website are relevant.

You have Identified your bad links, now what?
Try reaching out the webmaster of the websites that host your links and ask them to remove the unnatural links, but trust me it is a very painful process. Some website owners will even charge link removal fees. Alternatively, you can disavow the unnatural links by submitting a text document within Google Webmaster Tools. Be advised that once you disavow an unnatural link, there is no way to get it back, therefore, proceed with caution.

Here’s a summary of the Link Cleanup process:

1. Download all the fresh and historic links from OSE or MajesticSEO.
2. Pull all the anchors and check them for volume. The higher the volume, the more likely they are bad links. Volume…meaning the # of the same anchor text.

a. People don’t typically link naturally with non-branded, high performing keywords.

3. Identify the bad links from that batch:

a. Two methods:

• By a Script, or
• Manually in Excel looking for patterns. (Eg: sort data by anchor text).

Then, serve a takedown notice:

1. Write a script to get contact info (whois info, or by crawling and finding contact links).
2. Then use email software to email everyone with a terse, direct takedown notice.
3. Submit a reconsideration request to Google.
4. In your message to Google, you need to detail everything you’ve done to rectify the situation.

Moving Forward
Now that you have identified and removed the unnatural links from your website you can submit a reconsideration request to Google. Look at this as an opportunity to turn in a clean slate and begin strictly building natural links, improve the quality and frequency of your writing, decrease your overall bounce rate, and provide a better overall user experience.

Notes:
This post was co-authored by Shimon Sandler and Eli Orgel.

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Q. Hi Greg, thanks for joining us today. For starters, there might be some people who don’t know what a “web directory” is. How would you describe a web directory.

A. A web directory is a classification of the web’s content. All day, our editors search the web for quality websites and then list them in the most relevant category within the directory. Each listing is human reviewed, so users can be sure that all the sites are relevant and not spammy.

Q. Does BOTW have any relationship with Google’s Larry Page & Sergey Brin other than being the 1st reference mentioned in their college thesis paper Anatomy of a Search Engine?

A. None whatsoever- there is absolutely no relationship. They just referenced the site on building a quality search product.

Q. What makes BOTW different from the other web directories? How can we determine a quality web directory from a spammy one?

A. BOTW is really, really focused on the quality of our listings and our commitment to building a great resource for users. We reject listings all the time because they don’t meet our editorial guidelines. We have a staff of editors that we pay to go and find great sites and then add thousands of them on a weekly basis to build a directory that users can trust. The quality of our listings and our singular focus on that quality is what really sets us apart.

Q. . For websites that are geo-targeting a specific local area, people use Google Places. What benefit can BOTW offer, that is different from Google Places and other directories? What about businesses with multiple locations? Do you have a bulk upload of sorts?

A. Local business owners have multiple options with BOTW. We have an entire regional branch in the web directory where you can list your website. Additionally, we have BOTW Local (http://local.botw.org), a local directory where you can list your brick and mortar business and provide users with all the details about your business. The key difference is that our offerings require unique content – businesses can’t just put up the same stuff that has been loaded onto 40 other sites across the web. Both options are great choices for businesses with multiple locations, and we do have a bulk uploader to help businesses get us the information. Of course, it all needs to get reviewed by editors, but it certainly helps with the process.

Q. In today’s fast and furious search environment, what are some of the biggest challenges for a Web Directory?

A. There’s so much noise out there now, it’s getting more and more difficult to just stay in front of people. And let’s face it – we’re not that sexy. Fortunately though, we have continued to evolve our offerings and by staying true to our commitment to quality, we have never lost our audience of users who trust BOTW as an authority resource.

Q. Has BOTW been impacted by the last year of Google algorithm updates? It seems a lot of directories got hit hard.

A. The directories that got hit hard probably deserved it. Now, I’m no Google engineer, and I certainly can’t speak for them, but in my opinion those sites were probably linking out to a disproportionately high number of low quality sites. They were probably accepting almost any site that paid them for a listing, and added little to no high quality sites on their own. In essence, they were probably building a link farm to manipulate search rankings, and not building for a good user experience.

Q. Is it more important to get a link on a relevant niche directory, than a comprehensive directory like BOTW?

A. Most importantly you should be trying to get links from great resources that will provide some traffic and relevancy signals. I’d recommend looking at both niche and general directories that meet quality standards.

Q. How is the shift to social signals affecting the importance of sites like directories in SEO?

A. They’re both really fantastic, right? Both rely on human beings to verify the quality and accuracy of the information, and then vouch for it by sharing it, or listing it in a relevant category.

Q. How much clickthrough traffic should someone expect to receive from a authoritative directory like BOTW?

A. That’s such a tough question to answer – traffic varies widely depending upon your category. Obviously sites in categories like travel get much more traffic than a site listed in a reference category. But regardless of that, site owners should expect just a fraction of the traffic that they would expect to receive from a listing in a top search engine. However, our traffic is highly targeted and relevant.

Q. What is the best strategy in choosing a section within a web directory for a link. Should we look at PageRank, Number of listings on the page, Inbound links, and Relevance? Or are there other factors to take into consideration?

A. This an easy one – relevance. If you have decided to submit to a directory, then the only thing you should be concerned with is the relevancy of the listing. I wouldn’t over think the rest of it – if it’s a good resource, you should aim to be listed in the most relevant area for your site. The rest of it has little importance.

Q. You have a huge amount of pages, and local data. How do you ensure that everything gets indexed in the Search Engines?

A. We work at adding quality content on a continual basis. We really have a symbiotic relationship with the search engines – we need them to help drive us traffic and they need us to gobble up our good content. We provide them awesome content that they can’t find anywhere else online, so they come back frequently to see what we are doing. We check our webmaster tools frequently to make sure that everything is in proper working order, and then we do what we do.

Q. Do you have any advice for people that have just built a website?

A. Patience – it is going to take a long time to get some traction. And always be building for the long term – don’t do things that will jeopardize the long term viability of your project.

Q. What do you see for the future of Web Directories, or more specifically what’s the future for BOTW?

A. We need to continue to evolve with the internet. As the needs of users and marketers change, we need to continue to expand our offerings to meet those needs. When blogs became the rage, we built our blog directory. We added all the social button stuff to the listings when social took off.

Now, content marketing has become very important so we just launched our ProListings ( http://botw.org/helpcenter/prolistings.aspx ) which are an awesome way for marketers to get fresh, quality content out there. You get to add three sublistings to any web directory listing for a low monthly cost, and you can change them out as often as you like. So whenever you create a new piece of awesome content, you can attach it to your web directory listing and get instant exposure. We’re really excited about it. It’s a natural evolution for us, and it will prove to bring incredible ROI for site owners.

Q. What trade shows are you planning on attending this year?

A. There are so many different trade shows now that we had to pull back a little. We were starting to get stretched pretty thin by trying to be at them all. This year, we are doing some SMX shows, MozCon in July (my first, so I am pretty excited), PubCon (of course), SES and some smaller niche shows. Hope to see you at one or more of them – Brian is buying drinks!

Sounds great! Here’s an old photo from March 2009 from SES NY (i think) . It’s always a good time in the BOTW suite.

Thanks for spending time with us today. Looking forward to seeing you and Brian again real soon.

The post Interview with Greg Hartnett – President BOTW appeared first on SEO Consultant - Shimon Sandler.

Even though infinite scroll may seem an attractive enhancement to your website, be forewarned; it is often complicated to implement, and is not always favored by users.  Infinite scroll has both advantages and disadvantages from a usability and SEO perspective.

Advantages of infinite scroll

• Retains visitors on one page, allowing them to view lots of content without a page refresh.
• Can improve load time (page speed) for pages that have lots of content.

Disadvantages of infinite scroll

• If not done correctly, it can affect how search engines crawl (or don’t crawl) your website.
• It makes it extremely difficult for users to view the footer.
• There is no permalink to a specific section of the page.
• If not properly optimized, pages with lots of content can soak up lots of browser memory.

Optimizing Infinite Scroll For SEO

Infinite scroll pages are coded in either Javascript and/or Ajax. These programming languages, search engines have trouble reading. Therefore, the best practice for web developers is to use progressive enhancement, which means allowing all visitors to be able to use the sites basic functionality of a website independent on their browser, but at the same time offer an enhanced version for users with up-to date browser.  On that token, when coding infinite scroll make sure your users can navigate to your paginated pages with JavaScript turned off.  Once you have links to your paginated content, to make sure it properly optimized read my previous post on optimizing pagination. In brief, make sure that you use rel=”prev” rel=”next”, and append the page number to the Title tag (starting on page 2).

Infinite Scroll Plugins

• 10 jquery infinite scroll plugins
• Infinite scroll plugin for wordpress

The post The Effect Infinite scroll has on SEO appeared first on SEO Consultant - Shimon Sandler.

I don’t say I disagree with the statement. I’d say, those who keep citing it miss the point because it’s taken out of context.

It’s not that I recommend focusing on the raw number of results you see in return for [site:domain.com] search (and jumping to any conclusions based on it) – it’s that there are much more useful ways to use the search operator (hopefully it will never be discontinued):

1. Find weak pages that probably should not be in the index

Depending on your site CMS and architecture, these can be:

[site:mysite.com inur:admin]

[site:mysite.com inurl:asp?id=]

[site:mysite.com inurl:css]

2. Identify any canonical issues [site:mysite.com -site:www.mysite.com]

3. Find best internal pages to link to [site:site.com KEYWORD]

4. Drop some section of the site from search results [site:site.com -inurl:news]

5. You name it!

In fact SITE: command is an invaluable tool, especially in combination with other advanced operators, and here are some tools to make the most of it:

1. Google Site: Tool (Greasemonkey)

How does it work?

SITE: search from search results: Limit search results to any domain right from the search results. Click on green URL below the title in the search snippet to bring up the option.

This is an awesome little tool developed by Jefferson Scher, a frequent contributor to UserScripts.org. It works by allowing you to add site: or -site: to modify your Google results. Very straight forward, easy to use and compatible with Firefox 14 and up. You have to click on the green ‘cite’ button for it to show the script, which is otherwise hidden.

If you don’t see the button, it might not be compatible with your country’s Google tld. You should then use it on Google.com, rather than the international engines. But it was updated in August of this year, so all bugs should be worked out.

2. Google All Sites & Similar Sites Search

How does it work?

SITE: search from status bar: Search SITE:currentsite.com right from FireFox status bar.

Don’t sift through website searches. This is a quick way to use a website-specific Google search, even when the site doesn’t have a search box function available. They have an added feature for finding similar websites, and single click run. There were a few problems when it was first released, which led to some bad reviews. But those were fixed and it has since been given positive ratings for its simple design and ease of use.

3. Search Site

How does it work?

SITE: search from context menu: Search the current site using the right-click (context) menu.

Here is another search addon for Firefox that works by enabling you to search the current site for the search term you select on a page. If you are looking for something really basic and functional, this one has been recommended highly by users. I wish the search results opened in a new tab though.

Do you know of any tools for site: command? Let us know in the comments.

Ann Smarty is the co-founder of Viral Content Buzz, the free social media promotion platform.

The post 3 FireFox Addons to Use Google’s SITE: More Effectively appeared first on SEO Consultant - Shimon Sandler.

Here are two easy (yes, easy but I bet you haven’t thought of those yet!) tricks to make your pages social-media-friendlier by making the most of popular hashtags:

1. Hashtags in <Title> Tag: Twitter Optimization

Think about that: whether your reader is using your Tweet button or not, in most cases <title> of the page will be imported into a Tweet. You cannot always be on top of Twitter trending topics and you can’t always make it to the popular hashtags results. What you can do is get your readers help you! Thus you can see some surprising results by *helping* people tweet your content into popular Twitter hashtag stream!

Like I mentioned earlier when talking about optimizing your title tags for Twitter, you use hashtags to brand important sections of your site. For example, instead of “SEOmoz QA”, this could be

@SEOmoz #QA (mind how popular this hashtag is!)

Thus, instead of tweeting “Using Brand Name in Page Titles | SEOmoz QA bit/lyXXX”, people would be promoted to use a more useful format:

This could ensure SEOmoz’s continuous presence in #qa hashtag search results on Twitter.

Conclusion: Research which hashtags are being used by your niche influencers and journalists and optimize your title tags for them to make sure you often appear in search results (and you are not the only one who gets you there).

2. Hashtags in Image Anchor Text: Twitter + Pinterest Optimization

Another important part of your website to optimize for hashtags is an image anchor text.

Many people don’t realize that the anchor text is what gets imported into the Pin description / comment field when people are using the official “Pin it” bookmarklet. So by including a couple of important hashtags in the <alt=> part of the image, you make sure they get both:

1. In a Pinterest description

2. In a Tweet that usually follows the Pin:

(Mind that those tweets linking to the Pin increase your content Pinterest visibility as well)

Note: Before you go play with Pinterest hashtags, don’t get confused. The new social media site “over-complicate” the ranking system a bit:

Whereas on Twitter hashtags are chronologically organized, Pinterest “tags” are sorted by perceived relevance. Therefore, hashtagged photos with the most “likes, repins, comments etc.” will show up at the top of the search page.

Conclusion: For better Pinterest visibility make sure to always include some relevant hashtags in your image anchor text. No need to overuse though. One hashtag is usually enough.

Are you utilizing hashtags for on-page optimization? Please share your tricks!

The post 2 Ideas of Using Hashtags for On-Page Optimization appeared first on SEO Consultant - Shimon Sandler.

Fortunately, you don’t have to be a Google Analytics guru to create a meaningful custom report. Or a Google Analytics ninja. Or whatever the kids are calling it these days. All you need to do is ask the right questions, and use a bit of critical thinking. Which actually takes more effort than you would think – hence the reason that all websites ever aren’t custom-reported up the wazoo. Knowing how to mooch off the Internet is good too – it comes in handy if your custom reports need a bit of spiffing up with some Regular Expressions. (Assuming that you either don’t know how to use Regular Expressions, or that you’re too lazy to translate your needs to Regex. I’m not judging. I’m a combination of both.)

I like knowing that my data has a framework, and that it’s been placed somewhere significant so that it can tell me something interesting that will move my campaigns forward. The data is already there – it’s just a question of aligning it properly so that you understand what it means. As Google Analytics standard reporting is, it won’t do that. It’s just an avalanche of numbers.

Keyword Analysis

The Keyword Analysis report is fairly self-explanatory: it tells you which keywords in your SEO campaign are performing well through which landing page. If all of your keywords are performing well, great – you have what to show your client. (Or your boss, as the case may be.) If your keywords are performing less than well, that’s where your analytical skills come in. Are your keywords lined up with the content of the landing page to which they’re directing traffic? Are there variations of that keyword that are doing better?

Link Analysis

The Link Analysis report gives you a good idea of which referral traffic has a high level of engagement with your site once it lands there from the third party source. It’s a great way to find relevant forums and communities to engage with – if the traffic landing on your site from a forum is already engaged, imagine what you can accomplish by increasing the level of your activity there. And reviewing the activity on a forum or community also opens up a whole slew of possible relevant link building sources. The good, organic kind.

Landing Page Report

The reason I like this report is because not only does it let you know which landing page is sending converting traffic from Google, but it also includes social actions. So even if it doesn’t convert, you know that word’s spreading around the webosphere.

One tip to remember – always check the various elements of your Custom Report when you’re copying a report and make sure to substitute your brand in the field that excludes branded traffic.

The post New Google Analytics Custom Reports appeared first on SEO Consultant - Shimon Sandler.

Typically, small websites and blogs don’t often need to worry about SEO pagination problems, because they just don’t have enough content that paginates. It is the more complex sites such as e-commerce sites, websites using AJAX and large scale publishers that often need to worry about the problems surrounding paginated content.

Paginated content in layman’s terms is when a website chooses to break up content into several pages to:

A) Better organize content and improve usability

B) Serve more advertisements to their viewers

The problem webmasters face when using paginated content is that, if not done correctly, there are multiple potential pitfalls that will make their content not search engine friendly.

Problems with Paginated content:

• Search engines will have trouble crawling all the pages of the paginated content
• search engines will have problems understanding which page in the series is the most relevant
• there may be a problem with duplicate content

Often you will find problems of paginated content on product categories pages. (see picture above)

The Solutions

Using the Show All Page

The simplest and easiest way to solve the problem is the make a “View all Results” that allows the search engines and your visitor to view all the content on one single page. Then put a rel=”canonical” on all of your component pages to signal the configuration of your site to Google and avoid issues of duplicate content. However, if you have so much content that the page load time of your “view all” page is over 5 seconds then I would suggest breaking up your content so that latency doesn’t ruin  your users’ experience.

Using Rel=”Prev” &Rel=”next”

If you choose to break up your content simply place the Rel=”Prev” and Rel=”next” in the header of each page one of your component pages.

<link rel=”prev” href=”http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=1/>

<link rel=”next” href=”http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2/>

To avoid Duplicate Title Tags, all you need to do is append each paginated page with the page number, starting with Page 2. For example, just add this as a suffix to the Title tag: “- Page 2″

Google’s Thoughts on Paginated Content

What if your content is coded in AJAX?

Many web developers forget that search engines cannot crawl past the “#” in any given URL. This means that if page 2 in your paginated contented  link is like this:

http://www.example.com/product_search#page=2

Google will not be able to crawl that page. Additionally, many developers also forget that search engines can’t read JavaScript so if your links are coded in JavaScript the search engines will not be able to follow them either.

Making JavaScript Links Crawlable

If you would like to make your JavaScript links crawlable you must make sure to include a static A HREF link.  If you would like point your users to a URL with“#” in it, create an “on click event” which will allow your users to follow the link if their JavaScript is turned on.  For Search engines and users who have JavaScript turned off, they will be able to follow the static A HREF Link.

Infinite Scroll

If you have an infinite scroll set up on your page, there is a good chance that it is supported by JavaScript or AJAX. Your website should offer a paginated list with natural links to your various pages for the users that have JavaScript turned off, and search engines that can’t read JavaScript.

Using a feed

If you are using an RSS feed to show content on your website make sure not to parse the RSS with JavaScript, because Search Engines can’t read this. It is preferable to use .asp/.php scripts that will show HTML to the search engines and users.

Feedforall.com is a great resource for parsing RSS to HTML using PHP.

Sources:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/infinite-scrolling-vs-pagination-on-an-ecommerce-site

http://www.webseoanalytics.com/blog/googles-ajax-crawling-scheme-and-its-effects-on-seo/

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/proposal-for-making-ajax-crawlable.html

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/pagination-best-practices-for-seo-user-experience

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