Google "Directory Submission" Update

While Google has condemned buying and selling links that pass PageRank, they’ve encouraged listing in paid directories like Yahoo for years. It seems that era may have come to an end earlier today. The following bullet points have been removed from Google’s Webmaster Guidelines Webmaster Help Center*

• “Have other relevant sites link to yours.”
• “Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.”

Does this recent move reflect a renewed emphasis on rooting out paid links passing PageRank and/or low quality links by Google?

*As mentioned, the bullet points above have been removed from the US version of Google’s Webmaster Help Center. Other versions may not yet reflect this change.

Overdoing Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is not a bad thing. In deed, SEO is a good thing because, at least in theory, doing SEO helps the cream rise to the top.

However, if you overdo SEO for your website, your website will be crowded with SEO friendly design only such as webpages are full with text links, text, text, text, text links, alt meta tags, alt meta tags, alt meta tags, alt meta tags, and more.

Your website will get the good results for search engines for sure. But what you need from those search engine search results are “potential visitors and customers” or not?

Yes, visitors will like the easy navigated websites which are friendly to their eyed too. Don’t amaze them and chase them out of your websites with overdoing search engine optimization (Overdo SEO) because you will be the loser instead.

Great tips to ranking in Google for a HIGHLY competitive keyword

Every one of us wants to rank high in Google. You must focus on backlink building to have good serps. But backlink building has to be done with great care - not to get penalized.

Here are some simple tips which will definetely help:

1. Don't buy (or sell) sitewide links for serps. Buy links from individual pages*.

2. Don't look for high PR links only - start your campaign for a new site with PR 0-1 and slowly move up each week as you see your rankings improve.

3. Control link placement speed. Remember of "Too many links at once" Google filter.

4. Control the number of outbound links on your pages and on pages where you place your links, avoid link-farms, links to gambling, pills, etc.

5. A link from a relevant website is excellent, but a link from a quality site of other niche or other language can also boost your ranking - so don't ignore such links.

6. Make links look natural. Use different link anchors, promote not only your main page, but your deep pages too.

7. Don't do reciprocal linkexchange.

* - Links from individual pages are far more effective when speaking of improving serps, not PR. They are more natural and organic. Sitewide links can easily be filtered.
Selling sitewide links also means loosing lots of money - if your site has 1000 of PR2-3 pages, you could earn hundreds of $$$ a month just from selling ONE outbound link per page, compared to some $20-30 for selling a sitewide link (now, when it has become possible). What do you think?

Using this simple technique, many our sites has received an excellent rank in Google in just 1 month for HIGHLY competitive keywords. If you are interested, I can tell how we did it.

Just remember, that your site's ranking depends on your efforts and skills, it doesn't depend on your site's PR etc. (see our PR if you don't believe it).

If you are too stupid to use a computer you might try giving SEO advice

Now that everybody and their uncle is an expert in search engine optimization you get to read some really off the wall advice. I have collected a few gems that had me laughing and reproduced them below. Most of these are from Yahoo Answers and Live QnA but you can find answers like these almost everywhere.

These are all from the last few months and I have corrected the spelling, grammar and replaced any links with .

Q. What is cloaking in SEO?
A. Cloaking is the speed process for your cpu. You can over cloak your cpu but be aware of the overheating, the biggest problem of over cloaking is that it overheats the cpu.

Q. Seo stuff, what are some basic pointers?
A. My friend I have the perfect website for you. It includes over 1000 links to free advertising websites including free directories, free search engine submissions, free viral marketing, free top keywords and much, much more also investing in the big daddy search engine and program hoppers will prove very profitable.

Q. If your site is a cooking site but you add your site as a link to sports related forums, would your site be penalized or banned from the search engines?
A. It is legal to point from one topic to other, you will just get a lower rank but it is better than nothing.

Q. Can someone explain how sub-domains can impact search engine optimization?
A. If you want top ranking in MSN just spam with sub-domains.

Q. Why does page rank fall?
A. The number of hits you get and the frequency that your site is updated changes your ratings.

Q. What does “omitted results” mean e.g. “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 103 already displayed”?
A. It means that there are search results that have been left out.

Q. What is SEO?
A. South East Organization.

Q. Can an expert tell me why Google is not updating our website?
A. No it doesn’t update, you have to resubmit it.

Q. Why are SEO Consultants too expensive for webmasters?
A. I personally used a firm that did a 250,000 site submissions for my site, it worked great.

Q. What are SEO and SEM and how do they differ?
A. SEO typically includes keyword research, density balancing, tagging, linking strategy and website submission. With SEM you can buy advertising to get to the top.

Q. Can any of you SEO experts recommend a good link exchange site that works?
A. I’ve found 45 different link exchange services and the two that I think work the best are and .

Q. Can anyone suggest any SEO tips for my website?
A. I checked your website and one thing is missing, a Visitor’s Guest Book where visitors can insert a message describing their business and website.

Q. What are some SEO tips?
A. The most important item is meta tags, very good keywords and keyword density.

Q. What is the best way to get a website to appear on the first page of search engines, can I do it myself?
A. My experience is that trying to do it yourself does not give the best results. My website has been online for about 5 years now and on average I get about 11 unique hits per day and my meta tags are in order.

Q. How do you get removed from a search result?
A. You don’t. Whatever embarrassing thing you may have committed in a public forum is indelibly etched.

How do I add my website to search engines like Google, Yahoo, AOL?
A. From my understanding, your website will pop up in search engines based on how many people visit your website but how people visit your website if it’s not in a search engine, ironic right?

Finding a New Domain Name With Bustaname.com

Ryan Stout has built a great tool to help in that increasingly difficult task of finding a suitable domain name for a new site.

Called Bust a Name it has a nice JavaScript interface with a rails, MySQL and lighttpd backend.

Primarily a word combiner, once you have entered your words you can select similar words from a drop down list. You can sort available domains by length, readability or alphabetically. A really useful feature is that you can group keywords so that keywords in the same group are not combined. Other options allow a limited number of suffixes and prefixes with an additional checkbox to pluralize or drop the last vowel.

Using this tool I have found that augmenting the similar word feature with a thesaurus and finding additional keywords to input with Google’s Keyword Tool helps a lot in finding usable domain names.