Comments on: 4 Tips For Clean Link Checking

By: mani

mani — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 17:23:18 +0000

Hi,

Very useful information for budding SEO professionals. Can you please suggest any free open source tool that can check the sites for these 3 things?

Kind regards,
Mani

By: k0nan

k0nan — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 09:35:10 +0000

about 4.
“nofollow” tag is a must in some scenarios, in order to avoid content duplication.
if your web content management system allows frontend PDF or PRINTABLE page creation through a link, inserting nofollow will stop spiders linking to those pages, which actually are only duplicated content formatted in a different way (= ba for SEO) .

By: k0nan

k0nan — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 09:31:57 +0000

about 3. it’s the standard joomla/mambo robots.txt, in order to avoid spiders (legit or not!) go trought directory that does not contain content items, which are always reachable by a url string that does not contains any of those path/ (urls are reproduced by site.com/index.php?¶ms.. or by something more sef friendly)

also, in robots.txt you can include SITEMAP directive, like ASK.COM requires

regards

By: Toan Duong

Toan Duong — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 01:51:27 +0000

I saw some sites with:

will a space after the “index,” make any difference?

By: Ron

Ron — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 18:14:29 +0000

There’s a plugin that works with WordPress 2.7 called “Nofollow Case by Case”. It can be accessed within the “install plugins” page in WP 2.7. Just be sure to have your spam blocker enabled…

By: Penny Hoskins

Penny Hoskins — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 12:51:09 +0000

Thanks for the great tip. You would be surprised how many paid dead links Google has been bring up lately, depending on the key word or key phrase used.

By: Mike

Mike — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 08:08:56 +0000

Lee, This is good informative article, it covers everything about how to check your links are worth or not? I don’t know javascript much, but you have given some good ways to check is it dofollow or not. I need to install the tool and check my all inbound links.

By: wie bali

wie bali — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 07:31:13 +0000

thanks frank for the tips its look like simple can be folow

By: Neva

Neva — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 12:50:30 +0000

Great article but I had one question. You sai to check if the link had:

rel = nofollow.
If that

By: Robert A. Kearse

Robert A. Kearse — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 00:28:00 +0000

Lee:

I believe it was Google who introduced this technique of NoFollow/DoFollow tags to adjust for the nature of their ranking algorithm.

Is there anything we can do about the 800 pound Google gorilla??

This NoFollow tag as it applies to blogs is the worst thing to happen to blogging ever.

It has discouraged active commenting on blogs that is often insightful and helpful.

So we are stuck with the never ending hunt for DoFollow
blogs and forums.

The value of provoking targeted traffic through blog comments has been lost with all the emphasis on creating
backlinks with maximum SEO benefits.

Why can’t Google fix their ranking algorithm so that NoFollow/DoFollow is irrelevant?

Google has inflicted punishment on those who want to buy text links for targeted traffic by insisting these links be NoFollow links.

Google is pretending that they can distinguish links bought for link popularity versus links bought for targted traffic.

It’s a sorry mess ww’re in thanks to the big G.

Please, forgive the rant.

Best of success,

Robert

By: Darren Moloney

Darren Moloney — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 16:11:21 +0000

Lee, I agree and I applaud your blog for informing people, its just sometimes people seem to tie themselves up in unneccessary knots over something quite simple… maybe I’ve been SEO’ing for too long (7 years)

By: Lee Odden

Lee Odden — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 15:43:04 +0000

Hey Darren, nothing is rocket science except rocket science.

By: Darren Moloney

Darren Moloney — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 15:25:28 +0000

I’m uncertain why something as relatively simple as links are a “confusing topic for many people/business” as per one of the comments on this blog. If you spent 20 minutes researching links on Google I’d think you would quickly find enough information to have a reasonable understanding. Its hardly rocket science or quantum physics now is it~?

By: Dim

Dim — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 07:02:43 +0000

You know what turned out to be a great backlink checking tool? Trackback comments in your WP settings.

The problem with all backlink checking services is that they have to outsource the info from Google and Yahoo. Google deliberately is not showing the true number of backlinks. And Yahoo is better, but as many fight for Google – then measuring Google with Yahoo makes little sense.

The members of my service are getting one way links from inside blog posts, and for this type of backlinks trackbacks are a perfect tool to backlink checking: you get to your comments section and see all pages that gave you a backlink.

P.S. But, of course, one shouldn’t approve these trackbacks as comments on the blog, otherwise you give a link back and this is not wise in terms of SEO.

By: Wollongong

Wollongong — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:05:01 +0000

Well done mate, this is a very confusing topic for many people / businesses. Most people don’t know this robot.txt even exits!

By: Lee Odden

Lee Odden — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 20:02:14 +0000

Thanks Frank. Most companies don’t know any better. They “know enough to be dangerous” about SEO and are aware of the value of links but may not know that all links are not created equally.

By: Frank Reed

Frank Reed — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 15:48:32 +0000

If the SEO professional doesn’t check at all should he / she then be called a professional? Like you pointed out quality trumps quantity so just trying to impress a client with numbers is what has given the industry a bad rap at times. Like the traffic v. conversion argument.

Thanks for the post, Lee.