Weekly SEO news: 18 February 2014
Welcome to the latest issue of the Search Engine Facts newsletter.

Google's recent updates have spread fear, uncertainty and doubt among webmasters. Which tactics can you still use to build backlinks to your website and which tactics should you avoid? There are some old-school tactics that still work if you do it right.

In the news: Amazon probably has high rankings because the website has many backlinks, you can get daily link notification messages, infinite scrolling is not good for SEO, and more.

Table of contents:

We hope that you enjoy this newsletter and that it helps you to get more out of your website. Please pass this newsletter on to your friends.

Best regards,
Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO

1. Four old-school SEO methods that still work if you do it right
Google's recent updates have spread fear, uncertainty and doubt among webmasters. Which tactics can you still use to build backlinks to your website and which tactics should you avoid? There are some old-school tactics that still work if you do it right:

old school seo

1. Forum backlinks

How not to do it: Automatically created forum backlinks are a sure way to get a Google penalty. There have been many tools and services that automatically created forum accounts with keyword rich links that pointed to the websites of the user. These links do not work anymore.

How to do it right: If a high quality forum is closely related to the topic of your website, a link from that forum can still have a positive influence on the search engine positions of your web pages.

2. Directories

How not to do it: Bulk submitting your website to directories that will accept any kind of website won't do your rankings any good.

How to do it right: If your website is listed in a high quality directory that delivers targeted visitors to your website, you should submit your site to that directory. Links from authorative directories (including niche directories) with strict submission guidelines are good for your website.

3. Guest blogging

How not do to it: Using the same article on several blogs doesn't work. Using keyword rich links in that article might even trigger a Google penalty. If the main purpose of guest blogging is getting links, don't do it.

How to do it right: Guest blogging can drive targeted visitors to your website if you write for blogs that are related to your business. Your guest blog article should offer the readers of the blog insights or other valuable information. Individual articles on related blogs can have a positive influence on your website's performance.

4. Link pages

How not to do it: If your link pages contain links to every Tom, Dick and Harry, chances are that these link pages won't be good for your site.

How to do it right: highly themed link pages that contain links to closely related high quality websites are good for website visitors and search engines.
   
It's easy: spamming doesn't work anymore, building real backlinks works better than ever before.


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2. Search engine news and articles of the week
Consumer electronics SEO: Amazon comes top for organic and paid visibility

"This shows the extent to which the top sites are acquiring new links as they attempt to maintain and improve their organic search visibility. It also reveals a correlation (not a causation) between high site visibility and strong link metrics."

Email notificationsNew: daily backlink notifications by email
"When our web crawlers find new links to your site, you will get an email notification (a maximum of one email per day). As an SEOprofiler member, you will get these messages automatically. You can manage your email subscriptions on the account settings page."


Google's patent on site speed as a ranking signal

"Given two resources that are of similar relevance to a search query, a typical user may prefer to visit the resource having the shorter load time. [...]

If you can improve the speed of your site, it’s not a bad thing to do. It may not be as strong a factor as something like relevance or an importance signal such as PageRank, but it could make a difference when there are two different pages that are very close in both of those areas, and one loads much faster than another."


GoogleGoogle: infinite scroll search-friendly recommendations

"Your site’s news feed or pinboard might use infinite scroll—much to your users’ delight! When it comes to delighting Googlebot, however, that can be another story.

With infinite scroll, crawlers cannot always emulate manual user behavior–like scrolling or clicking a button to load more items–so they don’t always access all individual items in the feed or gallery. If crawlers can’t access your content, it’s unlikely to surface in search results."

Google: settlement with the European Commission

"Following three rounds of negotiations and significant concessions, we are glad to have now reached an agreement with the European Commission that addresses its competition concerns. [...]

To ensure that everyone understands the wide-ranging nature of this settlement, we are taking the (again unusual) step of publishing the full text of the agreement."

Search engine newslets
  • 7 steps to ‘translate’ a PPC campaign.
  • Mobile Sitelinks now available on Bing Ads.
  • Discussion: was there another Google update?
  • Google overseas tax bill rises as UK sales hit $5.6 billion.
  • NY Times: The plus in Google Plus? It’s mostly for Google.
  • Bing: domain names aren’t that important.
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3. Recommended resources

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4. Previous articles
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