Flickr Adds No Follow to Links

Flickr recently added nofollow tags to most of the external links within the website. Flickr has been one of the few social sites that have allowed potential link gain from including links within the profile, comments and other areas.

Is this a surprising move? In my opinion, No. More and more social media sites are adding nofollow tags to lower the amount of spam they get hit with. You can't blame them for trying to provide clean, valuable, relevant content to their visitors / users can you? Keep in mind, you no longer can gain any link popularity from links on Flickr. However it still can generate traffic to your website. There?s a lot more benefits to using Flickr than just for links.

Link Popularity - Page Specific, NOT Site Specific

Many people confuse link popularity as being only the root domains popularity. More and more, internal pages link popularity is becoming the influential factor, not simply your home page. Your root domain can enjoy a great link popularity and Google PageRank, but your site won't reap the entire benefit unless your internal pages have links pointing to them too.

Internal linking contributes highly to your sites total link popularity thus search positioning especially on Google. Getting external links pointing to your internal pages has become a more determining search position factor than before.

Google's Webmaster Tools provides a good estimate of your website's link popularity both to the root and internally. You can see how well your site is externally links as well as interlinked with itself.

Finding places to link into your internal pages can be a challenge. Providing your visitors with information they are looking for and interesting content is a link building strategy itself. By using the correct avenues, internal link popularity is a great way to build search visibility, traffic and overall search positioning.

Anchor Text Upgrade in Google Webmaster Tools

Google's Webmaster Tools has provided yet another useful upgrade. Google announced the upgrade to the Anchor Text. This new feature tells you what text is being used in links pointing to your website. Since anchor text is an important part of the SEO pie, this feature shows you what keywords are being emphasized for your website.

This feature was not available on all sites, but has now been rolled out to everyone who has Google Webmaster Tools set up for their website.

Previously Google's Webmaster Tools only provided the most popular single words contained in the links, now you are provided with the full Anchor Text among variations up to 200 phrases. They have also brought back the section showing you the most common individual words contained in your websites anchor text.

I have to give my props to Google for this tool. It's a beauty!!

Content - The Most Effective Linking Campaign

Never underestimate the power of content with the search engines. As many SEO gurus say "Content is King". They aren't kidding. Not only do search engines reward your website when new valuable content is added to your site, the opportunity to use this content for link building has become just as important.

With the rise of Social Networking, content has become even more important than before. Links from Social Networking and Bookmarking sites are extremely influential within Google's algorithms and why wouldn't they be? Social Networking and Bookmarking sites are users directly telling Google that they find a page important. It only makes sense that Google and the other search engines would reward this.

However, while writing good content is an effective component to your linking campaign don't neglect high quality directories like Yahoo, DMOZ, GoGuides and JoeAnt. These directories still have a great deal of influence with the top search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN). Traditional organic linking is still an influential piece of the pie. Quality directories and links from authoritative sites still play an important role with search engine positioning.

By offering content that is non-marketing in nature and offers valuable information to users, you are creating your own organic link campaign. You can drive traffic to your website, increase brand recognition as well as increase sales, all by providing content that is non-marketing. You're marketing by not marketing!

Google Webmaster Tools New Link Feature

Earlier this month, Google released a new Link option within Google's Webmaster Tools. Google allows you to look up which websites are linking to your by using search commands like: link:www.domain.com, links: www.domain.com, plus other variations through the regular search. However, Google only allows you to see a sample of those back links.

The new Link option now provides you with a larger sample of those websites linking to you. Although you won't get to see all incoming links to your site, including those listed in Google's supplemental index, you will see a larger sample than if using the now outdated link commands. The Link option is only for your website, so you are not able to check out your competition's strategic linking programs. You will still need to use the above mentioned link commands for competitor analysis.

To use this new link option, you need to be a Google Webmaster user. Once you've verified your website, click on the My Sites screen and choose your domain. Then you will see the following tabs: Diagnostic, Statistics, Links and Sitemaps. The new Links tab allows you to see external and internal links for your website. External links are the links most people are concerned with. These are links coming from outside of your site. You can see what other sites are linking to you, whether it is the home page, or the interior pages. Internal links tell you how well your site is interlinked within itself.

The new Links tab definitely offers valuable information, plus Google also allows you to download the data into an Excel spreadsheet making management of the data much easier than before. So, why did Google decide to offer this new feature? Google spokespeople claim they decided to offer the option because of feedback from Webmasters. Google is more comfortable with the idea because the info is only going to specific site owners, rather than to everyone. Either way, I'm happy with the new tool!